Timur Kuran

This is a great historical comparison of Islamic and European legal institutions and their influence on economic development. The author focuses on selected European institutions that revolved around the impersonal and non-familial corporation. The legal recognition of corporations allowed coordination and cooperation on a scale far superior to what earlier European and Islamic arrangements could manage. The author then explains why certain peculiarities in Islamic law hindered the emergence of similar corporate entities in the Middle East. He is careful to point out that institutional innovation was by no means made impossible by Islamic law. Islam's institutional rigidity was a matter of unfortunate circumstance rather than deliberate resistance.

I'm sure this book has aroused debate among experts in the field. I'm obviously not competent to judge the details of the argument, but I liked the way it was set up. I was also very impressed by the author's ability to discuss fairly complex Islamic institutions with clarity and broad scope. I didn't know anything about these institutions before reading this book, but I could still follow and understand the argument. I learned a lot from this book, not only about institutional differences between Islamic and European law but also about economic history in general and the reasons why economic cooperation sometimes works and sometimes fails to work. The book requires some focused work from the general reader, but I still highly recommend it to anyone interested in world history, economic history or comparative history.… (más)

Learn to write from Timur Kuran, economists! Learn from him. Um, he also seems like a smart economist: this paper sets out to definitively separate the reasons for the Middle East’s economic backwardness (pre–oil distortion; I mena, excluding that) from Islam or national character–type garbage arguments. He looks at the close similarity of Middle Eastern and European institutions in the Middle Ages, and considers some differences—prominent among them the rise of primogeniture in Europe (allowing a new scale of capital accumulation) and the Islamic institution of the waqf, or a trust established for religious reasons to provide particular social services, absolving the state of the responsibility and at the same time providing protections for private property (like, make yourself the trustee and hire your family and pay everybody big dinars) that were not available in Europe and that helped spur the development of the more flexible merchant corporation. It’s interesting how in both cases (equality among heirs and protection of the social good the waqf provides) the Muslims were more fairer and better, letting Europeans catapult beyond them and achieve great wealth at the cause, initially, of great disruption, inequality, all the rest of it. Makes you wonder if the Islamic world could have designed institutions better fit to development later on and thus achieved a financial version of the manufacturing-based Asian miracle, instead of following a weird oil-distorted dictatorish version of Western welfare capitalism. (Another interesting point Kuran makes is that part of the reason for this was legal concessions for Christians and Jews in Muslim countries—they had their own legal systems, and as the power differential between the West and Islam grew, the jurisdiction of these systems spread, and Muslims started to found chartered companies under Christian or Jewish law, etc.) Anyway, this was super interesting. Journal of Economic Perspectives (good title).… (más)