Timur Kuran
This course offers an introduction to the economic history of the Middle East from the advent of Islam fourteen centuries ago to the modern era. It has four main objectives. First of all, it will familiarize you with the institutions that have governed the pace and characteristics of economic development in the region. Second, it will examine particular transformations and selected cases of inertia to derive lessons about the mechanisms that govern economic development and modernization in general. As such, it will provide insights applicable to other regions of the world, in both the past and present. Third, the course will investigate how religion shaped the region’s economic transformation; in particular, it will identify the mechanisms through which Islam may have contributed to specific historical patterns, including periods of economic dynamism and the region’s slip, around the eighteenth century, into a state of economic underdevelopment from which it has yet to recover. Fourth, the course will identify the social forces driving the contemporary rediscovery and reinterpretation of Islam, partly under the rubric of Islamism, also known as Islamic fundamentalism.
