Institutions Matter

Why is it that some countries continue to be poor despite being blessed with abundant natural resources, human capital and technology transfer from developed countries?  Many resource-rich African countries mired in poverty and bloody civil wars come to mind. Even India, despite its much lauded economic growth of recent years, can be added to the list of these underachievers. 

According to Tim Harford in The Undercover Economist (2006), the answer lies in the poor nations' institutions or lack thereof.  As he puts it succinctly, "institutions matter".

Most resource-rich poor countries lack institutions capable of holding executive power in check and making them accountable to the people. As a result, the ruling cliques and their cronies can cream off the proceeds from the resources with impunity and become obscenely rich while the vast majority of their compatriots sink deeper into poverty.

"Institutions matter".  This phrase popped into my mind again when reading about the 1843 British annexation of Sindh (Punjab) in John Keay's India: A History (2000). One of the last so-called princely states to be bullied into Pax Britannica, Sindh had been able to keep the British at bay with diplomacy and a modern military under the inspired rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

On the eve of the First British Afghan War in which the British Raj suffered one of its most disastrous losses, Ranjit Singh, the Bonaparte of Sindh, the Lion of Punjab, died, in 1839.   

Keay writes: "A philander of many wives and more women, he was not without potential successors. Yet so personal had been his rule and so absolute his authority that the institutions of sovereignty and government through which a successor might establish himself scarcely existed."

The result was predictable. In the midst of the succession crisis that engulfed Sindh, the British, in the words of the victorious British general, pulled off a "very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality."

'Rascality' actually sums up the Indian, or perhaps any human, history.

Keay opens his narrative with the ancient Indian concept of Matsya-Nyaya or 'fish law' according to which big fish devour small fish. The subsequent laundry list of dynasties great and small that subjugate various parts of the Indian sub-continent through the millennia appears like a rogue’s gallery of history.

When the various dynasties are not oppressing their wretched subjects by imposing extortionate taxes to finance their ego-boosting monumental extravagances, they are at each others' throats, pillaging the defeated kingdoms’  treasuries and polluting their women.

This gives lie to the myth of a golden age, the so-called ‘Ram Rajya’, to which many people of certain persuasion look back with great nostalgia in the Indian sub-continent.  

Keay has a slippery grasp of Sanskrit words and phrases but he, nevertheless, convincingly demolishes many cherished mytho-historical sacred cows of India. For example, he cogently argues that the epic Mahabharata predates Ramayana, a startling proposition only an outsider like Keay could perhaps make.

After reading about the umpteenth petty cutthroat performing a ritual digvijaya or world conquest and assuming the title of Maharajadhiraja ,  one starts to contemplate the august personages of surviving Maharajadhirajas with fresh eyes.

Ornament of the World

A few random notes from my recent reading of David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215:

• The famous 732 Battle of Poitiers, in which a Christian coalition halted an Islamic force in what is now France, may have been retrospectively elevated and mythologised as a turning point by Western historians but it was a minor, temporary setback in a skirmish at the periphery of the empire as far as the Islamic rulers in Damacus were concerned.


• Before Baghdad of the One Thousand and One Nights fame, Damascus was the Caliphal seat of the Islamic empire. Caliph Abu Ja'far al-Mansur (754 - 74) ordered the construction of Baghdad beside the Tigris "with the point of his sword". It was finished in four years. Madinat al-Salam or "The City of Peace" was rivalled only by Constantinople in grandeur.


• In the battle of Poitiers, the Christian coalition was led by Charles the Bastard, whose political and battlefield exploits would earn him the sobriquet Hammer (Martel in Latin). Martel's grandson, Charlemagne, would be crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor.


• In his role as Palace Mayor (Prime Minister), Charles Martel virtually brought down the curtain on the Merovingian line, which is now regarded as the first French royal dynasty. Charles's line was officially formalised and divinely sanctioned when his son and heir Pippin the Short successfully sought papal blessing for a palace coup, signalling the ascendancy of the Carolingian dynasty.


• Charlemagne once executed forty-five hundred defeated Saxons in a single morning after they refused to recant their pagan beliefs in favour of Christianity.


• A fierce Germanic tribe with long beards challenged the temporal power of papacy. Eventually pacified by Franks under Charlemagne, the tribe settled in a part of the continent that came to be known as Lombardy, the home of the long beards.


• The celebrated deeds of the eponymous hero of the Song of Rolland was inspired by a disastrous chapter from one of Charlemagne's military expeditions into al-Andalus. However, it was not Muslim treachery or cowardice but the opportunistic attack of independent-minded Basque partisans that trapped and martyred the archetypal Christian knight in a narrow mountain pass.


• Cordoba attained its exalted status as the "ornament of the world" under the Umayyad rule transplanted by Abd al-Rahman I from Damascus to the Iberian peninsula. Prince Abd al-Rahman I fled Damascus after losing his Caliphal inheritance in a bloody power struggle against an Abbasid usurper. His enlightened policy encouraged the famous convivencia, the civic collaboration of Muslims, Jews and Christians that resulted in an unprecedented efflorescence of arts, culture, science and commerce. Al-Andalus would turn out to be the conduit of the flow of ancient Greek knowledge preserved and enhanced by Islamic scholars to then backward Christian dominions.


• Abd al-Rahman's architectural masterpiece, La Mezquita or the Friday Mosque, had the following self-referential inscription: It embodied what came before. Illuminated what came after. The inscription could have been the motto of the Umayyad Cordoba itself.