Introduction

After pondering the disparity in income between rich nations and poor, Robert Lucas famously stated: "Once one starts to think about [the problem], it is difficult to think about anything else." Humanitarians, policymakers, and scholars have joined Lucas in addressing the determinants of development; and in this volume, I, a political scientist, join them.

Among those who seek to account for the disparities in income that mark the modern world, economists, such as Lucas, stand supreme. Not only do they rank among the most skilled and insightful of those who study development, but also they dominate the agencies that fund programs and design policies for those who strive to achieve it. But clearly, the problems bedeviling efforts to promote prosperity in the developing world are not purely economic in nature. Some arise from cultural values and religious beliefs; others from biological and environmental forces; and still others from politics. I shall focus on the impact of politics. I shall focus in particular on politicians, their use of power, and their impact on development.

Development, I contend, contains two elements: one economic, the level of prosperity; and the second political, the degree of security. From this perspective, societies can be considered more developed the greater their prosperity and the more secure the lives and property of those who inhabit them. Some might object to the use of income, and especially average income, as a measure of development. But clearly the attainment of other valued outcomes is costly and prosperous societies are better positioned to secure them than are those that are poor. As for security, I take counsel from Hobbes, who noted that where "the life of man is nasty, poor, brutish and short," there is "no place for industries, because the future thereof is uncertain ... no knowledge of the face of the earth; ... no arts; no letters; and what is worst of all, continuous fear, and danger of violent death." Both prosperity and security are valuable, then, not only in their own right but also because they make possible the attainment of other values.

Throughout this book, I probe the political foundations of development.

Method and Substance

Most who study development proceed "cross-sectionally"; that is, they compare poor nations to rich ones and note how differences in, say, education, gender equality, investment, or corruption relate to differences in standards of living. But development is a dynamic phenomenon and involves change over time. It is best studied, then, by seeing how nations evolve. Not only that: only a handful of nations in today's developing world have achieved a standard of living comparable to that of nations in the developed world; and in many, life and property remain imperiled. The number of "successes" is small; and because most of these reside in the Pacific Rim, so too is the amount of variation in the sample they provide. Today's world thus provides us little information. The implications are profound: today's world supplies little insight into how nations develop.

In response to this difficulty, I turn to history. Rather than proceeding cross-sectionally, and comparing poor countries with rich in the contemporary world, I proceed "longitudinally" and explore, for a given set of countries, how they changed over time. For reasons that I will soon discuss, I focus on England and France in the medieval and early modern periods. At the end of the latter, England stood poised to undergo the "great transformation" whereas France stood on the verge of political collapse. Attempts to isolate the factors that rendered the one more successful than the other can therefore offer insight into the factors that promote or impede the attainment of prosperity and security.

To use historical materials in this fashion, we have to assure ourselves that at least two conditions are met. The first is that the historical cases be sufficiently similar that inferences can be drawn from their divergent responses to similar stimuli. The second is to find a way of moving from "what is known" — the historical cases — to what cannot yet be known — the determinants of development in the contemporary world. We now turn to these issues.

TURNING TO HISTORY

The principal justification for drawing inferences from a comparison between England and France is that politically, economically, linguistically, and culturally, in the medieval and early modern periods, England and France shared important characteristics in common.

The England we first encounter was ruled by the Normans. And the Normans, like the Angevins that followed, presided not only over England but also over their "homelands" in what now is France (see figure 1.1). England's governing classes held properties on both sides of the channel, which they crossed and recrossed to manage and defend. The ruling lineages intermarried and incessantly fought each other. On both sides of the channel, the elite spoke the same language and until the sixteenth century belonged to the same church. That the two cases shared such basic characteristics in common, I argue, enables us to relate their differences to variations in the developmental outcomes that emerge over time: the one, becoming richer and more powerful; the other, a failed state.

USES OF THE PAST

Turning to a second challenge, we ask: How are we to employ our knowledge of history to gain insight into the contemporary world?

We do so by noting that in the medieval and early modern periods, Western societies were agrarian and that the underdeveloped nations remain largely so today. The attributes that commonly mark agrarian societies offer a framework that enables us to compare the two sets of cases; they enable us to treat them as members of a similar class. While accommodating, the framework (see box 1.1) is also powerful: it highlights regularities that enable us to draw on what is known about one set of cases to shed light on another. By so doing, it enables us to better comprehend the impact of power upon the process of development.

AGRARIAN ECONOMIES

As can be seen in box 1.1, two powerful regularities characterize agrarian economies, one governing production and the other consumption. The first is the law of diminishing returns. Derived by David Ricardo, a student of England's agrarian economy, the law states that as population grows, because the quantity of land remains fixed, per capita output declines. The first settlers would work the most productive land; as the population grows and people spread out, they then move to lands of lower quality. Should they instead remain on the most fertile plot, as their numbers increase, they would have to farm more intensively or make use of less productive labor, such as the aged. The increase in population therefore results in less...