There appear to be two seemingly contradictory images of law and economic change in the Islamic world. Whereas some scholars have viewed Islamic societies as rigid and incapable of adapting to a changing environment, others have held the opposite image of Islamic societies as flexible, quick to...

An expanding state has to decide how to tax the newly conquered lands, most likely taxed under a different regime. It can either preserve the prevailing system of taxation or change it to conform to its own system. The choice depends on the relative efficiency of the two systems, political...

This article studies temporal variations in wealth levels and distribution in an Ottoman context during the eighteenth century. By analysing the probate estate inventories of the Muslim deceased in Kastamonu, located in north-central Anatolia, we demonstrate that real wealth levels generally...

Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity of access to the information about the names, personal characteristics, and socio-economic status of individuals and about the laws, local...

Throughout history, religious and political authorities have had a mysterious attraction to each other. Rulers have established state religions and adopted laws with religious origins, sometimes even claiming to have divine powers. We propose a political economy approach to theocracy, centered...

State and religion, two of the oldest institutions known to mankind, have historically had a close relationship with each other, often joining forces to rule populations. Although the tendency towards secularization has hampered this relationship in recent centuries, the state-religion alliance...

Until the seventeenth century, the Ottomans used fines extensively for law enforcement and employed agents to collect the fines. Fines can be costly to implement because of agency problems and corruption. To solve the problem of corruption, the Ottomans implemented a variety of mechanisms,...

This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on the wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals,...

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 construct a simple political economy model which suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

The ruler's power varied greatly in Islamic history over time and space. We explain these variations with a political economy approach to public finance, identifying factors affecting economic power and its constraints. An influential interest group capable of affecting the ruler's power was the...