Why Nations Fail

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

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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 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

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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
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

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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 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

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comparison between England and Ethiopia spans world
inequality. The reason Ethiopia is where it is today is that,
unlike in England, in Ethiopia 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.