AUA Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoglu | Page 242

restrictions on trade. The urban economy was dominated by guilds, which restricted entry into professions. Until 1775 there were internal tariffs within Austria itself and in Hungary until 1784. There were very high tariffs on imported goods, with many explicit prohibitions on the import and export of goods.
The suppression of markets and the creation of extractive economic institutions are of course quite characteristic of absolutism, but Francis went further. It was not simply that extractive economic institutions removed the incentive for individuals to innovate or adopt new technology. We saw in chapter 2 how in the Kingdom of Kongo attempts to promote the use of plows were unsuccessful because people lacked any incentive, given the extractive nature of the economic institutions. The king of Kongo realized that if he could induce people to use plows, agricultural productivity would be higher, generating more wealth, which he could benefit from. This is a potential incentive for all governments, even absolutist ones. The problem in Kongo was that people understood that whatever they produced could be confiscated by an absolutist monarch, and therefore they had no incentive to invest or use better technology. In the Habsburg lands, Francis did not encourage his citizens to adopt better technology; on the contrary, he actually opposed it, and blocked the dissemination of technologies that people would have been otherwise willing to adopt with the existing economic institutions.
Opposition to innovation was manifested in two ways. First, Francis I was opposed to the development of industry. Industry led to factories, and factories would concentrate poor workers in cities, particularly in the capital city of Vienna. Those workers might then become supporters for opponents of absolutism. His policies were aimed at locking into place the traditional elites and the political and economic status quo. He wanted to keep society primarily agrarian. The best way to do this, Francis believed, was to stop the factories being built in the first place. This he did directly— for instance, in 1802, banning the creation of new factories in Vienna. Instead of encouraging the importation and adoption of new machinery, the basis of industrialization, he banned it until