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

T
HE
 C
HILDREN OF
 S
AMAALE
Absolutist political institutions around the world impeded
industrialization either indirectly, in the way they organized the
economy, or directly, as we have seen in Austria-Hungary and Russia.
But absolutism was not the only barrier to the emergence of inclusive
economic institutions. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, many
parts of the world, especially in Africa, lacked a state that could
provide even a minimal degree of law and order, which is a
prerequisite for having a modern economy. There was not the
equivalent of Peter the Great in Russia starting the process of political
centralization and then forging Russian absolutism, let alone that of
the Tudors in England centralizing the state without fully destroying
—or, more appropriately, without fully being able to destroy—the
Parliament and other constraints on their power. Without some
degree of political centralization, even if the elites of these African
polities had wished to greet industrialization with open arms, there
wouldn’t have been much they could have done.
Somalia, situated in the Horn of Africa, illustrates the devastating
effects of lack of political centralization. Somalia has been dominated
historically by people organized into six clan families. The four
largest of these, the Dir, Darod, Isaq, and Hawiye, all trace their
ancestry back to a mythical ancestor, Samaale. These clan families
originated in the north of Somalia and gradually spread south and
east, and are even today primarily pastoral people who migrate with
their flocks of goats, sheep, and camels. In the south, the Digil and
the Rahanweyn, sedentary agriculturalists, make up the last two of

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the clan families. The territories of these clans are depicted on 
Map
12
.
Somalis identify first with their clan family, but these are very large
and contain many subgroups. First among these are clans that trace
their descent back to one of the larger clan families. More significant
are the groupings within clans called diya-paying groups, which
consist of closely related kinspeople who pay and collect diya, or
“blood wealth,” compensation against the murder of one of their
members. Somali clans and diya-paying groups were historically
locked in to almost continual conflict over the scarce resources at
their disposal, particularly water sources and good grazing land for
their animals. They also constantly raided the herds of neighboring
clans and diya-paying groups. Though clans had leaders called
sultans, and also elders, these people had no real power. Political
power was very widely dispersed, with every Somali adult man being
able to have his say on decisions that might affect the clan or group.
This was achieved through an informal council made up of all adult
males. There was no written law, no police, and no legal system to
speak of, except that Sharia law was used as a framework within
which informal laws were embedded. These informal laws for a diya-
paying group would be encoded in what was called a heer, a body of
explicitly formulated obligations, rights, and duties the group
demanded others obey in their interactions with the group. With the
advent of colonial rule, these heers began to be written down. For
example, the Hassan Ugaas lineage formed a diya-paying group of
about fifteen hundred men and was a subclan of the Dir clan family in
British Somaliland. On March 8, 1950, their heer was recorded by the
British district commissioner, the first three clauses of which read
1. When a man of the Hassan Ugaas is murdered by an external
group twenty camels of his blood wealth (100) will be taken
by his next of kin and the remaining eighty camels shared
amongst all the Hassan Ugaas.
2. If a man of the Hassan Ugaas is wounded by an outsider and
his injuries are valued at thirty-three-and-a-third camels, ten

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camels must be given to him and the remained to his jiffo-
group (a sub-group of the diya group).
3. Homicide amongst members of the Hassan Ugaas is subject
to compensation at the rate of thirty-three-and-a-third
camels, payable only to the deceased’s next of kin. If the
culprit is unable to pay all or part, he will be assisted by his
lineage.
The heavy focus of the heer on killing and wounding reflects the
almost constant state of warfare between diya-paying groups and
clans. Central to this was blood wealth and blood feuding. A crime
against a particular person was a crime against the whole diya-paying
group, and necessitated collective compensation, blood wealth. If
such blood wealth was not paid, the diya-paying group of the person
who had committed the crime faced the collective retribution of the
victim. When modern transportation reached Somalia, blood wealth
was extended to people who were killed or injured in motor
accidents. The Hassan Ugaas’s heer didn’t refer only to murder; clause
6 was “If one man of the Hassan Ugaas insults another at a Hassan
Ugaas council he shall pay 150 shillings to the offended party.”
In early 1955, the flocks of two clans, the Habar Tol Ja’lo and the
Habar Yuunis, were grazing close to each other in the region of
Domberelly. A man from the Yuunis was wounded after a dispute
with a member of the Tol Ja’lo over camel herding. The Yuunis clan
immediately retaliated, attacking the Tol Ja’lo clan and killing a man.
This death led, following the code of blood wealth, to the Yuunis clan
offering compensation to the Tol Ja’lo clan, which was accepted. The
blood wealth was to be handed over in person, as usual in the form of
camels. At the handing-over ceremony, one of the Tol Ja’lo killed a
member of the Yuunis, mistaking him for a member of the diya-
paying group of the murderer. This led to all-out warfare, and within
the next forty-eight hours thirteen Yuunis and twenty-six Tol Ja’lo
had been killed. Warfare continued for another year before elders
from both clans, brought together by the English colonial
administration, managed to broker a deal (the exchange of blood

