False Economy - Alan Beattie [73]
At the same time, Western Europe was edging its way, however slowly, toward restraining the absolute power of the monarch. Different groups— first landowners, and then merchants and manufacturers—were creating alternative bases of power. These conflicts often took place through religious debates within Christianity, especially after the Reformation.
Yet it was the failure of any one denomination to predominate, not the nature of Protestantism itself, that created a comparatively open European civilization with a variety of beliefs. The object of the Reformation was not to create political and religious freedom. It sought to maintain the unity of the Catholic Church while reforming it. Its originator, the German theologian Martin Luther, was also rabidly anti-Semitic and repeatedly incited the persecution of Jews.
Nor did Puritanism, as an organized creed, originally aim at political liberalism. At the time when the monarchy was restored in England (1660) and religious toleration began to spread, the Massachusetts colonists were far more intolerant of other Christian sects than was the English society they had left behind. But Quakers and other such undesirables could go off and found their own homes in Rhode Island or Pennsylvania. It was because the Reformation only half succeeded in Europe and North America that it led, inadvertently, to a more pluralistic society. It is worth noting that the Catholic city-states like Florence that preceded Protestant England in capitalist development had also famously been centers of humanist freethinking.
By contrast, the dominant culture in the operation of the Islamic empires tended toward one of military authority: top-down, unquestioning, with a vast amount of power vested in a centralized state. Like the Mamluks, the Ottoman empire was based on a corps of soldiers who started out as slaves. The lack of a well-organized merchant class meant that where Islamic practices might have proved unhelpful to economic growth, there were not enough voices raised to lobby for change. One such practice, ironically, may well have been the Islamic tradition concerning business partnership and inheritance. The irony resides in the fact that it was initially designed to help, not hinder, commerce.
Islamic rules governing business partnerships were created between the seventh and tenth centuries. They drew mainly on customs and practices already established in the countries that came under Muslim rule: there is precious little in the Koran that determines how businesses should be organized. The Islamic partnership generally involved an investor or investors, who bore the financial risk, and a merchant, who undertook trade on the investors' behalf. Unlike the equivalent contract under Jewish law, which required profits and/or risks to be shared equally by investor and merchant, the profit shares in Islamic partnerships could vary. In fact, this flexibility meant that Jewish traders in the Middle East well into the second millennium usually chose to follow Islamic contract law in preference to their own.
But a combination of rules meant that, as time went on and economies became more complex, this form of partnership became increasingly restrictive. One such restriction was the rule that all payments had to be in cash, and in a single currency. The goods being traded could not be used to settle accounts. The second stipulation was the rule that all partnerships were automatically dissolved on the death of a partner. These laws intersected unhelpfully with the Islamic rules on inheritance, which were laid out clearly in the Koran and decreed that at least