(^32) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
them, arouse their cupidity, or even attract their attention; to look
them in the eye was an act of impudence that invited severest punish-
ment.
Today, of course, we recognize that such contingency of ownership
stifles enterprise and stunts development; for why should anyone invest
capital or labor in the creation or acquisition of wealth that he may not
be allowed to keep? In the words of Edmund Burke, "a law against
property is a law against industry."^2 In Asian despotisms, however,
such arrangements were seen as the very raison d'être of human soci-
ety: what did ordinary people exist for, except to enhance the pleasure
of their rulers?
Certainly not to indulge a will of their own. The experience of the
people of Balkh (central Asia) is emblematic. It so happened their ruler
was away making war on the Indians, and a nomadic people nearby
took advantage of his absence to seize the city. The inhabitants put up
a good fight, defending not only their own houses and families but
those of the absent ruler; but they lost. When the ruler returned, he re-
took the city; and when he learned of his subjects' valor, he scolded
them. War, he lectured, was not their affair; their duty was to pay and
obey whoever ruled them. The leaders of the common folk duly apol-
ogized and promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté}
In these circumstances, the very notion of economic development
was a Western invention. Aristocratic (despotic) empires were charac-
teristically squeeze operations: when the elites wanted more, they did
not think in terms of gains in productivity. Where would these have
come from? They simply pressed (and oppressed) harder, and usually
found some hidden juice. Sometimes they miscalculated and squeezed
too hard, and that could mean flight, riot, and opportunities for re-
bellion. These autocracies, though defined as divine, were not immor-
tal. Meanwhile only societies with room for multiple initiatives, from
below more than from above, could think in terms of a growing pie.
The ancient Greeks distinguished between free and unfree, not so
much in terms of material benefits (they were not particularly keen on
economic enterprise, which they associated with metics and other crass
people), or even in terms of the advantages of their own system, as of
the wrongness of the other, which they saw as tyranny. And yet the
Greeks succumbed to despotism, most spectacularly in the empire cre-
ated by Alexander and ruled by his Asian and Egyptian successors; and
later the Romans went the same way, sliding all too easily into tyran-
nical autocracy. In final form, the classical Mediterranean world came
to resemble politically the civilizations to the east—a powerful and
nora
(Nora)
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