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

T
HE
 L
ONG
 S
UMMER
About 15,000 
BC
, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate
warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that
average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a
short span of time. This warming seems to have coincided with rapid
increases in human populations as the global warming led to
expanding animal populations and much greater availability of wild
plants and foods. This process was put into rapid reverse at about
14,000 
BC
, by a period of cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but
after 9600 
BC
, global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees
Celsius in less than a decade, and have since stayed high.
Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer. The warming-up
of the climate was a huge critical juncture that formed the
background to the Neolithic Revolution, where human societies made
the transition to sedentary life, farming, and herding. This and the
rest of subsequent human history have played out basking in this
Long Summer.
There is a fundamental difference between farming and herding
and hunting-gathering. The former is based on the domestication of
plant and animal species, with active intervention in their life cycles
to change genetics to make those species more useful to humans.
Domestication is a technological change that enables humans to
produce a lot more food from the available plants and animals. The
domestication of maize, for example, began when humans gathered
teosinte, the wild crop that was maize’s ancestor. Teosinte cobs are
very small, barely a few centimeters long. They are dwarfed by a cob
of modern maize. Yet gradually, by selecting the larger ears of
teosinte, and plants whose ears did not break but stayed on the stalk
to be harvested, humans created modern maize, a crop that provides
far more nourishment from the same piece of land.
The earliest evidence of farming, herding, and the domestication of
plants and animals comes from the Middle East, in particular from the
area known as the Hilly Flanks, which stretches from the south of
modern-day Israel, up through Palestine and the west bank of the

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River Jordan, via Syria and into southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq,
and western Iran. Around 9500 
BC
the first domestic plants, emmer
and two-row barley, were found in Jericho on the west bank of the
River Jordan in Palestine; and emmer, peas, and lentils, at Tell
Aswad, farther north in Syria. Both were sites of the so-called
Natufian culture and both supported large villages; the village of
Jericho had a population of possibly five hundred people by this time.
Why did the first farming villages happen here and not elsewhere?
Why was it the Natufians, and not other peoples, who domesticated
peas and lentils? Were they lucky and just happened to be living
where there were many potential candidates for domestication? While
this is true, many other people were living among these species, but
they did not domesticate them. As we saw in 
chapter 2
in 
Maps 4
and
5
, research by geneticists and archaeologists to pin down the
distribution of the wild ancestors of modern domesticated animals
and plants reveals that many of these ancestors were spread over very
large areas, millions of square kilometers. The wild ancestors of
domesticated animal species were spread throughout Eurasia. Though
the Hilly Flanks were particularly well endowed in terms of wild crop
species, even they were very far from unique. It was not that the
Natufians lived in an area uniquely endowed with wild species that
made them special. It was that they were sedentary before they
started domesticating plants or animals. One piece of evidence comes
from gazelle teeth, which are composed of cementum, a bony
connective tissue that grows in layers. During the spring and summer,
when cementum’s growth is most rapid, the layers are a different
color from the layers that form in the winter. By taking a slice
through a tooth you can see the color of the last layer created before
the gazelle died. Using this technique, you can determine if the
gazelle was killed in summer or winter. At Natufian sites, one finds
gazelles killed in all seasons, suggesting year-round residence. The
village of Abu Hureyra, on the river Euphrates, is one of the most
intensively researched Natufian settlements. For almost forty years
archaeologists have examined the layers of the village, which
provides one of the best documented examples of sedentary life

