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

8.
NOT ON OUR TURF: BARRIERS TO DEVELOPMENT
N
O
 P
RINTING
 A
LLOWED
I
N 1445 IN THE
G
ERMAN
city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg unveiled an
innovation with profound consequences for subsequent economic
history: a printing press based on movable type. Until then, books
either had to be hand-copied by scribes, a very slow and laborious
process, or they were block-printed with specific pieces of wood cut
for printing each page. Books were few and far between, and very
expensive. After Gutenberg’s invention, things began to change. Books
were printed and became more readily available. Without this
innovation, mass literacy and education would have been impossible.
In Western Europe, the importance of the printing press was
quickly recognized. In 1460 there was already a printing press across
the border, in Strasbourg, France. By the late 1460s the technology
had spread throughout Italy, with presses in Rome and Venice, soon
followed by Florence, Milan, and Turin. By 1476 William Caxton had
set up a printing press in London, and two years later there was one
in Oxford. During the same period, printing spread throughout the
Low Countries, into Spain, and even into Eastern Europe, with a press
opening in Budapest in 1473 and in Cracow a year later.
Not everyone saw printing as a desirable innovation. As early as
1485 the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II issued an edict that Muslims were
expressly forbidden from printing in Arabic. This rule was further
reinforced by Sultan Selim I in 1515. It was not until 1727 that the
first printing press was allowed in the Ottoman lands. Then Sultan
Ahmed III issued a decree granting İbrahim Müteferrika permission to
set up a press. Even this belated step was hedged with restraints.

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Though the decree noted “the fortunate day this Western technique
will be unveiled like a bride and will not again be hidden,”
Müteferrika’s printing was going to be closely monitored. The decree
stated:
so that the printed books will be free from printing
mistakes, the wise, respected and meritorious religious
scholars specializing in Islamic Law, the excellent Kadi of
Istanbul, Mevlana İshak, and Selaniki’s Kadi, Mevlana
Sahib, and Galata’s Kadi, Mevlana Asad, may their merits
be increased, and from the illustrious religious orders, the
pillar of the righteous religious scholars, the Sheykh of the
Kasim Paşa Mevlevihane, Mevlana Musa, may his wisdom
and knowledge increase, will oversee the proofreading.
Müteferrika was allowed to set up a printing press, but whatever he
printed had to be vetted by a panel of three religious and legal
scholars, the Kadis. Maybe the wisdom and knowledge of the Kadis,
like everybody else’s, would have increased much faster had the
printing press been more readily available. But that was not to be,
even after Müteferrika was given permission to set up his press.
Not surprisingly Müteferrika printed few books in the end, only
seventeen between 1729, when the press began to operate, and 1743,
when he stopped working. His family tried to continue the tradition,
but they managed to print only another seven books by the time they
finally gave up in 1797. Outside of the core of the Ottoman Empire in
Turkey, printing lagged even further behind. In Egypt, for instance,
the first printing press was set up only in 1798, by Frenchmen who
were part of the abortive attempt by Napoleon Bonaparte to capture
the country. Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century,
book production in the Ottoman Empire was still primarily
undertaken by scribes hand-copying existing books. In the early
eighteenth century, there were reputed to be eighty thousand such
scribes active in Istanbul.
This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences

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for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only
2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman Empire were literate,
compared with 60 percent of adult males and 40 percent of adult
females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates
were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European
countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such
as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could
read and write.
Given the highly absolutist and extractive Ottoman institutions, the
sultan’s hostility to the printing press is easy to understand. Books
spread ideas and make the population much harder to control. Some
of these ideas may be valuable new ways to increase economic
growth, but others may be subversive and challenge the existing
political and social status quo. Books also undermine the power of
those who control oral knowledge, since they make that knowledge
readily available to anyone who can master literacy. This threatened
to undermine the existing status quo, where knowledge was
controlled by elites. The Ottoman sultans and religious establishment
feared the creative destruction that would result. Their solution was
to forbid printing.
T
HE
I
NDUSTRIAL
R
EVOLUTION
created a critical juncture that affected almost
every country. Some nations, such as England, not only allowed, but
actively 
encouraged, 
commerce, 
industrialization, 
and
entrepreneurship, and grew rapidly. Many, such as the Ottoman
Empire, China, and other absolutist regimes, lagged behind as they
blocked or at the very least did nothing to encourage the spread of
industry. Political and economic institutions shaped the response to
technological innovation, creating once again the familiar pattern of
interaction between existing institutions and critical junctures leading
to divergence in institutions and economic outcomes.
The Ottoman Empire remained absolutist until it collapsed at the
end of the First World War, and was thus able to successfully oppose
or impede innovations such as the printing press and the creative

