War, Peace, and Prosperity in the Name of God

The Ottoman Role in Europe's Socioeconomic Evolution

Murat Iyigun

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226388434
• eBook ISBN: 9780226232287
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Differences among religious communities have motivated—and continue to motivate—many of the deadliest conflicts in human history. But how did political power and organized religion become so thoroughly intertwined? And how have religion and religiously motivated conflicts affected the evolution of societies throughout history, from demographic and sociopolitical change to economic growth?

War, Peace, and Prosperity in the Name of God turns the focus on the "big three monotheisms"—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—to consider these questions. Chronicling the relatively rapid spread of the Abrahamic religions among the Old World, Murat Iyigun shows that societies that adhered to a monotheistic belief in that era lasted longer, suggesting that monotheism brought some sociopolitical advantages. While the inherent belief in one true god meant that these religious communities had sooner or later to contend with one another, Iyigun shows that differences among them were typically strong enough to trump disagreements within. The book concludes by documenting the long-term repercussions of these dynamics for the organization of societies and their politics in Europe and the Middle East.

Part Three

Monotheism, Conflict, and Cooperation

Four

A Conceptual Framework

In the third part of the book, I will now turn attention away from the survival and spread of monotheisms and begin to focus on how religion influenced conflict and cooperation. I will also examine how some pivotal interfaith conflicts and intrareligious cooperations produced lasting effects in the sociopolitical and economic realms.

In doing so, the rest of the book is organized such that the impact of Islam on the Christian world will get a lot more early emphasis, especially in chapters 5 through 7. An examination of the influence of Christianity on the Muslim world—with particular emphasis on the role of the latter in the Near East and the Middle East—is the focus of chapter 11 and, to a less extent, the material in chapters 8 and 9.

Note that the interactions of Christianity and Islam with Judaism, which got some coverage heretofore, will for the most part recede to the background. This is, in part, due to the historical focus of the remainder of this book, which mainly covers an era when Muslim and Christian interactions dominated the relevant geographic landscape. It is also an artifact of Christianity and Islam accounting for more than half the world population and a majority of countries among their adherents.

To get this started, I would like to identify the conditions under which internal divisions within a monotheist religion would be subordinated to those between monotheisms and the conditions under which they would not. In particular, it will be useful to develop an analytical model that would help contextualize the incentives for conflict, the means through which conflict historically paid off, and how religious adherence came to bear on peace and conflict among societies.

The success of monotheisms in spreading and generating stability and durability for sociopolitical systems meant that, sooner or later, civilizations associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would be in direct confrontation. While all monotheistic traditions agree on the oneness of God, they are in inherent disagreement over who the messenger of God is and, accordingly, which ecclesiastical clerical institutions ought to have domain over religious matters. Recall that sociologists brand this aspect of religion particularism—the idea that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all built on fundamental beliefs in One God and One Religion. Prominent scholars such as Rodney Stark (2001) and Karen Armstrong (1993, 2006) have suggested particularism as the cause of faith-based conflicts and confrontations in Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, once Abrahamic religions exerted a religious monopoly in these geographies.

But conflict is of the same vintage as human history, and there was clearly no dearth of political and economic motives pitting rulers and societies against each other not only prior to monotheisms becoming the majority ecclesiastical norm in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe but also thereafter. Furthermore, after the advent of monotheism, differences of ecclesiastical opinion among various sects of each religion were enough to produce seemingly irreparable rifts within societies that adhered to the same monotheist tradition.

In the words of Stark (2001, pp. 116–20),

It is precisely God as a conscious, responsive, good supreme being of infinite scope—the One True God as conceived by the great monotheisms—who prompts awareness in idolatry, false Gods, and heretical religions. Particularism, the belief that any given religion is the only true religion, is inherent in monotheism . . . . If salvation comes only through faith in Christ, then Jews are outcasts, bound for hell for practicing a false religion. By the same logic, if Yahweh is the One True God, then the ancient Greeks and Romans were idolaters—and even polytheists will take offense when others dismiss their Gods as fantasies or falsehoods. Thus, the two sides of particularism: the contempt for other faiths and the reaction by those held in contempt. But if monotheists believe there is only One True God, they have been unable to sustain One True Religion. Rather from the start all of the major monotheisms have been prone to splinter into many True Religions that sometimes acknowledge one another’s right to coexist and sometimes don’t. Hence, internal and external conflict is inherent in particularistic religion.

Observations such as these raise an important question: could differences among monotheisms override all other internal ecclesiastical rifts in determining the patterns of conflict and cooperation among societies? Or, to state it more poignantly, when and under what circumstances could religious affinity and differences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam drive violent conflicts and cooperation? (Readers who would like to be spared the analytical details can skip ahead to subsection 4.3.)

Once again, the existing literatures in economics, political science, and sociology provide the foundations upon which one can scaffold a useful analytical framework. Here, one can even borrow from existing work on evolutionary biology and psychology.

