Imperial Rule and Long-Run Development: Evidence on the Role of Human Capital in Ottoman Europe

• Author: Bogdan G. Popescu,Mircea Popa
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211060283
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(11) 1910–1946

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211060283

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Imperial Rule and

Long-Run Development:

Evidence on the Role of

Human Capital in

Ottoman Europe

Bogdan G. Popescu

1

and Mircea Popa

2



Abstract

This study examines the effects of Ottoman imperial rule on long-run de-

velopment in Europe. Using a novel geographical dataset that tracks territorial

changes at the sub-national level over 600 years, we identify a negative effect

of Ottoman rule on modern economic performance. Contemporary survey

data provides strong support for a causal mechanism involving reduced human

capital accumulation. This insight is conf‌irmed by a regression discontinuity

analysis using historical data from Romania. We uncover large causal effects of

Ottoman rule on literacy rates from the 19th century, which persisted

throughout the 20th century. We argue that the late adoption of the printing

press in the empire was an important determinant of low human capital

accumulation and illustrate this using data on the spread of the printing press.

Keywords

historical legacies, empires, long-run development

1

Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

2

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Corresponding Author:

Mircea Popa, University of Bristol, 10 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1QU, UK.

Email: mp14106@bristol.ac.uk

Introduction

The long-run effects of historical imperial rule on economic development are

still controversial. On the one hand, an inf‌luential body of scholarship

(Acemoˇ

glu et al., 2001;Dell, 2010;Lee & Schultz, 2012) suggests that certain

forms of imperial rule were particularly detrimental, even if the extent of this

phenomenon and the causal mechanisms underlying it are still elusive. On the

other hand, an emerging stream of work (Becker et al., 2016;G¨

okmen et al.,

2017;Wahl, 2017) identif‌ies some positive effects of imperial rule onlong-run

development. We contribute to this debate by considering an imperial ex-

perience that is important but relatively little understood, that of Ottoman rule

in Europe. Our article pursues two objectives: f‌irst, to estimate the effects of

Ottoman exposure on long-run development by going beyond broad cross-

country comparisons, and second, to tackle the diff‌icult issue of the mech-

anisms underlying long-run effects.

An important component of our identif‌ication strategy is exploiting the

extensive within-country and over-time variation in imperial rule in Eastern

Europe. We have coded for the f‌irst time to our knowledge, all historical

border changes in central and Eastern Europe between 1326 and 1922 at the

level of the NUTS-3 sub-national level.

1

This allows us to calculate the

number of years that different regions have been ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

This measure is substantially more accurate than the sources used by previous

scholarship (Nüssli, 2002). The map in Figure 1 illustrates the number of years

different regions have been ruled by the Ottoman Empire. This ranges from

less than 100 years in regions in Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine to more than

600 years in central and eastern Anatolia and the eastern Balkans.

Using this variation in exposure to Ottoman rule, we show that longer

Ottoman rule predicts lower economic output and less private sector de-

velopment. This effect is identif‌ied in the presence of country f‌ixed effects and

a battery of geographical controls, and is magnif‌ied by more recent exposure.

The effect is also robust to controlling for the extent of commercial activity at

the onset of Ottoman expansion. Overall, we estimate that going from low to

relatively high exposure to Ottoman governance caused income differences

comparable in size to both the within- and the between-country standard

deviation of this measure, pointing to the substantive importance of the

f‌indings.

A signif‌icant challenge to claims of long-run effects is the diff‌iculty of

identifying plausible transmission channels. Ottoman exposure entailed a

variety of factors, including particular political institutions, specif‌ic policies

associated with those institutions, as well as the emergence of certain cultural

features. We use several historical sources, including f‌ine-grained educational

data, and individual and regional-level contemporary data to evaluate the

evidence for several plausible mechanisms. We f‌ind robust evidence for a

Popescu and Popa 1911

human capital channel, which is also supported by the qualitative historical

accounts. Individuals in regions with a long Ottoman experience have lower

educational achievement, as did their parents, and grew up in households with

lower access to education. Regions in Europe under the Ottoman Empire show

less innovative activity, and this variable mediates the effects of the empire

itself on output.

We also explore the causal relationship between Ottoman exposure and

historical education using a regression discontinuity design in Romania.

Comparing regions close to the border between Ottoman and non-Ottoman

areas allows us to estimate the causal effect of Ottoman rule against a

counterfactual given by Hungarian and later Habsburg governance. Using

county-level educational data from the 19th and early 20th centuries, we

estimate literacy rates to have been several times higher in the non-Ottoman

regions. These signif‌icant differences, while attenuated by the Communist

Figure 1. The Ottoman Empire and modern-day borders. Sources: See supplemental

appendix.

1912 Comparative Political Studies 55(11)