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before and after the transition to farming. The settlement probably
began around 9500 
BC
, and the inhabitants continued their hunter-
gatherer lifestyle for another five hundred years before switching to
agriculture. Archaeologists estimate that the population of the village
prior to farming was between one hundred and three hundred.
You can think of all sorts of reasons why a society might find it
advantageous to become sedentary. Moving about is costly; children
and old people have to be carried, and it is impossible to store food
for lean times when you are on the move. Moreover, tools such as
grinding stones and sickles were useful for processing wild foods, but
are heavy to carry. There is evidence that even mobile hunter-
gatherers stored food in select locations such as caves. One attraction
of maize is that it stores very well, and this is a key reason why it
became so intensively cultivated throughout the Americas. The ability
to deal more effectively with storage and accumulate food stocks
must have been a key incentive for adopting a sedentary way of life.
While it might be collectively desirable to become sedentary, this
doesn’t mean that it will necessarily happen. A mobile group of
hunter-gatherers would have to agree to do this, or someone would
have to force them. Some archaeologists have suggested that
increasing population density and declining living standards were key
factors in the emergence of sedentary life, forcing mobile people to
stay in one place. Yet the density of Natufian sites is no greater than
that of previous groups, so there does not appear to be evidence of
increasing population density. Skeletal and dental evidence does not
suggest deteriorating health, either. For instance, food shortage tends
to create thin lines in people’s tooth enamel, a condition called
hypoplasia. These lines are in fact less prevalent in Natufian people
than in later farming people.
More important is that while sedentary life had pluses, it also had
minuses. Conflict resolution was probably much harder for sedentary
groups, since disagreements could be resolved less easily by people or
groups merely moving away. Once people had built permanent
buildings and had more assets than they could carry, moving away
was a much less attractive option. So villages needed more effective

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ways of resolving conflict and more elaborate notions of property.
Decisions would have to be made about who had access to which
piece of land close to the village, or who got to pick fruit from which
stand of trees and fish in which part of the stream. Rules had to be
developed, and the institutions that made and enforced rules had to
be elaborated.
In order for sedentary life to emerge, it therefore seems plausible
that hunter-gatherers would have had to be forced to settle down, and
this would have to have been preceded by an institutional innovation
concentrating power in the hands of a group that would become the
political elite, enforce property rights, maintain order, and also
benefit from their status by extracting resources from the rest of
society. In fact, a political revolution similar to that initiated by King
Shyaam, even if on a smaller scale, is likely to have been the
breakthrough that led to sedentary life.
The archaeological evidence indeed suggests that the Natufians
developed a complex society characterized by hierarchy, order, and
inequality—beginnings of what we would recognize as extractive
institutions—a long time before they became farmers. One compelling
piece of evidence for such hierarchy and inequality comes from
Natufian graves. Some people were buried with large amounts of
obsidian and dentalium shells, which came from the Mediterranean
coast near Mount Carmel. Other types of ornamentation include
necklaces, garters, and bracelets, which were made out of canine
teeth and deer phalanges as well as shells. Other people were buried
without any of these things. Shells and also obsidian were traded, and
control of this trade was quite likely a source of power accumulation
and inequality. Further evidence of economic and political inequality
comes from the Natufian site of Ain Mallaha, just north of the Sea of
Galilee. Amid a group of about fifty round huts and many pits, clearly
used for storage, there is a large, intensively plastered building close
to a cleared central place. This building was almost certainly the
house of a chief. Among the burials at the site, some are much more
elaborate, and there is also evidence of a skull cult, possibly
indicating ancestor worship. Such cults are widespread in Natufian

