percent of adult males and 40 percent of adult females in
England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates
were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the
European countries with the lowest educational attainment
in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only
around 20 percent of adults could read and write.
Given the highly absolutist and extractive Ottoman
institutions, the sultan’s hostility to the printing press is easy
to understand. Books spread ideas and make the
population much harder to control. Some of these ideas
may be valuable new ways to increase economic growth,
but others may be subversive and challenge the existing
political and social status quo. Books also undermine the
power of those who control oral knowledge, since they
make that knowledge readily available to anyone who can
master literacy. This threatened to undermine the existing
status quo, where knowledge was controlled by elites. The
Ottoman sultans and religious establishment feared the
creative destruction that would result. Their solution was to
forbid printing.
T HE I NDUSTRIAL R EVOLUTION created a critical juncture that
affected almost every country. Some nations, such as
England, not only allowed, but actively encouraged,
commerce, industrialization, and entrepreneurship, and
grew rapidly. Many, such as the Ottoman Empire, China,
and other absolutist regimes, lagged behind as they
blocked or at the very least did nothing to encourage the
spread of industry. Political and economic institutions
shaped the response to technological innovation, creating
once again the familiar pattern of interaction between
existing institutions and critical junctures leading to
divergence in institutions and economic outcomes.
The Ottoman Empire remained absolutist until it
collapsed at the end of the First World War, and was thus
able to successfully oppose or impede innovations such as
the printing press and the creative destruction that would
have resulted. The reason that the economic changes that
took place in England did not happen in the Ottoman
Empire is the natural connection between extractive,
absolutist political institutions and extractive economic