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destruction that would have resulted. The reason that the economic
changes that took place in England did not happen in the Ottoman
Empire is the natural connection between extractive, absolutist
political institutions and extractive economic institutions. Absolutism
is rule unconstrained by law or the wishes of others, though in reality
absolutists rule with the support of some small group or elite. In
nineteenth-century Russia, for example, the tsars were absolutist
rulers supported by a nobility that represented about 1 percent of the
total population. This narrow group organized political institutions to
perpetuate their power. There was no Parliament or political
representation of other groups in Russian society until 1905, when
the tsar created the Duma, though he quickly undermined what few
powers he had given to it. Unsurprisingly, economic institutions were
extractive, organized to make the tsar and nobility as wealthy as
possible. The basis of this, as of many extractive economic systems,
was a mass system of labor coercion and control, in the particularly
pernicious form of Russian serfdom.
Absolutism was not the only type of political institution preventing
industrialization. Though absolutist regimes were not pluralistic and
feared creative destruction, many had centralized states, or at least
states that were centralized enough to impose bans on innovations
such as the printing press. Even today, countries such as Afghanistan,
Haiti, and Nepal have national states that lack political centralization.
In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is even worse. As we argued
earlier, without a centralized state to provide order and enforce rules
and property rights, inclusive institutions could not emerge. We will
see in this chapter that in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (for
example, Somalia and southern Sudan) a major barrier to
industrialization was the lack of any form of political centralization.
Without these natural prerequisites, industrialization had no chance
of getting off the ground.
Absolutism and a lack of, or weak, political centralization are two
different barriers to the spread of industry. But they are also
connected; both are kept in place by fear of creative destruction and
because the process of political centralization often creates a tendency

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toward absolutism. Resistance to political centralization is motivated
by reasons similar to resistance to inclusive political institutions: fear
of losing political power, this time to the newly centralizing state and
those who control it. We saw in the previous chapter how the process
of political centralization under the Tudor monarchy in England
increased demands for voice and representation by different local
elites in national political institutions as a way of staving off this loss
of political power. A stronger Parliament was created, ultimately
enabling the emergence of inclusive political institutions.
But in many other cases, just the opposite takes place, and the
process of political centralization also ushers in an era of greater
absolutism. This is illustrated by the origins of Russian absolutism,
which was forged by Peter the Great between 1682 and his death in
1725. Peter built a new capital at Saint Petersburg, stripping away
power from the old aristocracy, the Boyars, in order to create a
modern bureaucratic state and modern army. He even abolished the
Boyar Duma that had made him tsar. Peter introduced the Table of
Ranks, a completely new social hierarchy whose essence was service
to the tsar. He also took control over the Church, just as Henry VIII
did when centralizing the state in England. With this process of
political centralization, Peter was taking power away from others and
redirecting it toward himself. His military reforms led the traditional
royal guards, the Streltsy, to rebel. Their revolt was followed by
others, such as the Bashkirs in Central Asia and the Bulavin Rebellion.
None succeeded.
Though Peter the Great’s project of political centralization was a
success and the opposition was overcome, the type of forces that
opposed state centralization, such as the Streltsy, who saw their
power being challenged, won out in many parts of the world, and the
resulting lack of state centralization meant the persistence of a
different type of extractive political institutions.
In this chapter, we will see how during the critical juncture created
by the Industrial Revolution, many nations missed the boat and failed
to take advantage of the spread of industry. Either they had absolutist
political and extractive economic institutions, as in the Ottoman

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Empire, or they lacked political centralization, as in Somalia.