Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

particularly unstable because of the concentration of power in the
hands of the emperor and his entourage. In a pattern not too different
from what happened in the Maya city-states, infighting to take control
of this powerful position increased. Civil wars became a regular
occurrence, even before the chaotic fifth century, when the
barbarians ruled supreme. For example, Septimius Severus seized
power from Didius Julianus, who had made himself emperor after the
murder of Pertinax in 
AD
193. Severus, the third emperor in the so-
called Year of the Five Emperors, then waged war against his rival
claimants, the generals Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, who
were finally defeated in 
AD
194 and 197, respectively. Severus
confiscated all the property of his losing opponents in the ensuing
civil war. Though able rulers, such as Trajan (
AD
98 to 117), Hadrian,
and Marcus Aurelius in the next century, could stanch decline, they
could not, or did not want to, address the fundamental institutional
problems. None of these men proposed abandoning the empire or re-
creating effective political institutions along the lines of the Roman
Republic. Marcus Aurelius, for all his successes, was followed by his

---

son Commodus, who was more like Caligula or Nero than his father.
The rising instability was evident from the layout and location of
towns and cities in the empire. By the third century 
AD
every sizeable
city in the empire had a defensive wall. In many cases monuments
were plundered for stone, which was used in fortifications. In Gaul
before the Romans had arrived in 125 
BC
, it was usual to build
settlements on hilltops, since these were more easily defended. With
the initial arrival of Rome, settlements moved down to the plains. In
the third century, this trend was reversed.
Along with mounting political instability came changes in society
that moved economic institutions toward greater extraction. Though
citizenship was expanded to the extent that by 
AD
212 nearly all the
inhabitants of the empire were citizens, this change went along with
changes in status between citizens. Any sense that there might have
been of equality before the law deteriorated. For example, by the
reign of Hadrian (
AD
117 to 138), there were clear differences in the
types of laws applied to different categories of Roman citizen. Just as
important, the role of citizens was completely different from how it
had been in the days of the Roman Republic, when they were able to
exercise some power over political and economic decisions through
the assemblies in Rome.
Slavery remained a constant throughout Rome, though there is
some controversy over whether the fraction of slaves in the
population actually declined over the centuries. Equally important, as
the empire developed, more and more agricultural workers were
reduced to semi-servile status and tied to the land. The status of these
servile “coloni” is extensively discussed in legal documents such as the
Codex Theodosianus and Codex Justinianus, and probably originated
during the reign of Diocletian (
AD
284 to 305). The rights of landlords
over the coloni were progressively increased. The emperor
Constantine in 332 allowed landlords to chain a colonus whom they
suspected was trying to escape, and from 
AD
365, coloni were not
allowed to sell their own property without their landlord’s
permission.
Just as we can use shipwrecks and the Greenland ice cores to track

---

the economic expansion of Rome during earlier periods, we can use
them also to trace its decline. By 
AD
500 the peak of 180 ships was
reduced to 20. As Rome declined, Mediterranean trade collapsed, and
some scholars have even argued that it did not return to its Roman
height until the nineteenth century. The Greenland ice tells a similar
story. The Romans used silver for coins, and lead had many uses,
including for pipes and tableware. After peaking in the first century
AD
, the deposits of lead, silver, and copper in the ice cores declined.
The experience of economic growth during the Roman Republic
was impressive, as were other examples of growth under extractive
institutions, such as the Soviet Union. But that growth was limited
and was not sustained, even when it is taken into account that it
occurred under partially inclusive institutions. Growth was based on
relatively high agricultural productivity, significant tribute from the
provinces, and long-distance trade, but it was not underpinned by
technological progress or creative destruction. The Romans inherited
some basic technologies, iron tools and weapons, literacy, plow
agriculture, and building techniques. Early on in the Republic, they
created others: cement masonry, pumps, and the water wheel. But
thereafter, technology was stagnant throughout the period of the
Roman Empire. In shipping, for instance, there was little change in
ship design or rigging, and the Romans never developed the stern
rudder, instead steering ships with oars. Water wheels spread very
slowly, so that water power never revolutionized the Roman
economy. Even such great achievements as aqueducts and city sewers
used existing technology, though the Romans perfected it. There
could be some economic growth without innovation, relying on
existing technology, but it was growth without creative destruction.
And it did not last. As property rights became more insecure and the
economic rights of citizens followed the decline of their political
rights, economic growth likewise declined.
A remarkable thing about new technologies in the Roman period is
that their creation and spread seem to have been driven by the state.
This is good news, until the government decides that it is not
interested in technological development—an all-too-common

---

occurrence due to the fear of creative destruction. The great Roman
writer Pliny the Elder relates the following story. During the reign of
the emperor Tiberius, a man invented unbreakable glass and went to
the emperor anticipating that he would get a great reward. He
demonstrated his invention, and Tiberius asked him if he had told
anyone else about it. When the man replied no, Tiberius had the man
dragged away and killed, “lest gold be reduced to the value of mud.”
There are two interesting things about this story. First, the man went
to Tiberius in the first place for a reward, rather than setting himself
up in business and making a profit by selling the glass. This shows the
role of the Roman government in controlling technology. Second,
Tiberius was happy to destroy the innovation because of the adverse
economic effects it would have had. This is the fear of the economic
effects of creative destruction.
There is also direct evidence from the period of the Empire of the
fear of the political consequences of creative destruction. Suetonius
tells how the emperor Vespasian, who ruled between 
AD
69 and 79,
was approached by a man who had invented a device for transporting
columns to the Capitol, the citadel of Rome, at a relatively small cost.
Columns were large, heavy, and very difficult to transport. Moving
them to Rome from the mines where they were made involved the
labor of thousands of people, at great expense to the government.
Vespasian did not kill the man, but he also refused to use the
innovation, declaring, “How will it be possible for me to feed the
populace?” Again an inventor came to the government. Perhaps this
was more natural than with the unbreakable glass, as the Roman
government was most heavily involved with column mining and
transportation. Again the innovation was turned down because of the
threat of creative destruction, not so much because of its economic
impact, but because of fear of political creative destruction. Vespasian
was concerned that unless he kept the people happy and under
control it would be politically destabilizing. The Roman plebeians had
to be kept busy and pliant, so it was good to have jobs to give them,
such as moving columns about. This complemented the bread and
circuses, which were also dispensed for free to keep the population

---

content. It is perhaps telling that both of these examples came soon
after the collapse of the Republic. The Roman emperors had far more
power to block change than the Roman rulers during the Republic.
Another important reason for the lack of technological innovation
was the prevalence of slavery. As the territories Romans controlled
expanded, vast numbers were enslaved, often being brought back to
Italy to work on large estates. Many citizens in Rome did not need to
work: they lived off the handouts from the government. Where was
innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation comes
from new people with new ideas, developing new solutions to old
problems. In Rome the people doing the producing were slaves and,
later, semi-servile coloni with few incentives to innovate, since it was
their masters, not they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As
we will see many times in this book, economies based on the
repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are
notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the
modern era. In the United States, for example, the northern states
took part in the Industrial Revolution, not the South. Of course
slavery and serfdom created huge wealth for those who owned the
slaves and controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological
innovation or prosperity for society.