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You could have said this about Europe as well. What did the Welsh have to do with the Scottish or English? People in Provence, Brittany, and Isle-de-France didn't even speak the same languages. Italian only coalesced as a basically-uniform and mutually-intelligible language in the last couple hundred years, and at the time of the discovery of the New World there was no "Spain", but instead "the Spains" because they were a bunch of fiercely-independent kingdoms with their own privileges and rivalries, bound together through fragile personal unions. Prussians, Brunswickers, Saxons, Badeners, and Bavarians didn't have much in common. Russia is a giant, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire, and even today eastern/south-eastern europe don't match ethnic and national borders well - they certainly didn't back in the bad old days of the great Habsburg empires.
Up until the late 19th century, just about every significant country in Europe was some type of monarchy (i.e. dictatorship), mediated by local elites (as is the case in Africa as well). How did they escape this seemingly-impossible corruption trap?
Dictatorship and corruption aren't synonymous. There's some trivial sense in which a dictatorship is "corrupt" because the dictator can violate laws for his own benefit, but it isn't necessarily corruption in the sense of there being whole classes of corrupt people and cultural expectations that push the government towards being corrupt.
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Even more recently there's been a bunch of ex-dictatorships emerging into strong market economies without much outside influence. Most of the Asian Tigers would be closer to facist than anything else. Spain, etc.
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