Jared Rubin

American economic historian (b. 1979), professor at Chapman University. Trained at Stanford. One of the most active modern voices in the comparative-religious-political-economy frontier of the Great Divergence debate, with sustained empirical and theoretical work on how religious institutions shaped European and Middle Eastern economic trajectories.

Intellectual program

Rubin’s career-defining contribution is Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge, 2017), which articulates a specific institutional-economic mechanism for the European-vs-Middle-Eastern divergence. The argument: rulers in pre-modern societies needed legitimacy, which they could derive either from religious authorities (priests, ulama) or from economic-political constituencies (merchants, parliaments). In medieval Europe, the Reformation broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on religious legitimation, forcing rulers to seek legitimacy from economic elites — which led them to support commerce-favourable institutions. In the Islamic world, religious legitimation remained centralized through the ulama class, and rulers had less incentive to support commerce-favourable institutions. The framework is at once empirical (testable through specific historical-archival data) and theoretical (a formal political-economy model of legitimation incentives).

Rubin’s broader research program covers the political economy of religion historically and currently, the institutional history of Reformation-era Europe, and the comparative-economic-history frontier with the Islamic world. How the World Became Rich (with Mark Koyama, 2022) is a synthetic textbook-level statement of the modern political-economy-of-the-divergence framework, integrating Rubin’s specific arguments with the broader Acemoglu-Robinson institutional tradition and with Mokyr-style cultural-epistemic frameworks.

His work integrates with several adjacent literatures: Cantoni’s JEEA 2015 Reformation-economic-effects work; Becker-Woessmann’s Protestant-economy-via-literacy framework; Kuran’s Long Divergence on Islamic commercial law. The combined effect of these scholars (Rubin, Cantoni, Becker-Woessmann, Kuran) has been to substantially modernize the empirical political-economy-of-religion field with rigorous quantitative-and-archival methods.

Reception

Rubin is widely regarded as one of the most productive and methodologically rigorous voices in the comparative political economy of religion. Rulers, Religion, and Riches has been broadly cited and engaged with; the framework remains contested (alternative accounts of European-Middle-Eastern divergence assign different weight to the legitimation mechanism) but is now part of the standard literature.

Associated positions

• European institutional advantage (GD) — the Rubin framework provides specific institutional mechanisms for the European-vs-Middle-Eastern divergence case.
• The Protestant ethic (IR) — Rubin’s work on Reformation political economy is part of the modern empirical literature engaging the Weber thesis from a non-cultural-psychological angle.
• State competition & fragmentation (GD) — Rubin’s Reformation-fragmentation argument connects the religious-legitimation framework to the broader state-competition story.

Key works

• Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
• With Mark Koyama: How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity Press, 2022).
• “Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation” (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2014).
• Numerous papers on the political economy of religion, on Reformation-period Europe, and on Islamic commercial institutions.
• Editor of the Journal of Historical Political Economy.