I'm using extractive loosely in the sense of Acemoglu-Robinson, e.g. using political/religious/social institutions to give wealth from the many to the few.
I've been doing some light reading about the Reformation and Thirty Years War, and it was really striking to me how extractive the political/religious institutions were. But given the technology levels at the time, it also seems like the only way a large scale political body could function is by being highly extractive. A hypothetical king or emperor needs to be willing to participate in large scale brutality to be able to force compliance with rules, even though they should avoid it whenever possible.
Does this hold true in other historical civilizations? How extractive were the Aztecs, the Chinese, the Mughals, the Japanese, the Maya, the Mongols, the Inca?
This is a followup question that might lead to a possible answer.
Fernand Braudel, in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, argues that the extractiveness of an ancient or medieval regime was directly linked to the productivity of the major grain cultivated in the area. In Europe, wheat was the main crop. Wheat has a terrible yield, meaning many man-hours must be devoted to its cultivation and harvesting, so there is effectively a limit to how extractive a ruler can be, assuming they want their people to be fed. Rice and corn (maize) have much higher yields. Corn, in particular, is so productive that it resulted in "theocratic totalitarian systems" in which "all the leisure of the peasants was used for gigantic public works of the Egyptian type"--basically, a very productive crop allowed the ruling class to more or less enslave their populace.
I am wondering if Braudel's hypothesis has stood the test of time. This particular volume was first published in 1967, and I imagine historical and archaeological insights since then have shone light on these systems in a way Braudel missed, but of course I have no way of knowing.