How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

By contrast, the Ottoman and Mughal empires managed to ban printing for more than three centuries. Istanbul, a great city of culture on the edge of Europe administering a vast empire of Christians as well as Muslims, resisted the new technology. It did so, precisely because it was the capital of an empire. In 1485 printing was banned by order of Sultan Bayezid II. In 1515 Sultan Selim I decreed that printing by Muslims was punishable by death. This was an unholy alliance: the calligraphers defending their business monopoly in cahoots with the priests defending their religious monopoly, by successfully lobbying the imperial authorities to keep printing at bay. Foreigners were eventually allowed to print books in foreign languages within the Ottoman Empire, but it was not until 1726 that a Hungarian convert to Islam, Ibrahim Muteferrika, managed to persuade the imperial authorities to allow secular (but not religious) books to be printed in Arabic. Had the lands ruled by the Sultans been fragmented into different political territories and different religions, it is impossible to believe that printing would not have happened sooner and spread faster.