Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and parts of
Germany and Italy. Farther east the reaction was similar to
that after the Black Death, when, instead of crumbling,
feudalism intensified. Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the
Ottoman Empire fell even further behind economically, but
their absolutist monarchies managed to stay in place until
the First World War.
Elsewhere in the world, absolutism was as resilient as in
Eastern Europe. This was particularly true in China, where
the Ming-Qing transition led to a state committed to
building a stable agrarian society and hostile to
international trade. But there were also institutional
differences that mattered in Asia. If China reacted to the
Industrial Revolution as Eastern Europe did, Japan reacted
in the same way as Western Europe. Just as in France, it
took a revolution to change the system, this time one led by
the renegade lords of the Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa, and Aki
domains. These lords overthrew the shogun, created the
Meiji Restoration, and moved Japan onto the path of
institutional reforms and economic growth.
We also saw that absolutism was resilient in isolated
Ethiopia. Elsewhere on the continent the very same force of
international trade that helped to transform English
institutions in the seventeenth century locked large parts of
western and central Africa into highly extractive institutions
via the slave trade. This destroyed societies in some
places and led to the creation of extractive slaving states in
others.
The institutional dynamics we have described ultimately
determined which countries took advantage of the major
opportunities present in the nineteenth century onward and
which ones failed to do so. The roots of the world inequality
we observe today can be found in this divergence. With a
few exceptions, the rich countries of today are those that
embarked on the process of industrialization and
technological change starting in the nineteenth century, and
the poor ones are those that did not.