"The Narrow Corridor" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2019)

"The story of this chapter is that this architecture, though it worked to lever the U.S. into the corridor, was a Faustian bargain.  One of the major things it promoted was the ability of Southern slaveholders to exploit their slaves, making the hands of the state not just tied but also sullied.  These sullied shackles meant that the federal state remained impaired in some important dimensions.  For one, it obviously didn't protect slaves and later its African American citizens from violence, discrimination, poverty, and dominance.  It is emblematic of this pattern too that it was the poor, black citizens of Ferguson who were harassed, fined, imprisoned, and even killed.

"For another, the concessions to the states and the various constraints also meant that the federal state would be hobbled when it came to protecting all of its citizens, not just African Americans, from violence and economic hardship."

Daron Acemoglu is a Professor of Economics teaching at M.I.T., and James A. Robinson is a Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago.  The two of them authored another book together, Why Nations Fail, which is very influential.

In The Narrow Corridor the authors offer a rather unwieldy model of how free societies come to be, and of how they continue to be (or cease being) free over time.  Many of the authors' arguments are compounded upon Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, a much older work which describes the origin and purposes of government.

Key to their idea of a free society are three models of government, these being the Despotic Leviathan, the Shackled Leviathan and the Absent (or Paper) Leviathan. The first type of government exercises near absolute (despotic) control over its subjects, the second is restrained (shackled) by the power of the people, and the third is absent (or ineffectual), unable to change the social medium in which it exists.  Alongside all three models the authors posit a "Red Queen Effect" in which society and government attempt to keep pace with one another in terms of how they affect individual choices. It probably goes without saying that the authors regard the Shackled Leviathan as an ideal government, existing as it does in a "narrow corridor" between the Despotic and Absent Leviathans.

As you might expect, this book begins its lengthy arguments in the ancient world and from there slowly progresses toward the present day.  This approach is, I think, a mistake, in that we have so few sources for the societies under discussion, and using them as examples of anything feels like cherrypicking. As the authors move into the Industrial Age they're on more solid ground, and their evidence is more convincing.

This book is, in my opinion, very lopsided. Part of the reason for this is the authors' awkward model of a "narrow corridor," complete with diagrams that mean almost nothing.  Another reason is the time scale over which they stretch their survey.  This time scale is really too big, and too many cultures are ignored in an effort to apply the authors' ideas over several centuries of human culture.

I will say, however, that the last few chapters of this book are quite good.  They don't require an understanding of "leviathans," "red queens" or "corridors," and are instead a common sense look at the world we live in today.

Their ideas on labor coercion, by the way, could have easily been expanded into a book better than this one.

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"The Chinese in America" by Iris Chang (2003)

"What Chinese Want" by Tom Doctoroff