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

particular, maize, cassava, and chili peppers). The intense mixed-
farming cycle was introduced at this time, and the amount of food
produced per capita doubled. To adopt these crops and reorganize the
agricultural cycle, more hands were needed in the fields. So the age of
marriage was lowered to twenty, which brought men into the
agricultural labor force at a younger age. The contrast with the Lele is
stark. Their men tended to marry at thirty-five and only then worked
in the fields. Until then, they dedicated their lives to fighting and
raiding.
The connection between the political and economic revolution was
simple. King Shyaam and those who supported him wanted to extract
taxes and wealth from the Kuba, who had to produce a surplus above
what they consumed themselves. While Shyaam and his men did not
introduce inclusive institutions to the eastern bank of the Kasai, some

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amount of economic prosperity is intrinsic to extractive institutions
that achieve some degree of state centralization and impose law and
order. Encouraging economic activity was of course in the interest of
Shyaam and his men, as otherwise there would have been nothing to
extract. Just like Stalin, Shyaam created by command a set of
institutions that would generate the wealth necessary to support this
system. Compared to the utter absence of law and order that reigned
on the other bank of the Kasai, this generated significant economic
prosperity—even if much of it was likely extracted by Shyaam and his
elites. But it was necessarily limited. Just as in the Soviet Union, there
was no creative destruction in the Kuba Kingdom and no
technological innovation after this initial change. This situation was
more or less unaltered by the time the kingdom was first encountered
by Belgian colonial officials in the late nineteenth century.
K
ING
S
HYAAM’S ACHIEVEMENT
illustrates how some limited degree of
economic success can be achieved through extractive institutions.
Creating such growth requires a centralized state. To centralize the
state, a political revolution is often necessary. Once Shyaam created
this state, he could use its power to reorganize the economy and
boost agricultural productivity, which he could then tax.
Why was it that the Bushong, and not the Lele, had a political
revolution? Couldn’t the Lele have had their own King Shyaam? What
Shyaam accomplished was an institutional innovation not tied in any
deterministic way to geography, culture, or ignorance. The Lele could
have had such a revolution and similarly transformed their
institutions, but they didn’t. Perhaps this is for reasons that we do not
understand, because of our limited knowledge of their society today.
Most likely it is because of the contingent nature of history. The same
contingency was probably at work when some of the societies in the
Middle East twelve thousand years ago embarked upon an even more
radical set of institutional innovations leading to settled societies and
then to the domestication of plants and animals, as we discuss next.

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