This opposition to the printing press had the obvious
consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800
probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman Empire
were literate, compared with 60 percent of adult males and 40
percent of adult females in England. In the Netherlands and
Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands
lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest
educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where
probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write.
Given the highly absolutist and extractive Ottoman institutions,
the sultan’s hostility to the printing press is easy to understand.
Books spread ideas and make the population much harder to
control. Some of these ideas may be valuable new ways to increase
economic growth, but others may be subversive and challenge the
existing political and social status quo. Books also undermine the
power of those who control oral knowledge, since they make that
knowledge readily available to anyone who can master literacy. This
threatened to undermine the existing status quo, where knowledge
was controlled by elites. The Ottoman sultans and religious
establishment feared the creative destruction that would result.
Their solution was to forbid printing.