A basic framework for classifying institutions and thinking about their role in economic development is illustrated with the colonial experience of the British and Spanish empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Japan in the nineteenth century. Institutions are the ‘rules of the game’. Primary rules are rules that apply directly to individuals and their relationships. Secondary rules are the ‘rules for making the rules’. The secondary rules governing the Spanish Empire located the procedures for making new rules and changing existing rules in negotiations with the king. Secondary rules in the British Empire located many of the processes for making new rules in the colonies themselves. Faced with independence and the end of monarchical rule in the late eighteenth and early ninteenth century, the institutions in the former Spanish colonies had to be reinvented from whole cloth, as the basic structure of secondary rules was no longer viable. In the British North American colonies, secondary rules allocating authority to colonial legislatures remained in place and were gradually transformed after independence. Japan, in contrast, wrestled with how to structure secondary rules in the events leading up to and following the Meiji Restoration.