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wealth) that satisfied both sides and was paid over the next three
years.
The paying of blood wealth took place in the shadow of the threat
of force and feuding, and even when it was paid, it did not necessarily
stop conflict. Usually conflict died down and then flared up again.
Political power was thus widely dispersed in Somali society, almost
pluralistically. But without the authority of a centralized state to
enforce order, let alone property rights, this led not to inclusive
institutions. Nobody respected the authority of another, and nobody,
including the British colonial state when it eventually arrived, was
able to impose order. The lack of political centralization made it
impossible for Somalia to benefit from the Industrial Revolution. In
such a climate it would have been unimaginable to invest in or adopt
the new technologies emanating from Britain, or indeed to create the
types of organizations necessary to do so.
The complex politics of Somalia had even more subtle implications
for economic progress. We mentioned earlier some of the great
technological puzzles of African history. Prior to the expansion of
colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, African societies did not
use wheeled transportation or plow agriculture and few had writing.
Ethiopia did, as we have seen. The Somalis also had a written script,
but unlike the Ethiopians, they did not use it. We have already seen
instances of this in African history. African societies may not have
used wheels or plows, but they certainly knew about them. In the
case of the Kingdom of Kongo, as we have seen, this was
fundamentally due to the fact that the economic institutions created
no incentives for people to adopt these technologies. Could the same
issues arise with the adoption of writing?
We can get some sense of this from the Kingdom of Taqali, situated
to the northwest of Somalia, in the Nuba Hills of southern Sudan. The
Kingdom of Taqali was formed in the late eighteenth century by a
band of warriors led by a man called Isma’il, and it stayed
independent until amalgamated into the British Empire in 1884. The
Taqali kings and people had access to writing in Arabic, but it was
not used—except by the kings, for external communication with other

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polities and diplomatic correspondence. At first this situation seems
very puzzling. The traditional account of the origin of writing in
Mesopotamia is that it was developed by states in order to record
information, control people, and levy taxes. Wasn’t the Taqali state
interested in this?
These questions were investigated by the historian Janet Ewald in
the late 1970s as she tried to reconstruct the history of the Taqali
state. Part of the story is that the citizens resisted the use of writing
because they feared that it would be used to control resources, such
as valuable land, by allowing the state to claim ownership. They also
feared that it would lead to more systematic taxation. The dynasty
that Isma’il started did not gel into a powerful state. Even if it had
wanted to, the state was not strong enough to impose its will over the
objections of the citizens. But there were other, more subtle factors at
work. Various elites also opposed political centralization, for example,
preferring oral to written interaction with citizens, because this
allowed them maximum discretion. Written laws or orders could not
be taken back or denied and were harder to change; they set
benchmarks that governing elites might want to reverse. So neither
the ruled nor the rulers of Taqali saw the introduction of writing to be
to their advantage. The ruled feared how the rulers would use it, and
the rulers themselves saw the absence of writing as aiding their quite
precarious grip on power. It was the politics of Taqali that kept
writing from being introduced. Though the Somalis had even less of a
well-defined elite compared with the Taqali kingdom, it is quite
plausible that the same forces inhibited their use of writing and their
adoption of other basic technologies.
The Somali case shows the consequences of the lack of political
centralization for economic growth. The historical literature does not
record instances of attempts to create such centralization in Somalia.
However, it is clear why this would have been very difficult. To
politically centralize would have meant that some clans would have
been subject to the control of others. But they rejected any such
dominance, and the surrender of their power that this would have
entailed; the balance of military power in the society would also have

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made it difficult to create such centralized institutions. In fact, it is
likely that any group or clan attempting to centralize power would
not only have faced stiff resistance but would have lost its existing
power and privileges. As a consequence of this lack of political
centralization and the implied absence of even the most basic security
of property rights, Somali society never generated incentives to invest
in productivity-enhancing technologies. As the process of
industrialization was under way in other parts of the world in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Somalis were feuding and
fending for their lives, and their economic backwardness became
more ingrained.