Abstract
In The Narrow Corridor, Acemoglu and Robinson create a compelling narrative concerning the relationship between the power of states, the power of societies, and economic development, illustrated with a series of historical vignettes. Using a recently constructed historical dataset of state capacity, we provide a series of formal and informal tests of their hypothesis. We first visualise the historical paths of the strength of society and the strength of the state for each country so as to operationalise the claims of Acemoglu and Robinson. We then measure whether the balance of the strength of society and the strength of the state is predictive of improvements in both. We find very little evidence in favour of Acemoglu and Robinson.