Various historical accounts have suggested that the Ottomans' rise helped the Protestant Reformation as well as its offshoots, such as Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism, survive their infancy and mature. Utilizing a comprehensive data set on violent confrontations for the interval between 1401 and 1700 CE, I show that the incidence of military engagements between the Protestant Reformers and the Counter-Reformation forces between the 1520s and 1650s depended negatively on the Ottomans' military activities in Europe. Furthermore, I document that the impact of the Ottomans on Europe went beyond suppressing ecclesiastical conflicts only: at the turn of the sixteenth century, Ottoman conquests lowered the number of all newly initiated conflicts among the Europeans roughly by 25 percent, while they dampened all longer-running feuds by more than 15 percent. The Ottomans' military activities influenced the length of intra-European feuds too, with each Ottoman-European military engagement shortening the duration of intra-European conflicts by more than 50 percent. Thus, while the Protestant Reformation might have benefited from—and perhaps even capitalized on—the Ottoman advances in Europe, the latter seems to have played some role in reducing conflicts within Europe more generally.

We trace the evolution of the language of science, religion, and political economy in the centuries leading to the British Industrial Revolution. Using textual analysis of 264,443 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture manifested a belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the languages of science and religion beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Second, volumes using language at the nexus of science and political economy became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, volumes using industrial language—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the eighteenth century.