This chapter examines how oil wealth has fueled authoritarian resilience – dictatorship without significant outbreaks of civil war – in oil producers (petrostates) exposed to Muslim conquest. While the chapter’s analysis corroborates existing research that oil rents can hurt democracy, it makes four original contributions relevant for understanding why oil wealth has engendered authoritarian resilience in conquest petrostates. First, it identifies a tension in existing scholarship: the negative relationship between oil wealth and democracy but positive relationship between oil wealth and civil war, particularly in dictatorships. Second, this clarification is important in understanding why greater oil wealth in conquest petrostates has hurt democracy but has not fostered civil war. Third, the chapter introduces a new type of rent that is intricately tied to oil production in many conquest petrostates. The chapter argues that an implied security guarantee from the United States government has comprised an additional geopolitical rent which has augmented the military capacity of conquest petrostates to thwart insurgency. Finally, the chapter that oil wealth has not hindered a trajectory towards greater democracy in non-conquest petrostates.

This chapter documents the effect of Muslim military conquest on democratic governance after the initial expansion of Islam (from 632 to 1100). Whereas the previous two chapters established how Muslim conquest helped generate an equilibrium of centralized autocracy in conquered territories, this chapter traces the institutional legacy of the Islamic equilibrium through to the present. The statistical analysis in this chapter demonstrates how Muslim conquest slowed the adoption of representative assemblies in medieval Spain and then examines how territories conquered by Muslim armies tend to less democratic today. The latter analysis is careful to evaluate how Muslim conquest affected European colonialism. Finally, the chapter uses survey responses to show that Islamic culture does not explain the lack of democracy in many contemporary Muslim societies.

This chapter employs statistical analysis to evaluate the historical narrative from the chapter 3 using. The account in chapter 3 generated a sequence of testable implications linking Muslim military conquest to various political outcomes in conquered territories. First, conquest introduced institutions that consolidated political (absolutist) authority in subjugated territories during the initial period of Muslim conquest. Second, these more autocratized structures remained intact thereafter, particularly under Mongol/Turkic and Ottoman rule (up through the 1800s). Third, the prevalence of centralized autocratic institutions affected the European colonial strategy: it incentivized the use of indirect rule by colonial powers and concomitantly reduced European migration to territories conquered by Muslim armies (relative to non-conquered territories). Fourth, upon their independence, Muslim countries largely maintained their autocratic structures, institutions that remain today. This chapter provides statistical evidence examining the initial two steps: the period of Muslim conquest was associated with a centralization of political authority which persisted through the 1800s.

Declines in rents do not always lead to civil war but may facilitate a pathway towards democracy in societies that tend to have a stock of preexisting institutions that more equitably share government resources with opposition groups. This chapter probes the effect of increases and decreases on patterns of democracy, dictatorship, and civil war in non-Muslim societies, primarily in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Countries in these regions tend to exhibit institutions that share resources more equitably relative to Muslim societies. Using case studies and corroborative statistical analysis, the chapter shows that increases in rents in Latin America and Eastern Europe strengthened authoritarian governance, but when rents decline these societies experience relatively peaceful transitions to democracy. The analysis in this chapter provides an important set of “negative cases” (relative to Muslim societies that experienced conquest) that a decline in rents do not necessarily lead to violence.

Whereas rents in conquest petrostates have been a source of relatively peaceful authoritarianism, this has not been the case in many Muslim countries that do not produce oil. Muslim non-oil producers – many of whom were also exposed to the institutional legacy of Muslim conquest – have tended to experience more frequent and violent political upheaval since the 1960s. This chapter leverages a quasi-natural experiment of oil price driven foreign aid disbursements to show that buoyant levels of foreign aid receipts strengthened dictatorship in Muslim non-oil producers, but their subsequent decline led to heightened political instability in the form of civil war. However, despite this greater political upheaval (during periods of lower aid inflows), Muslim recipients remained staunchly non-democratic

Among political economists, the prevalence dictatorship and civil conflict captures the central features of societies afflicted with political violence. Accordingly, this chapter adopts this terminology and develop an analytical framework to better understand why many Muslim societies are inflicted with varying and heightened levels of political violence. The chapter identifies patterns in dictatorship and civil war in Muslim societies, relative to non-Muslim societies; and how they vary across oil and non-oil producing countries. These empirical patterns motivate a discussion of how variation in preexisting institutional structures and sources of nontax government revenue (rents) may explain these patterns in political violence. This discussion identifies tensions in existing theoretical accounts, leading the author to develop a formal model. The model shows that increases in rents can entrench dictatorship, while a decline in rents may facilitate peaceful transitions to democracy or lead to the outbreak of civil war. Societies whose preexisting institutional structures encourage “sharing” government resources with the opposition are more likely to transition to democracy. The model’s hypotheses form the basis of book’s subsequent empirical analysis.

This opening chapter outlines the book’s central argument, evidence, and political economy approach. The book argues Muslim societies tend to be less democratic and more conflict prone on average. However, there is considerable variation within the Muslim world depending on how Islam was spread. Territories where Islam spread via military conquest developed institutions and practices that led to political regimes that made them more impervious to democracy and, in response to declines in rents, more prone to civil war. In contrast, societies in non-conquered territories – including some Muslim societies, such as Indonesia and Malaysia – developed governance structures that made them more susceptible to political (democratic) development; and where declines in rents provided opportunities for transitions to democracy. A central takeaway from this book is that neither Islam nor aspects of Muslim culture are the root causes of political violence in many contemporary Muslim societies. Rather, it is due to the institutional legacy of Muslim conquest and contemporary rent streams. By linking these two independent variables – conquest and rents – to patterns of political violence, the theory and empirics advanced contributes to rich literatures in institutional economics, historical legacies, international relations, and the resource curse.

This final chapter briefly summarizes the book’s central argument and evidence. The chapter then discusses some implications of the book’s two key independent variables: rents and conquest. The former is situated in a broader discussion of economic and political development. This discussion introduces the concept of a political transfer problem. For the latter variable, the chapter discusses the muted possibility of political and economic liberalization in Muslim societies that experienced conquest.