Economic History: As I get older, I find myself more attracted to Patricia Crone’s observation that we should not measure other high erasion societies against a Dover-Circle yardstick, but should rather recognize that they were very successful at what their leaders intended them to do, which was to maintain and perfect their particular modes of societies of domination. In a stable and well-functioning society of domination nobody who holds any concentration of social power—whether ideological, political, or military—wants there to be long-lasting and powerful business organizations:

Mark Koyama: Review of Timur Kuran, “The long divergence: how Islamic law held back the Middle East”: ‘The book demonstrates how dynamic institutional analysis should be conducted…. Kuran is… able to show how separate institutions… egalitarian Islamic inheritance practices, polygyny, and the structural of Islamic partnerships mutually supported one another, making it difficult to establish long-lasting economic organizations. Institutions, in this view, do not exist in isolation but are rather systems of mutually reinforcing ‘interrelated elements’…. Had any one Islamic institutionexisted in isolation, reform would have been feasible. However, reform of any single insti-tution was likely to fail unless other institutions were also transformed. Hence Islamic legalinstitutions formed a mutually self-reinforcing set of institutional arrangements… <dropbox.com/scl/fi/0xqk…>