institutions. Absolutism is rule unconstrained by law or the
wishes of others, though in reality absolutists rule with the
support of some small group or elite. In nineteenth-century
Russia, for example, the tsars were absolutist rulers
supported by a nobility that represented about 1 percent of
the total population. This narrow group organized political
institutions to perpetuate their power. There was no
Parliament or political representation of other groups in
Russian society until 1905, when the tsar created the
Duma, though he quickly undermined what few powers he
had given to it. Unsurprisingly, economic institutions were
extractive, organized to make the tsar and nobility as
wealthy as possible. The basis of this, as of many
extractive economic systems, was a mass system of labor
coercion and control, in the particularly pernicious form of
Russian serfdom.
Absolutism was not the only type of political institution
preventing industrialization. Though absolutist regimes
were not pluralistic and feared creative destruction, many
had centralized states, or at least states that were
centralized enough to impose bans on innovations such as
the printing press. Even today, countries such as
Afghanistan, Haiti, and Nepal have national states that lack
political centralization. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is
even worse. As we argued earlier, without a centralized
state to provide order and enforce rules and property rights,
inclusive institutions could not emerge. We will see in this
chapter that in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (for
example, Somalia and southern Sudan) a major barrier to
industrialization was the lack of any form of political
centralization. Without these natural prerequisites,
industrialization had no chance of getting off the ground.
Absolutism and a lack of, or weak, political centralization
are two different barriers to the spread of industry. But they
are also connected; both are kept in place by fear of
creative destruction and because the process of political
centralization often creates a tendency toward absolutism.
Resistance to political centralization is motivated by
reasons similar to resistance to inclusive political
institutions: fear of losing political power, this time to the
newly centralizing state and those who control it. We saw in
the previous chapter how the process of political