company Interspan is indicative of what has happened in
the Uzbek economy in the last two decades. Cotton is not
the only agricultural crop; parts of the country are ideal for
growing tea, and Interspan decided to invest. By 2005 it
had taken over 30 percent of the local market, but then it
ran into trouble. Gulnora decided that the tea industry
looked economically promising. Soon Interspan’s local
personnel started to be arrested, beaten up, and tortured. It
became impossible to operate, and by August 2006 the
company had pulled out. Its assets were taken over by the
Karimov families’ rapidly expanding tea interests, at the
time representing 67 percent of the market, up from 2
percent a couple of years earlier.
Uzbekistan in many ways looks like a relic from the past,
a forgotten age. It is a country languishing under the
absolutism of a single family and the cronies surrounding
them, with an economy based on forced labor—in fact, the
forced labor of children. Except that it isn’t. It’s part of the
current mosaic of societies failing under extractive
institutions, and unfortunately it has many commonalities
with other former Soviet Socialist Republics, ranging from
Armenia and Azerbaijan to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and
Turkmenistan, and reminds us that even in the twenty-first
century, extractive economic and political institutions can
take an unashamed atrociously extractive form.
K EEPING THE P LAYING F IELD AT AN A NGLE
The 1990s were a period of reform in Egypt. Since the
military coup that removed the monarchy in 1954, Egypt
had been run as a quasi-socialist society in which the
government played a central role in the economy. Many
sectors of the economy were dominated by state-owned
enterprises. Over the years, the rhetoric of socialism
lapsed, markets opened, and the private sector developed.
Yet these were not inclusive markets, but markets
controlled by the state and by a handful of businessmen
allied with the National Democratic Party (NDP), the
political party founded by President Anwar Sadat in 1978.
Businessmen became more and more involved with the
party, and the party became more and more involved with
them under the government of Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak,