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

  Put simply, the press would have threatened the religious establishment’s role as a middleman between received religious wisdom and its dissemination. With a widespread adoption of the press, Muslims would have been able to receive knowledge directly from books, not the religious establishment. Even though literacy outside of the religious establishment was low, it was not zero. As events in Europe eventually proved, it did not take a large literate population for the printed word to facilitate the rapid spread of ideas, since ideas could spread quickly and cheaply by literates reading printed works aloud in public spaces (see Chapter 6).

  Why Did the Press Spread Quickly in Europe?

  The Ottoman suppression of printing raises the question: Why did Western European rulers by and large permit the press? Did European propagating arrangements play a role in permitting the press much like Ottoman propagating arrangements played a role in preventing its spread? By now, it should be clear that Western European rulers were engaged in very different propagating arrangements than their Ottoman counterparts by the era of Gutenberg. The Church was a much weaker source of legitimacy for rulers in Western Europe than the religious establishment was in the Ottoman Empire. Although there was heterogeneity throughout Europe, Church leaders began to lose their ability to confer legitimacy beginning in the thirteenth century, and their capacity to legitimize weakened further in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  Many factors encouraged the spread of printing in Western Europe but not in the Ottoman Empire. All of these factors were either a result of differences in propagating arrangements or exacerbated by differences in propagating arrangements. Take, for example, one of the distinguishing features between the Ottoman religious establishment and the Church: unlike Ottoman clerics, the Church lacked a monopoly on educational and intellectual institutions in the fifteenth century. This was not always the case. Prior to the late thirteenth century, men of the Church produced most European manuscripts. Indeed, the primary determinant of how many books a region produced in this period was the number and size of its monasteries.40 This was especially true in the tenth–twelfth centuries, after the Cluniac reforms led to an explosion of monasteries in Western Europe.

  Beginning in the late thirteenth century, two intertwined events helped shift the center of book production away from the monasteries: the growth of cities and the emergence of secular universities. The new urban elite were an important source of demand for printed works. Merchant manuals, books on arithmetic, and price sheets were among the early works published by European presses. This source of demand played an important role in encouraging the creation of printed works outside the control of the Church.

  More importantly, the weakened role of the Church as a legitimizing agent meant that secular rulers desired justification for their rule that was outside, but complementary to, the religious justification provided by the Church. They found this in the doctors located at the most prestigious universities. The doctors formulated theories of the state based on Aristotelian foundations – not Christianity – in return for the ruler’s financial support for the university. Such tracts were discouraged, and sometimes banned, when the Church dominated the universities prior to the late thirteenth century.41 But the secular wings of universities (i.e., everything outside of theology) grew rapidly beginning in the late thirteenth century, and even many of those universities previously controlled by the Church had control wrestled away by secular rulers.42 Political support for universities continued unabated throughout the remainder of the medieval period. For instance, during the Hundred Years’ War, both the French and the English founded universities to promote patriotic feelings. Meanwhile, Florence established a university in order to repopulate after a plague, and numerous other cities solicited universities in order to establish a new source of income.43 Associated with these movements was a growth in lay collections of nonreligious books.44

  An unintended consequence of the weakened importance of religious legitimacy in general and the rise of the universities in particular was that universities established a separate sphere of book production.45 Evidence collected by Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2009) indicates that while monasteries were the driving force behind manuscript production in the early medieval period, the center of manuscript production slowly moved to cities and universities in the latter half of the medieval period. This provided a setting in which there was widespread demand for books over which the Church did not hold a monopoly.

  As a result, the Church would not have been able to stop the spread of the press had it desired. And it is not even obvious that the Church desired to stop the spread of printing. It was one of the big early users of the press, which it used to print papal bulls, indulgences, and religious texts. But this is not prima facie evidence that the Church would have favored printing had it been in the position to oppose its spread. It simply reflects the Church’s optimal response to the broader economic and institutional realities it faced. Surely, given the press’s potential to undermine the existing social order, the Church would have preferred a world where the press did not exist. In fact, the next chapter shows that such fears were justified – the press played a key role in the Reformation, which was the biggest threat to the Church’s religious hegemony in more than 1,000 years. But the simple fact is that the Church was in no position to stop the spread of the printing press. Indeed, the Church’s actions during the Reformation are telling: it attempted to place prohibitions on many “heretical” works – often in the form of mass book burnings – but it never suggested an outright ban on printing, probably because it would have been futile.

