New World, and with it the entire history of the world, could
have been different.
Third and most radically, it is not even historically or
geographically or culturally predetermined that Europeans
should have been the ones colonizing the world. It could
have been the Chinese or even the Incas. Of course, such
an outcome is impossible when we look at the world from
the vantage point of the fifteenth century, by which time
Western Europe had pulled ahead of the Americas, and
China had already turned inward. But Western Europe of
the fifteenth century was itself an outcome of a contingent
process of institutional drift punctuated by critical junctures,
and nothing about it was inevitable. Western European
powers could not have surged ahead and conquered the
world without several historic turning points. These included
the specific path that feudalism took, replacing slavery and
weakening the power of monarchs on the way; the fact that
the centuries following the turn of the first millennium in
Europe witnessed the development of independent and
commercially autonomous cities; the fact that European
monarchs were not as threatened by, and consequently did
not try to discourage, overseas trade as the Chinese
emperors did during the Ming dynasty; and the arrival of the
Black Death, which shook up the foundations of the feudal
order. If these events had transpired differently, we could be
living in a very different world today, one in which Peru
might be richer than Western Europe or the United States.
N ATURALLY, THE PREDICTIVE POWER of a theory where both
small differences and contingency play key roles will be
limited. Few would have predicted in the fifteenth or even
the sixteenth centuries, let alone in the many centuries
following the fall of the Roman Empire, that the major
breakthrough toward inclusive institutions would happen in
Britain. It was only the specific process of institutional drift
and the nature of the critical juncture created by the opening
of Atlantic trade that made this possible. Neither would
many have believed in the midst of the Cultural Revolution
during the 1970s that China would soon be on a path
toward radical changes in its economic institutions and
subsequently on a breakneck growth trajectory. It is