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sites, particularly Jericho. The preponderance of evidence from
Natufian sites suggests that these were probably already societies
with elaborate institutions determining inheritance of elite status.
They engaged in trade with distant places and had nascent forms of
religion and political hierarchies.
The emergence of political elites most likely created the transition
first to sedentary life and then to farming. As the Natufian sites show,
sedentary life did not necessarily mean farming and herding. People
could settle down but still make their living by hunting and
gathering. After all, the Long Summer made wild crops more
bountiful, and hunting and gathering was likely to have been more
attractive. Most people may have been quite satisfied with a
subsistence life based on hunting and gathering that did not require a
lot of effort. Even technological innovation doesn’t necessarily lead to
increased agricultural production. In fact, it is known that a major
technological innovation, the introduction of the steel axe among the
group of Australian Aboriginal peoples known as Yir Yoront, led not
to more intense production but to more sleeping, because it allowed
subsistence requirements to be met more easily, with little incentive
to work for more.
The traditional, geography-based explanation for the Neolithic
Revolution—the centerpiece of Jared Diamond’s argument, which we
discussed in 
chapter 2
—is that it was driven by the fortuitous
availability of many plant and animal species that could easily be
domesticated. This made farming and herding attractive and induced
sedentary life. After societies became sedentary and started farming,
they began to develop political hierarchy, religion, and significantly
more complex institutions. Though widely accepted, the evidence
from the Natufians suggests that this traditional explanation puts the
cart before the horse. Institutional changes occurred in societies quite
a while before they made the transition to farming and were probably
the cause both of the move to sedentarism, which reinforced the
institutional changes, and subsequently of the Neolithic Revolution.
This pattern is suggested not only by the evidence from the Hilly
Flanks, which is the area most intensively studied, but also by the

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preponderance of evidence from the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa,
and East Asia.
Certainly the transition to farming led to greater agricultural
productivity and enabled a significant expansion of population. For
instance, in sites such as Jericho and Abu Hureyra, one sees that the
early farming village was much larger than the prefarming one. In
general, villages grew by between two and six times when the
transition took place. Moreover, many of the consequences that
people have traditionally argued as having flowed from this transition
undoubtedly happened. There was greater occupational specialization
and more rapid technological progress, and probably the development
of more complex and possibly less egalitarian political institutions.
But whether this happened in a particular place was not determined
by the availability of plant and animal species. Instead, it was a
consequence of the society’s having experienced the types of
institutional, social, and political innovations that would have
allowed sedentary life and then farming to emerge.
Though the Long Summer and the presence of crop and animal
species allowed this to happen, it did not determine where or when
exactly, after the climate had warmed up, it would happen. Rather,
this was determined by the interaction of a critical juncture, the Long
Summer, with small but important institutional differences that
mattered. As the climate warmed up, some societies, such as the
Natufians, developed elements of centralized institutions and
hierarchy, though these were on a very small scale relative to those of
modern nation-states. Like the Bushong under Shyaam, societies
reorganized to take advantage of the greater opportunities created by
the glut of wild plants and animals, and it was no doubt the political
elites who were the main beneficiaries of these new opportunities and
of the political centralization process. Other places that had only
slightly different institutions did not permit their political elites to
take similar advantage of this juncture and lagged behind the process
of political centralization and the creation of settled, agricultural, and
more complex societies. This paved the way to a subsequent
divergence of exactly the type we have seen before. Once these

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differences emerged, they spread to some places but not to others. For
example, farming spread into Europe from the Middle East starting
around 6500 
BC
, mostly as a consequence of the migration of farmers.
In Europe, institutions drifted away from parts of the world, such as
Africa, where initial institutions had been different and where the
innovations set in motion by the Long Summer in the Middle East
happened only much later, and even then in a different form.
T
HE INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS
of the Natufians, though they did most
likely underpin the Neolithic Revolution, did not leave a simple
legacy in world history and did not lead inexorably to the long-run
prosperity of their homelands in modern Israel, Palestine, and Syria.
Syria and Palestine are relatively poor parts of the modern world, and
the prosperity of Israel was largely imported by the settlement of
Jewish people after the Second World War and their high levels of
education and easy access to advanced technologies. The early
growth of the Natufians did not become sustained for the same reason
that Soviet growth fizzled out. Though highly significant, even
revolutionary for its time, this was growth under extractive
institutions. For the Natufian society it was also likely that this type
of growth created deep conflicts over who would control institutions
and the extraction they enabled. For every elite benefiting from
extraction there is a non-elite who would love to replace him.
Sometimes infighting simply replaces one elite with another.
Sometimes it destroys the whole extractive society, unleashing a
process of state and societal collapse, as the spectacular civilization
that Maya city-states built more than one thousand years ago
experienced.