Turkey, and as late as the Middle Ages the Middle East
was technologically dynamic. It was not the geography of
the Middle East that made the Neolithic Revolution flourish
in that part of the world, as we will see in chapter 5, and it
was, again, not geography that made the Middle East poor.
Instead, it was the expansion and consolidation of the
Ottoman Empire, and it is the institutional legacy of this
empire that keeps the Middle East poor today.