Belgium’s place in the book’s account of economic divergence is shaped by a historical reversal: French conquest disrupted entrenched institutions and helped prepare the country for industrialization. The same European expansion that carried reform into Belgium also strengthened extractive institutions in other parts of the world, linking its trajectory to a wider contrast between institutional transformation and colonial impoverishment.

French Rule and Institutional Change

In the late eighteenth century, much of continental Europe remained governed by institutions that empowered monarchs, princes, and nobility while restricting trade. French revolutionary armies and, later, Napoleon carried institutional reforms beyond France. In Belgium, as in the Netherlands and parts of Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, French rule imposed changes that attacked absolutist power and feudal land relations, abolished guilds, and advanced equality before the law.

The reforms formed part of a broader political project, not simply a change in administration. By weakening inherited privileges and legal distinctions based on birth, French rule altered the institutional conditions under which economic activity could take place. The book presents those changes as preparation for more inclusive institutions and the growth that could follow them.

Conquest, Reform, and Aftermath

French revolutionary forces seized the Austrian Netherlands, corresponding broadly to modern Belgium, and maintained strong control there through the 1790s. Their occupation belonged to a wider campaign of territorial expansion, initially justified as creating a buffer against hostile monarchies. Military conquest brought suffering, but it also carried institutional reforms into territories where feudal obligations and restrictions on commerce remained deeply rooted.

Napoleon continued this process, seeking firm control over conquered territories while also pursuing the Revolution’s legal reforms. He codified Roman law and the principle of equality before the law in the Code Napoleon, which he wanted imposed throughout the territories under his control. The durability of these changes varied across Europe: in some places old elites returned and reforms were reversed, while elsewhere feudal institutions and guild power were permanently weakened or destroyed. The book places Belgium among the territories opened to industrialization through the French-imposed institutional transformation.

A Divergent European Path

The comparison with regions less affected by French conquest gives Belgium’s experience its wider significance. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in many places France had controlled. Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, and Poland and Spain, where French control was temporary or limited, remained largely stagnant by comparison. The contrast is presented not as a simple consequence of military occupation, but as the result of whether institutional changes undermined barriers to economic activity.

The book also sets Belgium’s trajectory against the effects of European commercial and colonial expansion elsewhere. French expansion helped create conditions for industrialization in Belgium, while European expansion in regions such as the Moluccas imposed or reinforced extractive institutions, disrupted local commerce, and hindered industrial development. Belgium thus figures in an account of uneven historical change: institutions that enabled growth in one part of the world coexisted with imperial arrangements that constrained it in others.