History, as we have seen, is littered with examples of reform movements that succumbed to the iron law of oligarchy and replaced one set of extractive institution with even more pernicious ones. We have seen that England in 1688, Franc in 1789, and Japan during the Meiji Restoration of1868 started the process of forging inclusive political institution with a political revolution. But such political revolutions generally create much destruction and hardship, and their success in far from certain. The Bolshevik Revolution advertised its aim as replacing the exploitative economic system of tsarist Russia with a more just and efficient one that would bring freedom and prosperity to millions of Russians. Alas, the outcome was the opposite, and much more repressive and extractive institution replaced those of the government the Bolsheviks overthrew. The experiences in China, Cuba, and Vietnam were similar. Many noncommunist, top-down reforms fared no better. Nasser vowed to build a modern egalitarian society in Egypt, but this led only to Hosni Mubarak’s corrupt regime, as we sew in chapter 13. Robert Mugabe was viewed by many as a freedom fighter ousting lan Smith’s racist and highly extractive Rhodesian regime. But Zimbabwe’s institutions became no less extractive, and its economic performance had been even worse than before independence.