and 800. The last dated monument is from AD 810 by the Long Count, the same year that Yax Pasaj died. The city was abandoned soon after. Throughout the Maya area the story is the same; the political institutions that had provided the context for the expansion of trade, agriculture, and population vanished. Royal courts did not function, monuments and temples were not carved, and palaces were emptied. As political and social institutions unraveled, reversing the process of state centralization, the economy contracted and the population fell.
In some cases the major centers collapsed from widespread violence. The Petexbatun region of Guatemala—where the great temples were subsequently pulled down and the stone used to build extensive defensive walls—provides one vivid example. As we’ll see in the next chapter, it was very similar to what happened in the later Roman Empire. Later, even in places such as Copán, where there are fewer signs of violence at the time of the collapse, many monuments were defaced or destroyed. In some places the elite remained even after the initial overthrow of the k’uhul ajaw. In Copán there is evidence of the elite continuing to erect new buildings for at least another two hundred years before they also disappeared. Elsewhere elites seem to have gone at the same time as the divine lord.
Existing archaeological evidence does not allow us to reach a definitive conclusion about why the k’uhul ajaw and elites surrounding him were overthrown and the institutions that had created the Maya Classical Era collapsed. We know this took place in the context of intensified inter-city warfare, and it seems likely that opposition and rebellion within the cities, perhaps led by different factions of the elite, overthrew the institution.
Though the extractive institutions that the Mayas created produced sufficient wealth for the cities to flourish and the elite to become wealthy and generate great art and monumental buildings, the system was not stable. The extractive institutions upon which this narrow elite ruled created extensive inequality, and thus the potential for infighting between those who could benefit from the wealth extracted from the people. This conflict ultimately led to the undoing of the Maya civilization.
WHAT GOES WRONG?
Extractive institutions are so common in history because they have a powerful logic: they can generate some limited prosperity while at the same time distributing it into the hands of a small elite. For this growth to happen, there must be political centralization. Once this is in place, the state—or the elite controlling the state—typically has incentives to invest and generate wealth, encourage others to invest so that the state can extract resources from them, and even mimic some of the processes that would normally be set in motion by inclusive economic institutions and markets. In the Caribbean plantation economies, extractive institutions took the form of the elite using coercion to force slaves to produce sugar. In the Soviet Union, they took the form of the Communist Party reallocating resources from agriculture to industry and structuring some sort of incentives for managers and workers. As we have seen, such incentives were undermined by the nature of the system.
The potential for creating extractive growth gives an impetus to political centralization and is the reason why King Shyaam wished to create the Kuba Kingdom, and likely accounts for why the Natufians in the Middle East set up a primitive form of law and order, hierarchy, and extractive institutions that would ultimately lead to the Neolithic Revolution. Similar processes also likely underpinned the emergence of settled societies and the transition to agriculture in the Americas, and can be seen in the sophisticated civilization that the Mayas built on foundations laid by highly extractive institutions coercing many for the benefit of their narrow elites.
The growth generated by extractive institutions is very different in nature from growth created under inclusive institutions, however. Most important, it is not sustainable. By their very nature, extractive institutions do not foster creative destruction and generate at best only a limited amount of technological progress. The growth they engender thus lasts for only so long. The Soviet experience gives a vivid illustration of this limit. Soviet Russia generated rapid growth as it caught up rapidly with some of the advanced technologies in the world, and resources were allocated out of the highly inefficient agricultural sector and into industry. But ultimately the incentives faced in every sector, from agriculture to industry, could not stimulate technological progress. This took place in only a few pockets where resources were being poured and where