Sultans, the Sharia and Seven Empty Ears: Economic Catastrophes, Church and State

This paper uses over 700 years of Nile ‡ood data and a novel data set on the tenure of Egyptian political and religious leaders to investigate how economic shocks a¤ected the balance of power between “church”and “state” in pre-modern Egypt. Results suggest that while deviant Nile ‡oods increased political instability, such ‡oods decreased the likelihood of a change in the highest ranking religious post. Additional empirical evidence is combined with the historical record to investigate the extent to which this pattern represents increased political in‡uence of the religious elites. The paper concludes that Nile-induced economic crises appear to have increased the political in‡uence of a subset of incumbent religious authorities. Harvard University. I thank CREI for hosting me while part of this project was carried out. I especially thank Claudia Goldin, Andrei Shleifer and Joachim Voth for helpful conversations and suggestions. Seminar participants at CREI, Duke, Harvard, Sohbet-i Osmani at Harvard, UCL, Vanderbilt and the 2009 EHA meetings provided helpful discussions and comments. Alexander Ruzmaikin graciously shared the Nile data used in previous studies. The library sta¤ at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscrits Orientaux greatly facilitated the Nile data transcription. Any remaining errors are my own.