One of the most influential individuals of modern history is Mao Zedong – or Chairman Mao. He lived an extraordinary life. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideology of communism while a student at Peking University, Mao was a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1927. He immediately led an insurrection – the Autumn Harvest Uprising – that initiated a civil war with the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that then ruled China. It was a war that would last until 1949 (although interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945). When Mao’s CPC finally defeated the nationalists, the KMT and its followers retreated to Taiwan. This is the reason that China still does not recognise Taiwan as an independent country today.

When Milton Obote was inaugurated as Uganda’s first prime minister in 1962, the future of the country that Winston Churchill had called ‘the Pearl of Africa’ looked brighter than ever. Independence from Britain had come with a carefully constructed federal constitution that gave some internal autonomy to the ancient kingdom of Buganda and its king, while Obote and his government could still maintain effective control of a country with diverse ethnic and interest groups.

Independence brought democratic institutions at a time when the economy was booming. The ‘cash crop revolution’ involving cotton and coffee that started with the construction of the railway from Uganda to the Kenyan port at Mombasa in 1901 had spread rapidly during the following half-century. In the first decade of independence, coffee exports more than doubled.

Russia is the world’s largest country by landmass, covering an area of 17 million square kilometres. Canada, the world’s second-largest country, is less than 10 million square kilometres in size. At the beginning of 2022, before the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow, Russia’s capital, was home to more billionaires than any other city on earth. Yet Russians are relatively poor compared with their western and eastern neighbours. The GDP per capita of Russians is only half that of Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, and less than a quarter of that of Japan, its easternmost neighbour. Why is it that the average Russian has lagged behind, despite the nation’s apparent opulence?

The answer lies in the country’s economic institutions. By the beginning of the twentieth century Russia was already a poor country relative to its neighbours. It had only abolished serfdom in 1861.