Political Legitimacy and Technology Adoption

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we analyze the effect that new technologies have on agents that legitimize rulers. We construct a simple political economy model which suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it negatively affects an agent’s ability to provide the ruler legitimacy. However, when other sources of legitimacy emerge, the ruler will accept the technology as long as the new legitimizing source is not negatively affected. We use this insight to help explain the initial blocking but eventual accepting of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire and industrialization in Tsarist Russia.tef

The Political Economy of Mass Printing: Legitimacy and Technological Change in the Ottoman Empire

New technologies have not always been greeted with full enthusiasm. Although the Ottomans were quick to adopt advancements in military technology, they waited almost three centuries to sanction printing in Ottoman Turkish (in Arabic characters). Printing spread relatively rapidly throughout Europe following the invention of the printing press in 1450 despite resistance by interest groups and temporary restrictions in some countries. We explain differential reaction to technology through a political economy approach centered on the legitimizing relationships between rulers and their agents (e.g., military, religious, or secular authorities). The Ottomans regulated the printing press heavily to prevent the loss it would have caused to the ruler’s net revenue by undermining the legitimacy provided by religious authorities. On the other hand, the legitimizing relationship between European religious and political authorities was undermined over a century prior to the invention of the press. European rulers thus had little reason to stop the spread of printing as public policy, nor could the Church have stopped it had it wanted to. The Ottomans eventually sanctioned printing in Arabic script in the 18th century after alternative sources of legitimacy emerged

Medieval universities, legal institutions, and the commercial revolution

We present new data documenting medieval Europe’s Commercial Revolution using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany’s first universities after 1386 following the papal schism. We find that the trend rate of market establishment breaks upward in 1386 and this break is greatest where the distance to a university shrank most. There is no differential pre-1386 trend associated with the reduction in distance to a university, and there is no break in trend in 1386 where university proximity did not change. These results are robust to estimating a variety of specifications that address concerns about the endogeneity of university location. Universities provided training in newly rediscovered Roman and canon law; students with legal training served in positions that reduced the uncertainty of trade in the Middle Ages. We argue that training in the law, and the consequent development of legal and administrative institutions, was an important channel linking universities and greater economic activity in medieval Germany

Comparative development in the Middle East

Whereas certain regions and countries in the Middle East are currently enjoying incomes that are among the highest in the world, others are in extreme poverty. Although much of this difference may be attributable to climate and natural resources, regions also differ in religious composition, political history, and economic institutions. The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects of factors that have caused differences in observed outcomes around the year 2000, prior to the Gulf War and subsequent events. The outcomes of interest are the standard measures of economic performance, such as incomes and population density. The analysis is conducted at two levels, namely geographic grids and sub-national administrative boundaries. We use GIS data to examine the effects of climate, terrain, location, natural resources, and various other geographic factors. Controlling for current national differences by country-level variables, we use a novel georeferenced dataset, called “Historical Polities Data,” to examine the effects of historical differences across subnational regions

The political economy of trade and production in Ottoman Anatolia

This paper studies the emergence of Malikane Divani system and its impact on economic outcomes in the Ottoman Empire in 16th century. Developing an argument based on state capacity, it empirically establishes a strong relationship between terrain elevation and emergence of the Malikane Divani. Then, it empirically illustrates that Ottoman Kazas where Malikane Divani sytem was prevalent had lower level of trade and production in Anatolia

Religion and state capacity: Ottoman Europe in 1530

We study the relationship between religion and state capacity in the European districts of the Ottoman Empire in the year 1530. Starting from a small tribe settled in northwestern Anatolia at the end of the thirteenth century, the Ottomans soon expanded their rule in the Balkans and eventually controlled territories in eastern and central Europe, including lands in today’s Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Crimea, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Whereas the population in these lands consisted of non-Muslims prior to Ottoman conquest, the fraction of Muslims rose significantly in some districts by the sixteenth century. Focusing on the year 1530, we examine how the variation in the Muslim share of population across districts affected the fiscal ability of the Ottomans to tax the population and their administrative ability to provide public goods and services