Religious change and persistence in Bosnia: Poverty, conversions, and nationalism, 1468-2013

Abstract

While economic historians have invested a great deal of effort into understanding the economic consequences of religion, they have invested comparatively little effort into understanding the determinants of religious affiliation. This paper analyses conversions to Islam in the OttomanBosnia. Employing village-level data constructed from the Ottoman tax registers of 1468 and 1604, we find that households in the initially poorer villages were more likely to convert to Islam. This finding is consistent with the notion that the poll tax that non-Muslims had to pay stimulated the poorer Christians to convert to Islam. Using a stream of modern population censuses since the 19th century, we also find that our results hold after the end of the Ottoman rule and its discriminatory tax in 1878. We hypothesize that religious identity persisted because it became embedded into the rising national consciousness during the nineteenth century, reinforcing the cost of changing religion.