cabinet did. Two of Stevens’ s sons, Bockarie and Jengo, were even made ambassadors to the United States and Germany. In a sense this is a more volatile version of what we saw happen in Colombia. There the lack of state authority in many parts of the country persists over time because it is in the interests of part of the national political elite to allow it to do so, but the core state institutions are also strong enough to prevent this disorder from turning into complete chaos. In Sierra Leone, partly because of the more extractive nature of economic institutions and partly because of the country’ s history of highly extractive political institutions, the society has not only suffered economically but has also tipped between complete disorder and some sort of order. Still, the long-run effect is the same: the state all but remains absent, and institutions are extractive.
In all these cases there has been a long history of extractive institutions since at least the nineteenth century. Each country is trapped in a vicious circle. In Colombia and Argentina, they are rooted in the institutions of Spanish colonial rule( this page – this page). Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone originated in British colonial regimes set up in the late nineteenth century. In Sierra Leone, in the absence of white settlers, these regimes built extensively on precolonial extractive structures of political power and intensified them. These structures themselves were the outcome of a long vicious circle that featured lack of political centralization and the disastrous effects of the slave trade. In Zimbabwe, there was much more of a construction of a new form of extractive institutions, because the British South Africa Company created a dual economy. Uzbekistan could take over the extractive institutions of the Soviet Union and, like Egypt, modify them into crony capitalism. The Soviet Union’ s extractive institutions themselves were in many ways a continuation of those of the tsarist regime, again in a pattern predicated on the iron law of oligarchy. As these various vicious circles played out in different parts of the world over the past 250 years, world inequality emerged, and persists. The solution to the economic and political failure of nations today is to transform their extractive institutions toward inclusive ones. The vicious circle means that this is not easy. But it is not impossible, and the iron law of