The tools of neoclassical economics were traditionally applied to a variety of questions, but the supply side almost unequivocally involved aspects of legal production. And, to an overwhelming extent, it still does. A strong assumption inherent in the traditional neoclassical view is that property rights are well defined and secure; as a consequence, any individual who wishes to engage in productive activities can do so by taking into account the standard costs and benefits. In making such decisions and choices, one need not contend with whether the economic benefits of his or her activities could be appropriated through illegal means—nor is there an economic cost to ensuring a safe and relatively predictable environment in which people can engage in production. Perhaps more fundamentally, the standard neoclassical view of production does not entertain the question of whether an individual’s time is more gainfully employed in production or crime, where the latter can even extend into various violent incarnations.

Despite this long-cherished and mostly useful tradition, there is no reason to take as given an environment in which an economy’s resources and individuals’ time are allocated to productive and peaceful uses only. This is all the more relevant for developing countries or the history of industrialized nations; in weak institutional environments where property rights are not secure, it is more reasonable to consider the allocation of resources and time to all uses, including those that are of an extralegal nature.

Starting as early as the 1950s, a relatively small strand in the economics literature has done precisely that: The notion that crime and violent conflict over the ownership for resources should be modeled as an alternative to legal economic production was originally articulated by the Nobel laureate Trygve Haavelmo in his A Study in the Theory of Economic Evolution (1954). It was further developed by follow-up material such as Hirshleifer (1991), Grossman (1994), Grossman and Kim (1995), Grossman and Iyigun (1995, 1997), Skaperdas (1992), Alesina and Spolaore (2005), Hafer (2006), and Konrad and Skaperdas (2012). This body of work is part of a broader literature on the importance of secure property rights in economic activity, with contributions such as Tornell and Velasco (1992) and Dixit (2004) to take but two examples. The incorporation of the means to engage in crime and appropriation has proven to be a fairly fruitful approach to modeling conflict, because it has directed the tools of economics to the study of some esoteric but important subjects, such as the illegal economy, state formation, violence, anarchy, military conflicts, and so on.

Broadly speaking, the key idea I advocate below is related to a body of work that focuses on the role of evolutionary survival dynamics on social and political norms and institutions. For example, Axelrod (2006) mathematically computes an evolutionary extinction model to illustrate how cooperation dominates noncooperative behavior in terms of long-term survival prospects. Bowles (2006, 2009) and Choi and Bowles (2007) study the emergence and sustenance of altruism versus hostility and conflict due to intergroup competition, and Levine and Modica (2013) show how serious external threats help sustain internal compromise and produce more efficient political institutions domestically.

In spirit, the framework below is most similar to Wright (2000). His view is that societies—in particular socioeconomic and political institutions—have evolved over time to reflect more complexity and interdependence between heterogeneous cultures and social groups. The main reason for this is that conflict and survival has been a constant in the history of humankind and, when faced with formidable external threats, societies have adapted to learn to cooperate with or at least tolerate the existence of other groups to thwart and deflect such threats—even if the involved parties have a long history of animosity and conflict.

In order to highlight the role of religion in cooperation and confrontation, in what lies ahead, I will modify a standard model of production and conflict in a couple of ways. First, I will discuss a world in which there are three countries or sovereignties. In standard models of conflict and crime between two actors, the efficacy of appropriation plays a key role in the allocation of resources between productive uses and conflict. When such models are modified to incorporate more than two actors, as I will do below, changes in the technology of appropriation can influence the patterns and timing of conflict, too. In particular, the emergence of a player with a superior technology can be sufficient for other agents to want to refrain from engaging each other in conflict and even trying to prop each other up in confrontations with their superior foes.

Second, I will incorporate into the model the economic and social influences of monotheism in line with what I have reviewed and documented thus far. In particular, I will assume the following:

1. Adherence to monotheism by a majority of society supports a stable environment in which production can be undertaken, with adherence to a common faith raising the return to production relative to the return to crime and conflict.

2. Monotheistic beliefs aid national defense, and religious differences propagate conflicts. Hence the intensity of conflict is higher when conflicting parties subscribe to different faiths.

These two modifications create a framework of analysis according to which religious beliefs influence productivity at home and religious differences affect the intensity of violent conflict abroad. One should then be able to infer when and under which conditions religious affinity or lack thereof would drive and sustain violent conflict and cooperation among different societies.

The online technical appendix of this book exposits all details of the analytical model that underlies the following discussion.

4.1 An Outline

To simplify things as much as possible, consider a world in which there are only three countries, each under the rule of an autonomous sovereign. These countries are assumed to be lined up geographically contiguously in such a way that only one of the countries (say, country B) shares common borders with the other two, whereas the remaining two countries only neighbor country B. In this sense, as I will show shortly, country B is cursed with bad geography.

Each country’s sovereign has the authority to tax his resource base at a rate of his choosing. He can then use the proceeds to bankroll the military. Thus, in every period, sovereigns choose how much to tax their subjects and, conditional on how ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I The Preliminaries
• II The Rise of Monotheism
• III Monotheism, Conflict, and Cooperation
• IV Pluralism, Coexistence, and Prosperity
• References
• Index