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

N
O
 O
NE
 W
RITES FROM
 V
INDOLANDA
By 
AD
43 the Roman emperor Claudius had conquered England, but
not Scotland. A last, futile attempt was made by the Roman governor
Agricola, who gave up and, in 
AD
85, built a series of forts to protect
England’s northern border. One of the biggest of these was at
Vindolanda, thirty-five miles west of Newcastle and depicted on 
Map
11
 at the far northwest of the Roman Empire. Later, Vindolanda was
incorporated into the eighty-five-mile defensive wall that the emperor
Hadrian constructed, but in 
AD
103, when a Roman centurion,
Candidus, was stationed there, it was an isolated fort. Candidus was
engaged with his friend Octavius in supplying the Roman garrison

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and received a reply from Octavius to a letter he had sent:
Octavius to his brother Candidus, greetings.
I have several times written to you that I have bought
about five thousand modii of ears of grain, on account of
which I need cash. Unless you send me some cash, at least
five hundred denarii, the result will be that I shall lose
what I have laid out as a deposit, about three hundred
denarii, and I shall be embarrassed. So, I ask you, send me
some cash as soon as possible. The hides which you write
are at Cataractonium—write that they be given to me and
the wagon about which you write. I would have already
been to collect them except that I did not care to injure
the animals while the roads are bad. See with Tertius
about the 8½ denarii which he received from Fatalis. He
has not credited them to my account. Make sure that you
send me cash so that I may have ears of grain on the
threshing-floor. Greet Spectatus and Firmus. Farewell.
The correspondence between Candidus and Octavius illustrates
some significant facets of the economic prosperity of Roman England:
It reveals an advanced monetary economy with financial services. It
reveals the presence of constructed roads, even if sometimes in bad
condition. It reveals the presence of a fiscal system that raised taxes
to pay Candidus’s wages. Most obviously it reveals that both men
were literate and were able to take advantage of a postal service of
sorts. Roman England also benefited from the mass manufacture of
high-quality pottery, particularly in Oxfordshire; urban centers with
baths and public buildings; and house construction techniques using
mortar and tiles for roofs.
By the fourth century, all were in decline, and after 
AD
411 the
Roman Empire gave up on England. Troops were withdrawn; those
left were not paid, and as the Roman state crumbled, administrators
were expelled by the local population. By 
AD
450 all these trappings of
economic prosperity were gone. Money vanished from circulation.

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Urban areas were abandoned, and buildings stripped of stone. The
roads were overgrown with weeds. The only type of pottery
fabricated was crude and handmade, not manufactured. People forgot
how to use mortar, and literacy declined substantially. Roofs were
made of branches, not tiles. Nobody wrote from Vindolanda anymore.
After 
AD
411, England experienced an economic collapse and
became a poor backwater—and not for the first time. In the previous
chapter we saw how the Neolithic Revolution started in the Middle
East around 9500 
BC
. While the inhabitants of Jericho and Abu
Hureyra were living in small towns and farming, the inhabitants of
England were still hunting and gathering, and would do so for at least
another 5,500 years. Even then the English didn’t invent farming or
herding; these were brought from the outside by migrants who had
been spreading across Europe from the Middle East for thousands of
years. As the inhabitants of England caught up with these major
innovations, those in the Middle East were inventing cities, writing,
and pottery. By 3500 
BC
, large cities such as Uruk and Ur emerged in
Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. Uruk may have had a population of
fourteen thousand in 3500 
BC
, and forty thousand soon afterward. The
potter’s wheel was invented in Mesopotamia at about the same time
as was wheeled transportation. The Egyptian capital of Memphis
emerged as a large city soon thereafter. Writing appeared
independently in both regions. While the Egyptians were building the
great pyramids of Giza around 2500 
BC
, the English constructed their
most famous ancient monument, the stone circle at Stonehenge. Not
bad by English standards, but not even large enough to have housed
one of the ceremonial boats buried at the foot of King Khufu’s
pyramid. England continued to lag behind and to borrow from the
Middle East and the rest of Europe up to and including the Roman
period.
Despite such an inauspicious history, it was in England that the first
truly inclusive society emerged and where the Industrial Revolution
got under way. We argued earlier (
this page
–
this page
) that this was
the result of a series of interactions between small institutional
differences and critical junctures—for example, the Black Death and

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the discovery of the Americas. English divergence had historical
roots, but the view from Vindolanda suggests that these roots were
not that deep and certainly not historically predetermined. They were
not planted in the Neolithic Revolution, or even during the centuries
of Roman hegemony. By 
AD
450, at the start of what historians used to
call the Dark Ages, England had slipped back into poverty and
political chaos. There would be no effective centralized state in
England for hundreds of years.