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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Jared Rubin, "Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on both technological and economic terms.Jared Rubin argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the pr...