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

T
HE
 A
BSOLUTISM OF
 P
RESTER
 J
OHN
Absolutism as a set of political institutions and the economic
consequences that flowed from it were not restricted to Europe and
Asia. It was present in Africa, for example, with the Kingdom of
Kongo, as we saw in 
chapter 2
. An even more durable example of
African absolutism is Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, whose roots we came
across in 
chapter 6
, when we discussed the emergence of feudalism
after the decline of Aksum. Abyssinian absolutism was even more
long-lived than its European counterparts, because it was faced with
very different challenges and critical junctures.
After the conversion of the Aksumite king Ezana to Christianity, the
Ethiopians remained Christian, and by the fourteenth century they
had become the focus of the myth of King Prester John. Prester John
was a Christian king who had been cut off from Europe by the rise of
Islam in the Middle East. Initially his kingdom was thought to be
located in India. However, as European knowledge of India increased,
people realized that this was not true. The king of Ethiopia, since he
was a Christian, then became a natural target for the myth. Ethiopian
kings in fact tried hard to forge alliances with European monarchs
against Arab invasions, sending diplomatic missions to Europe from at
least 1300 onward, even persuading the Portuguese king to send
soldiers.
These soldiers, along with diplomats, Jesuits, and travelers wishing
to meet Prester John, left many accounts of Ethiopia. Some of the

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most interesting from an economic point of view are by Francisco
Álvares, a chaplain accompanying a Portuguese diplomatic mission,
who was in Ethiopia from 1520 to 1527. In addition, there are
accounts by Jesuit Manoel de Almeida, who lived in Ethiopia from
1624, and by John Bruce, a traveler who was in the country between
1768 and 1773. The writings of these people give a rich account of
political and economic institutions at the time in Ethiopia and leave
no doubt that Ethiopia was a perfect specimen of absolutism. There
were no pluralistic institutions of any kind, nor any checks and
constraints on the power of the emperor, who claimed the right to
rule on the basis of supposed descent from the legendary King
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
The consequence of absolutism was great insecurity of property
rights driven by the political strategy of the emperor. Bruce, for
example, noted that
all the land is the king’s; he gives it to whom he pleases
during pleasure, and resumes it when it is his will. As soon
as he dies the whole land in the kingdom is at the disposal
of the Crown; and not only so, but, by death of the present
owner, his possessions however long enjoyed, revert to the
king, and do not fall to the eldest son.
Álvares claimed there would be much more “fruit and tillage if the
great men did not ill-treat the people.” Alameida’s account of how the
society worked is very consistent. He observed:
It is so usual for the emperor to exchange, alter and take
away the lands each man holds every two or three years,
sometimes every year and even many times in the course
of a year, that it causes no surprise. Often one man plows
the soil, another sows it and another reaps. Hence it arises
that there is no one who takes care of the land he enjoys;
there is not even anyone to plant a tree because he knows
that he who plants it very rarely gathers the fruit. For the
king, however, it is useful that they should be so

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dependent upon him.
These descriptions suggest major similarities between the political
and economic structures of Ethiopia and those of European
absolutism, though they also make it clear that absolutism was more
intense in Ethiopia, and economic institutions even more extractive.
Moreover, as we emphasized in 
chapter 6
, Ethiopia was not subject to
the same critical junctures that helped undermine the absolutist
regime in England. It was cut off from many of the processes that
shaped the modern world. Even if this had not been the case, the
intensity of its absolutism would probably have led the absolutism to
strengthen even more. For example, as in Spain, international trade in
Ethiopia, including the lucrative slave trade, was controlled by the
monarch. Ethiopia was not completely isolated: Europeans did search
for Prester John, and it did have to fight wars against surrounding
Islamic polities. Nevertheless, the historian Edward Gibbon noted
with some accuracy that “encompassed on all sides by the enemies of
their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful
of the world by whom they were forgotten.”
As the European colonization of Africa began in the nineteenth
century, Ethiopia was an independent kingdom under Ras (Duke)
Kassa, who was crowned Emperor Tewodros II in 1855. Tewodros
embarked on a modernization of the state, creating a more
centralized bureaucracy and judiciary, and a military capable of
controlling the country and possibly fighting the Europeans. He
placed military governors, responsible for collecting taxes and
remitting them to him, in charge of all the provinces. His negotiations
with European powers were difficult, and in exasperation he
imprisoned the English consul. In 1868 the English sent an
expeditionary force, which sacked his capital. Tewodros committed
suicide.
All the same, Tewodros’s reconstructed government did manage to
pull off one of the great anticolonial triumphs of the nineteenth
century, against the Italians. In 1889 the throne went to Menelik II,
who was immediately faced with the interest of Italy in establishing a

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colony there. In 1885 the German chancellor Bismarck had convened
a conference in Berlin where the European powers hatched the
“Scramble for Africa”—that is, they decided how to divide up Africa
into different spheres of interest. At the conference, Italy secured its
rights to colonies in Eritrea, along the coast of Ethiopia, and Somalia.
Ethiopia, though not represented at the conference, somehow
managed to survive intact. But the Italians still kept designs, and in
1896 they marched an army south from Eritrea. Menelik’s response
was similar to that of a European medieval king; he formed an army
by getting the nobility to call up their armed men. This approach
could not put an army in the field for long, but it could put a huge
one together for a short time. This short time was just enough to
defeat the Italians, whose fifteen thousand men were overwhelmed by
Menelik’s one hundred thousand in the Battle of Adowa in 1896. It
was the most serious military defeat a precolonial African country
was able to inflict on a European power, and secured Ethiopia’s
independence for another forty years.
The last emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari, was crowned Haile
Selassie in 1930. Haile Selassie ruled until he was overthrown by a
second Italian invasion, which began in 1935, but he returned from
exile with the help of the English in 1941. He then ruled until he was
overthrown in a 1974 coup by the Derg, “the Committee,” a group of
Marxist army officers, who then proceeded to further impoverish and
ravage the country. The basic extractive economic institutions of the
absolutist Ethiopian empire, such as gult (
this page
), and the
feudalism created after the decline of Aksum, lasted until they were
abolished after the 1974 revolution.
Today Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. The
income of an average Ethiopian is about one-fortieth that of an
average citizen of England. Most people live in rural areas and
practice subsistence agriculture. They lack clean water, electricity,
and access to proper schools or health care. Life expectancy is about
fifty-five years and only one-third of adults are literate. A comparison
between England and Ethiopia spans world inequality. The reason
Ethiopia is where it is today is that, unlike in England, in Ethiopia

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absolutism persisted until the recent past. With absolutism came
extractive economic institutions and poverty for the mass of
Ethiopians, though of course the emperors and nobility benefited
hugely. But the most enduring implication of the absolutism was that
Ethiopian society failed to take advantage of industrialization
opportunities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
underpinning the abject poverty of its citizens today.