  The different reactions to the printing press in the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe were therefore not simply the result of differences in the preferences of Christian and Muslim religious authorities. Although oral transmission was much more important in the Islamic tradition than in medieval Christianity, there was an immense downside to permitting the press for religious authorities in both religions. The rapid transmission of ideas threatened both, since ideas could quickly escape their control. Thus, the key difference between Ottoman and Western European religious authorities was not their preferences, but their influence with rulers. The Ottoman religious establishment played an important enough of a propagating role that it could convince the sultan to prohibit printing in the Arabic script, but the Church was in no position by the end of the fifteenth century to do anything similar with Western European rulers. And since the Church was helpless to prevent the spread of the press, it might as well have reaped the benefits of having access to rapidly reproduced works.

  It is also possible that Western European rulers would have been unable to prevent the spread of printing even had they wanted to. Unlike the Ottoman Empire, Western Europe was highly fragmented, with numerous rulers presiding over relatively small territories. This meant that if one ruler suppressed printing, printers could simply go to a neighboring state and print there. And since printed works were often small and easily concealable, it was not difficult to smuggle printed works into the prohibited region. This, in fact, happened in sixteenth-century France, where the Crown banned many Protestant tracts. Printers subverted these prohibitions by printing in nearby regions with Protestant sympathies – the Netherlands and the western part of the Holy Roman Empire – and as a result, Protestant literature was available to the French Huguenots.

  It is undeniable that fragmentation played some role in the spread of printing in Western Europe. It certainly would have been easier for the Church to negotiate with one centralized state to suppress printing rather than numerous, decentralized, competing states. But fragmentation alone cannot be the sole reason for the spread of printing in Europe. It must have worked in tandem with the weakened role of the Church in legitimizing rule. To see why this is true, imagine a world where the Church was the most important propagating agent of every European state in the latter half of the fifteenth century. In such a circumstance, the Church should have bee
n able to prevent the spread of printing. If the Church were to enact an edict prohibiting the printing press, how would rulers react? Sure, one enterprising ruler might permit the press, thereby attracting printers, the associated tax revenue, and other efficiencies enabled by the press. But they also would have been taking the chance of losing one of their primary propagating agents. In a situation where many rival states were waiting for any sign of weakness to appear before attacking – as was largely the case for the thirteen to fourteen centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire – it is possible that a set of fragmented states would have been even less willing to adopt the press, as it would have weakened the propagation of their rule relative to their rivals. So, while it is probable that fragmentation played a positive role on balance in facilitating the spread of printing, it did so only in the context of a Western Europe that had become less reliant on religious propagation of rule.

  Unforeseeable Consequences

  History is full of missed opportunities. Rarely do missed opportunities have persistent long-run consequences; long-run trends tend to overwhelm the idiosyncratic choices made by rulers or other important decision-makers.46 Yet, sometimes missed opportunities initiate path-dependent processes that push history in a very different direction than it would have taken had someone seized that opportunity. Was the Ottoman failure to adopt the printing press an example of such a missed opportunity? What were the consequences of two and a half centuries of Ottoman printing restrictions?

  Like restrictions on taking interest, Ottoman restrictions on the printing press serve as a useful tool to highlight the mechanisms at the heart of the framework proposed in this book. The relationship between rulers and their propagating agents was different in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century, and as a result, rulers enacted different policies regarding the press. And like restrictions on taking interest, there were significant long-run, unintended consequences of the Ottoman suppression of the printing press. This chapter does not address these consequences, and the argument presented here does not imply that the press was directly responsible for the long-run divergence in economic fortunes between Western Europe and the Middle East. Sure, improvements in literacy and better access to price and exchange rate information had a positive effect on long-run economic outcomes in Western Europe. But these direct effects of printing pale in comparison to the unforeseeable, path-dependent consequences that arose following the spread of the press in Western Europe. The most important of these consequences was that the press permitted dissent to spread rapidly, making it much more likely that the existing political order would at some point be undermined. The next chapter proposes that this is precisely what occurred within a few decades of the entrenchment of printing throughout Western Europe. Specifically, the next chapter details how the press was instrumental in the spread and success of the Protestant Reformation, an event that completely upended propagating arrangements in large parts of Western Europe. Such a rapid and fundamental change never occurred in the Middle East, in no small part due to the absence of an information technology like the printing press that permitted dissent to spread rapidly and outside the hands of the existing elite. The ultimate upshot, detailed in Chapters 7 and 8, is that by the end of the sixteenth century, the manner in which rule was propagated was vastly different in the Middle East and Western Europe (especially Protestant Europe), and the resulting laws and policies favored commerce to a much greater degree in the latter. This is the reason that economic success ultimately occurred in parts of Western Europe but not the Middle East. The printing press did play a key role in the long-run divergence between the two regions, but only through a path-dependent sequence of events far removed from the initial causes of the divergence. The next chapter takes the first step at tracing this path, employing empirical evidence to support the connection between the spread of the printing press and the subsequent spread of the Protestant Reformation.

