Inkjet printer

The printing press is treated as an example of technology whose historical consequences cannot be separated from the institutions that permit, constrain, or resist its use. In the book’s comparative account, the decisive question is not simply whether a society knows of an invention, but how political power and institutional incentives shape its adoption and the opportunities that follow.

Technology and Institutional Resistance

The book’s discussion of opposition to the printing press in the Ottoman Empire points to resistance as a politically consequential response to new technology. The press is not presented as an agent that transforms society automatically: its spread depends on institutions and on the interests of those able to regulate its use. The contrast makes technological change part of a broader argument about how political arrangements can limit innovation.

Innovation and Access

Elsewhere, the book links innovation to the institutions that make it possible for people beyond established elites to develop and exploit new ideas. In the United States, patenting drew people from varied backgrounds: between 1820 and 1845, only 19 percent of patentees had professional parents or came from recognizable major landowning families, while 40 percent had only primary schooling or less. The patent system protected ideas, but turning a patent into a business also required capital. The expansion of American banking—from 338 banks in 1818 to 27,864 in 1914—helped provide that access. This account reinforces the distinction between possessing a technology and having institutions that allow people to put innovation to work.

A Lens on Historical Divergence

The book’s wider framework treats major disruptions as critical junctures: they can alter the balance of political and economic power, but their effects depend on prior institutional differences. The Black Death, for example, helped produce divergent outcomes in Western and Eastern Europe, contributing to the dissolution of feudalism in the West and the Second Serfdom in the East. The printing press’s reception in the Ottoman Empire belongs to this larger examination of how institutions shape responses to technological change, rather than evidence that technology alone determines prosperity. In this account, the press matters as a point of contact between invention, political control, and the uneven capacity of societies to change.