But the institutional transitions in Britain and the Industrial Revolution created new opportunities and challenges for European states. Though there was absolutism in Western Europe, the region had also shared much of the institutional drift that had impacted Britain in the previous millennium. But the situation was very different in Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and China. These differences mattered for the dissemination of industrialization. Just like the Black Death the rise of Atlantic trade, the critical juncture created by industrialization intensified the even-present conflict over institutions in many European nations. A major factor was the French Revolution of 1789. The end of absolutism in France opened the way for inclusive institutions, and the French ultimately embarked on industrialization and rapid economic growth. The French Revolution in fact did more than that. It exported its institutions by invading and forcibly reforming the extractive institutions of several neighboring countries. It thus opened the way to industrialization not only in France, but in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and parts of Germany and Italy. Farther east the reaction was similar to that after the Black Death, when, instead of crumbling, feudalism intensified. Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire fell even further behind economically, but their absolutist monarchies managed to stay in place until the First World Was
Elsewhere in the world, absolutism was as resilient as in Eastern Europe. This was particularly true in China, where the Ming-Qing transition led to a state committed to building a stable agrarian society and hostile to international trade. But there were also institutional differences that mattered in Asia. If China reacted to the Industrial Revolution as Western Europe. Just as in France, it took a revolution to change the system, this time one led by the renegade lords of the Satsuma, Chishu, Rosa, and Aki drains. These lords overthrew the shogun, created the Meiji Restoration, and moved Japan onto the path of institutional reforms and economic growth
we also saw that absolutism was resilient in isolated Ethiopia. Elsewhere on the continent the very same force of international trade that helped to transform English institution in the seventeenth century locked large parts of westem and central Africa into highly extracties in some places and led to the creation of extractive slaving states in others
The institutional dynamics we have described ultimately determined which countries took advantage of the major opportunities present in the nineteenth century onward and which ones failed to do so. The roots of thr world inequality we observe today can be found in this divergence. With a few exceptions, the richcountries of today are those that embarked on thevprocessvof industrialization and technological change starting in the nineteenth century, and the poor ones are those that dud not.