  6

  Printing and the Reformation

  The previous chapter began by noting the widely perceived importance of Johannes Gutenberg, who ranked as the most important person of the last millennium by a number of popular press publications. Not far behind Gutenberg on all of those lists was a man who was born 15 years after Gutenberg’s death in a city about 250 miles from Gutenberg’s Mainz. This man, Martin Luther, set in motion a sequence of events in 1517 known as the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was the most crippling blow to the religious hegemony of the Roman Church since it became the established church of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Within just a decade, new religious groups formed that forever split from the Church, and Protestants would ultimately count Baptists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, and many more among their ranks.

  Why were Luther and his Reformation so important to world history? It is one thing to suggest that the Reformation was one of the most important religious events of the last millennium, and it certainly was. It is quite another to claim that the consequences of the Reformation extended beyond the world of religion. Yet, this book has thus far suggested that religion – specifically, the role religion plays in propagating political rule – can have far-reaching implications for a region’s economic performance. It is natural, therefore, to ask whether the Reformation had any impact on the development of Western European economies.

  There is a long line of scholarly work suggesting that Protestantism did indeed have a positive impact on European economic development. The most famous thesis making this connection is Max Weber’s (1905 [2002]) classic The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism. In this text, Weber argued that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination inspired some Protestants to work hard to show that they were one of the “elect” selected for paradise after death. According to Weber, the ethic encouraged by this doctrine motivated Protestants to succeed at their “calling”: they could earn salvation through hard work. This work ethic was therefore consistent with capitalist growth. Protestants worked harder because it was their calling from God to do so, and Protestant economies grew as a result.

  Weber’s hypothesis has been subject to immense scrutiny in the century since he initially laid it out. One of the most obvious critiques cites the simple fact that capitalism predates the Reformation. Merchants built the Catholic Italian city-states of the late medieval period in order to conduct merchant activity, and a “capitalist ethic” imbued nearly every aspect of their social and economic life. Indeed, the most powerful of the city-states, Venice, was still one of the most important and wealthiest states in Western Europe during Luther’s lifetime. Put simply, it is a stretch to claim that Protestants had any unique capitalist work ethic.1

  While Weber was almost certainly wrong about the causal connection between Protestantism and economic success, this does not mean that the correlation he tried to explain was nonexistent. Weber came upon his idea about the connection between Protestantism and economic growth in part due to the conditions that surrounded him in Prussia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of Prussian cities were primarily Catholic and many others were primarily Protestant. One could see during Weber’s time that Protestant towns were better off than Catholic towns. Sascha Becker and Ludger Wößmann (2009) confirmed the possibility that this was due to something about Protestantism – and not something correlated with Protestantism – in a carefully identified study. Using the 1871 Prussian census, Becker and Wößmann found that Protestants had significantly higher incomes than Catholics did.2

  The positive correlation between Protestantism and economic success extends well beyond the borders of Prussia. Consider Figure 6.1, which shows the “welfare ratios” of skilled workers in seventeen European cities from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.3 A welfare ratio is the ratio of one’s real wages relative to how much it costs to buy a subsistence basket of goods. A welfare ratio of 1 means that workers are just at subsistence, while a ratio of 2 indica
tes that workers can buy twice the level of goods necessary for subsistence. This figure is divided into the six Protestant cities for which Allen (2001) gives data (Amsterdam, London, Strasbourg, Augsburg, Leipzig, and Hamburg), and eleven cities which remained Catholic (Antwerp, Florence/Milan, Naples, Valencia, Madrid, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Gdansk, Krakow, and Warsaw), and the welfare ratios are weighted by the city’s population.4 The trend is clear: beginning in the seventeenth century, skilled workers in the Protestant cities started to do significantly better than their Catholic counterparts. This trend begins prior to the Industrial Revolution and persists after industrialization. Although this pattern “proves” nothing in itself, it suggests that Weber’s observation regarding the difference between Protestant and Catholic areas had some foundation.

  Figure 6.1 Welfare Ratios of Skilled Workers in Protestant and Catholic Cities, 1500–1899

  Source: Welfare ratios – Allen (2001); Population – Bairoch et al. (1988); a city is considered Protestant if its population was largely converted by 1600.

  This correlation is still apparent today. Figures 6.2–6.4 plot real per capita GDP against the percentage of Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims in 182 countries for which there were data in 2010. For all the limitations of these figures, they make apparent a Weberian connection. A country made up of only Protestants is $13,406 wealthier per person (in 2010 U.S. dollars), on average, than a country with zero Protestants. There is a positive effect for Catholicism, but it is weaker: a country made up of only Catholics is $3,900 wealthier per person than a country with zero Catholics. The effect is negative for Islam, even after accounting for the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf: a country made up of only Muslims is $7,509 poorer per person than a country with zero Muslims.