Continuing the economic history theme from the yesterday's post, this new article by Mauricio Drelichman (University of British Columbia), Jordi Vidal-Robert (University of Sydney), and Hans-Joachim Voth (University of Zurich), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (ungated earlier version here) looks at the long-run consequences of the Spanish Inquisition. As they explain:
...we investigate the long-run impact of religious persecution on economic performance, education, and trust. The Spanish Inquisition is among the most iconic examples of a state-sponsored apparatus enforcing religious homogeneity... Histories of Spain’s decline and fall as an economic power frequently emphasize the role of the Inquisition... and sociological studies have argued for a “persistence of the inquisitorial mind” in modern-day Spanish thought...
Obviously, given the time period involved (the Spanish Inquisition ran from 1478 to 1834), this relates to the Little Divergence, as discussed in yesterday's post (and this earlier post). Drelichman et al. have data on the number of people persecuted in the Inquisition for many Spanish municipalities (based on around 67,000 records of Inquisition trials), and relate that to modern-day differences in incomes (measured using nightlight intensity), and survey-based measured of religiosity (measured by frequency of church attendance), education (proportion of the population with a high school diploma) and generalised trust. In terms of income, they find that:
Municipalities with no recorded inquisitorial activity as well those in the lowest tercile of persecution have the highest GDP per capita today. Those affected but in the middle tercile already have markedly lower income. Where the Inquisition struck with highest intensity (top tercile), the level of economic activity in Spain today is sharply lower. Magnitudes are large: In places with no persecution, median GDP per capita was 19,450€; where the Inquisition was active in more than 3 y out of 4, it is below 18,000€... Our estimates imply that had Spain not suffered from the Inquisition, its annual national production today would be 4.1% higher...
In terms of their other outcome measures, they find that:
A one-SD increase in inquisition intensity is associated with an increase of between 1.3% and 3.7% in religious service attendance...
We find a consistently negative relationship between persecution and educational attainment... going from no exposure to the Inquisition to half of all years being affected by persecutions would reduce the share of the population receiving higher education today by 2.7 percentage points, relative to a mean of 47.5 percentage points—a 5.6% relative reduction...
A one-SD increase in inquisitorial intensity reduces average municipality-level trust by 0.03 to 0.05 SDs.
All of the effects are statistically significant. Of course, it would be reasonable to worry that the Inquisition targeted its activities on areas that differed in relevant ways, such as areas that were more religious, or areas that were poorer. However, Drelichman et al. find the opposite:
To address the possibility that the Inquisition might have favored locales with high levels of pre-existing religiosity, we collect data on pre-Inquisition religious figures from the Spanish Biographical Dictionary... We then estimate the local density of famous people with strong links to the church and use it to examine whether inquisitorial intensity was systematically higher in places that were more religious pre- 1480. Our data suggests the opposite—places with greater inquisitorial intensity had a lower density of famous religious individuals...
A second concern is that the Inquisition could have been attracted to poorer areas. Standard histories of the Inquisition suggest this is unlikely. The Inquisition was self-financing. It had to confiscate property and impose fines to pay for its expenses and the salaries of inquisitors. While its mission was to persecute heresy, it had strong incentives to look for it in richer places...
In relation to the question of whether targeted areas were poorer, they use the location of hospitals, which were predominantly located in rural areas and:
Largely geared to care for the poor and for out-of-towners who fell ill and had no other place to stay, hospitals were credited with reducing the number of destitute people living and dying on the streets...
So, hospitals are indicative of areas that were, in general, wealthier and with higher social capital. They find that:
Inquisitorial intensity was five times higher in places with hospitals, and the difference is highly significant...
They move on to repeat many of their analyses using coarsened exact matching (which I discussed in this recent post), and find very similar results. Again, as with much of the literature in economic history, the results do not demonstrate causality, but we are getting closer to understanding the Little Divergence. And the results of this paper might not be limited to Spain. As Drelichman et al. conclude:
...the Inquisition also operated in Southern Italy and throughout Spanish America. Inquisitorial practices were also instituted throughout the Portuguese Empire and the Papal States. All of these areas today show relatively low education, lower incomes, and less generalized trust.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
Read more:
- Economic institutions and the 'Little Divergence'
- Portugal, gold, and the resource curse in the Little Divergence
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