Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society) by Jared Rubin

Author:Jared Rubin [Rubin, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

Summary: Explaining the Diverging Institutional Paths

Why did the Middle East and Western Europe, particularly Protestant Europe, undergo such divergent institutional histories? Part of the answer has to do with the presence of printing in Europe, but much more important was how the spread – or absence – of printing reinforced or undermined the relationships between political and religious authorities.

Prior to the spread of the press in Western Europe, heretical movements such as the Hussite and Lollard movements arose but did not spread far. It was only after the press was widespread that a movement like the one started by Luther could succeed. The absence of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire meant that even if such anti-authority thoughts did exist, they were unlikely to spread.28 This meant that Ottoman institutions were self-reinforcing (see Figure 6.7). The high degree of relatively inexpensive legitimacy bestowed by religious authorities discouraged the Ottoman sultan from permitting the spread of printing in the Arabic script. And it follows that the absence of the printing press was the very thing that prevented alternatives to religious legitimacy from emerging. And it was not simply the case that there was little opposition to the Ottoman religious establishment – mystical and dervish anti-Ottoman orders abounded even at the height of Ottoman power, especially among the tribes in the provinces. The Ottomans crushed the most famous of these movements, the Kizilbash movement, in the mid-sixteenth century – incidentally, right around the time of the Reformation.29 As was the case with rulers in pre-Reformation Europe, the Ottomans were able to quash any religious dissent from spreading too far before it was out of their control. While it is impossible to know whether these mystical movements would have been more successful had they had access to the press, the European experience suggests the possibility. After all, Jan Hus, John Wyclif, Jean Gerson, and other pre-Reformation reformers also lacked the press – and met similar fates.

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