The Middle East occupies two contrasting places in the book’s account of global inequality: it was once a center of early agricultural settlement and technological achievement, yet many of its countries today remain poor. The authors argue that this change cannot be explained by geography or Islam. Instead, they trace it through extractive institutions: Ottoman absolutism, insecure property and commerce, European colonial rule, and authoritarian regimes after independence. Oil wealth has lifted some countries’ incomes, but has not by itself produced diversified economies or broadly shared prosperity.

A region of contrasts

The Middle East is not economically uniform. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have incomes approaching those of the world’s richest countries, but that position depends heavily on the price of oil. Countries with little or no oil, including Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, cluster at income levels comparable to Guatemala or Peru. The contrast cautions against treating regional averages as a single explanation: resource wealth can raise national income without resolving the institutional conditions that shape economic opportunity.

The region’s present poverty also sits against a much longer history. The earliest evidence of farming, herding, and plant domestication comes from the Hilly Flanks, a broad area extending from the south of modern Israel through Palestine and Syria to southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and western Iran. Around 9500 BC, domesticated emmer and two-row barley were found at Jericho, while Tell Aswad in Syria yielded emmer, peas, and lentils. Jericho may already have held about five hundred people. Later, the Middle East remained technologically dynamic into the Middle Ages: the first towns arose in what is now Iraq, and iron was first smelted in Turkey. The book uses this history to reject the idea that the region’s contemporary economic position follows naturally from an unchanging geography.

Ottoman rule and extractive institutions

The institutional account begins with Ottoman expansion. After capturing Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans extended their rule across much of the Balkans and Turkey; in the sixteenth century their empire spread through the Middle East and North Africa. By the death of Süleyman I in 1566, Ottoman territory stretched from Tunisia through Egypt to Mecca and what is now Iraq. The state was absolutist: the sultan shared power with few, and the economic order was organized around extraction rather than secure private ownership.

Land formally belonged to the state, while taxation of land and agricultural output, alongside the proceeds of war, supplied government revenue. Yet the Ottoman state could not exercise the same control across the Middle East that it maintained in Anatolia. Bedouins and other tribal powers challenged its authority in the Arabian Peninsula, and the state often lacked the administrative capacity to impose stable order or collect taxes directly. It therefore sold the right to collect taxes to individuals. These tax farmers could become autonomous and powerful, and rates in some territories reached one-half or two-thirds of what farmers produced; much of that revenue stayed with the collectors rather than the state.

The resulting weakness of public order compounded the insecurity of property. Armed groups competed for local control, and banditry made farming land dangerous. In Palestine, beginning in the late sixteenth century, peasants abandoned some of the most fertile land and moved into mountainous areas where they could better protect themselves. The shift was not a response to barren soil but to the risks created by insecurity and contested authority.

Urban economic life was also constrained. Commerce remained under state control, while guilds and monopolies strictly regulated occupations. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, these arrangements formed an extractive economic order that impeded economic dynamism. The book thus connects the region’s later divergence not to a lack of historical achievement, but to institutions that limited secure ownership, open commerce, and the ability to benefit from new economic opportunities.

Reform, colonialism, and continuity

By the 1840s, Ottoman rulers attempted institutional reforms, including efforts to reverse tax farming and bring locally autonomous groups under state control. Reformers also discussed introducing private property rights in land to increase agricultural productivity. But absolutism persisted until the First World War, and the proposed changes were obstructed by political control and taxation interests, as well as elite fears of the economic and political losses that change might bring. The efforts did not displace the underlying system.

After the Ottoman collapse, European colonial powers took control of much of the region. The book describes this as a further interruption of local development, following rather than erasing the institutional legacies of Ottoman rule. After European control ended, independent elites often took over extractive colonial institutions. Jordan’s monarchy is given as an instance in which the postcolonial elite was a direct creation of colonial powers. This succession of regimes helps explain why political independence did not automatically produce more inclusive economic or political arrangements.

The book also points to a counterexample to the idea that the region was incapable of rapid change. Egypt between 1805 and 1848, under Muhammad Ali, temporarily escaped the tight hold of Ottoman and European power. After the French forces occupying Egypt withdrew, Muhammad Ali exploited the weakness of Ottoman authority, seized power, and founded a dynasty that would rule in one form or another until the 1952 Egyptian Revolution under Nasser. His reforms were coercive, but they modernized the bureaucracy, army, and tax system and encouraged growth in agriculture and industry. That trajectory ended after his death, when Egypt fell under European influence. The episode shows both that institutional change could generate growth and how vulnerable such change remained to renewed external control.

Oil, religion, and modern poverty

The book explicitly challenges the claim that Islam accounts for Middle Eastern poverty. Egypt and Syria are predominantly Muslim and poor, but the authors argue that their institutional histories are more explanatory: both were shaped by Ottoman rule, then by English and French colonial empires, and after independence by hierarchical, authoritarian regimes with few of the political and economic institutions the book considers essential to sustained economic success. The apparent link between Islam and poverty is therefore described as largely spurious.

Oil wealth, meanwhile, has not necessarily changed the structure of an economy. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have benefited from high incomes, but the windfall has done little to create diversified modern economies. For countries without significant oil, average incomes remain closer to those of poorer Latin American nations. The region has not experienced the same impoverishing forces as the slave trade, and it benefited for longer from flows of technology from Europe; it was also comparatively advanced during the Middle Ages. Even so, the majority of its people still live in poverty. The contrast between past dynamism, resource-rich prosperity, and persistent poverty supports the book’s central claim: economic outcomes depend on institutions and historical change, not on an immutable regional character.

Revolution and the argument about change

The preface returns to the Middle East through the Arab Spring, which began with the Jasmine Revolution and public anger over the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia since 1987, stepped down on January 14, 2011. The revolutionary challenge to privileged elites continued and spread across the region. Hosni Mubarak, after nearly thirty years in power in Egypt, was ousted on February 11, 2011; as the preface was completed, the fates of the regimes in Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen remained unknown.

The Egyptian protesters’ stated grievances connected political exclusion to economic hardship. Noha Hamed, a twenty-four-year-old advertising-agency worker demonstrating in Tahrir Square, identified corruption, oppression, poor education, and a corrupt system that had to change. Mosaab El Shami, a twenty-year-old pharmacy student, hoped for an elected government, universal freedoms, and an end to corruption. Their demands give concrete political voice to the book’s institutional argument: poverty and discontent are not treated as fixed properties of a place, but as consequences of arrangements that can be challenged. Across the region’s long history, periods of change have opened possibilities for growth, while extractive rule has repeatedly narrowed them.