Religious change and persistence in Bosnia, 1468-2013

In this online seminar, Dr Leonard Kukić will discuss the determinants of conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Bosnia and beyond in order to understand the determinants of religious affiliation and their economic consequences. Employing village-level data constructed from the Ottoman tax registers of 1468 and 1604, the paper finds 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 population censuses, the paper also finds that the results hold after the end of the Ottoman rule and its discriminatory tax in 1878. One reason for this persistence is that religious identity became embedded into the rising national consciousness during the nineteenth century, increasing the cost of changing religion.

Speaker info

Dr Leonard Kukić is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and holds a PhD in Economic History from LSE. His research interests lie in Economic History, Economic Growth and Development, and Political Economy.

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