Absolutism is rule unconstrained by law or the wishes of others, though in reality absolutists rule with the support of some small group or elite. In nineteenth-century Russia, for example, the tsars were absolutist rulers supported by a nobility that represented about 1 percent of the total population. This narrow group organized political institutions to per petuate their power. There was no Parliament or political representation of other groups in Russian society until 1905, when the tsar created the Duma, though he quickly undermined what few powers he had given to it. Unsurprisingly, economic institutions were extractive, organized to make the tsar and nobility as weathy as possible. The basis of this, as of many extractive economic systems, was a mass system of labor coercion and control, in the particularly pernicious from of Russian serfdom.
Absolutism was not the only type of political institution preventing industrialization. Though absolutist regimes were not pluralistic and feared ceative destruction, many had centralized states, or at least states that werecentralized enough to impose bans on innovations such as the printing press. Even today, countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti. and Nepal have national states that lack political centralization. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is even worse. As we argued earlier, without a centralized state to provide order and enforce rules and property rights, inclusive institutions could not emerge. We will see in this chapter that in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa ( for example, Somalia and southen Sudan ) a major barrier to industrialization was the lack of any form of political centralization. Without these natural prerequisites,industrialization had no chance of getting off the ground.
absolutism and a lack of, or weak, political centralization are two different barriers to the spread of industry. But they are also connected ; both are kept in place by fear of creative destruction and because the process of political centralization often creates a tendency toward absolutism. Resistance to political centralization is motivated by reasons similar to resistance to inclusive political institutions : fear of losing political power, this time to the newly centralizing state and those who control it. We saw in the previous chapter how the process of political century but got stronger in Spain.