The Ottoman Empire appears in the book as a centralized, absolutist state whose political and economic institutions helped determine how it responded to technological change. Its rulers could enforce restrictions across a wide territory, but the same concentration of power allowed them to obstruct innovations that threatened elite control. The delayed and closely supervised introduction of printing illustrates how institutional priorities shaped the Empire’s divergence from countries that fostered industrialization and wider access to knowledge.

Printing and the Limits on Knowledge

In 1485, Bayezid II prohibited Muslims from printing in Arabic; Selim I reinforced the ban in 1515. Printing had spread rapidly through Western Europe after Johannes Gutenberg unveiled his movable-type press in Mainz in 1445. In the Ottoman Empire, by contrast, the first press was not authorized until 1727, when Ahmed III granted İbrahim Müteferrika permission to establish one. The permission was not unrestricted: a panel of three religious and legal scholars, the Kadis, had to vet whatever the press produced.

Müteferrika’s press began operating in 1729, but produced only seventeen books before he stopped working in 1743. His family continued the effort, printing just seven more books before abandoning it in 1797. Printing remained even less established beyond the Empire’s Turkish core. In Egypt, the first press was set up in 1798 by Frenchmen involved in Napoleon Bonaparte’s abortive attempt to capture the country. Well into the second half of the nineteenth century, Ottoman book production still relied primarily on scribes copying existing books; Istanbul alone was reputed to have eighty thousand active scribes in the early eighteenth century.

The contrast was visible in literacy. Around 1800, only an estimated 2 to 3 percent of the Empire’s citizens could read, compared with 60 percent of adult men and 40 percent of adult women in England. The Netherlands and Germany had still higher literacy rates. Portugal, among the European countries with the lowest educational attainment, was estimated to have literacy of about 20 percent of adults. The figures underline the consequences of the Ottoman printing restrictions, though the book locates those restrictions within a larger institutional explanation rather than treating technology or education as isolated causes.

Absolutism and the Fear of Change

The book connects the sultans’ hostility to printing with the absolutist and extractive character of Ottoman institutions. Books could spread ideas—including ideas useful for economic growth—but they could also challenge the political and social status quo. Printed texts made knowledge available beyond the people who had previously controlled it through oral transmission. In the book’s account, the sultans and religious establishment feared this disruption and responded by forbidding printing or keeping it under close supervision.

The account places this policy within a general relationship between political and economic institutions. Extractive political institutions concentrate power in a narrow elite and impose few constraints on its use; the elite can then organize economic institutions to extract resources from the wider population. The book argues that these systems reinforce one another: the wealth generated by extractive economic arrangements can help elites preserve their political dominance, while political control protects the economic arrangements that sustain them. Applied to the Ottoman Empire, this framework helps explain why a state capable of enforcing a printing ban might use that capacity to contain innovation rather than promote it.

Industrialization and Institutional Divergence

The Industrial Revolution created a critical juncture that affected societies differently. England encouraged commerce, industrialization, and entrepreneurship and grew rapidly. The Ottoman Empire, China, and other absolutist regimes lagged behind as they blocked, or at least failed to encourage, the spread of industry. The contrast is not presented as a simple matter of leaders lacking the right information: political and economic institutions shaped incentives and constrained what kinds of change rulers would permit.

The Ottoman Empire remained absolutist until its collapse at the end of the First World War. In the book’s interpretation, this political structure allowed the state to oppose or impede innovations such as printing and the economic changes associated with them. Absolutism meant rule unconstrained by law or the wishes of others, although absolutist rulers depended in practice on the support of a small group or elite. This helps distinguish centralized capacity from pluralistic government: a state could be powerful enough to enforce policy while still excluding broad groups from influence over it.

The Ottoman case therefore sits within a wider comparison of centralized but extractive states and societies in which political power was more broadly shared. The book argues that inclusive political institutions tend to undermine economic arrangements that expropriate resources, block entry, and restrict markets to benefit a few. Conversely, an absolutist system can preserve such arrangements and resist changes that threaten established interests. The printing restrictions and the slower development of industry are presented as connected expressions of that institutional pattern, not as separate episodes of technological delay.

Historical Significance

The Empire’s history in the book serves as evidence that the availability of an innovation does not determine whether a society will adopt it. A printing press could be permitted and still constrained; a centralized government could enforce rules without enabling broad participation or open markets. The long gap between the European spread of printing and Müteferrika’s limited press, together with the continued reliance on scribal copying, makes the institutional barrier concrete.

The larger significance is comparative. The book uses the Ottoman Empire to show how absolutist political institutions can obstruct creative destruction—the replacement of existing practices and interests by new technologies and economic arrangements. Where rulers and elites fear the consequences of change, the state’s capacity may serve to contain innovation. In this account, the Empire’s delayed printing and industrialization were part of a durable interaction between political power and economic rules, an interaction that shaped both access to knowledge and the course of economic development.