Astral Codex Ten

Ottoman Empire

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Ottoman Empire

Article

Ottoman Empire is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 18, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire”; “Zeihan gives us a story of the Ottoman Empire entering a prolonged decline”. It most often appears alongside China, EU, France.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 18, 2021
  • Last seen: May 21, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, officially an Islamic caliphate though in practice only inconsistently religious, ruled by autocratic sultans and a dizzying series of provincial governors. As time passed, they fell further and further behind Western Europe; by World War I, they were a mess. As the stress of the war caused the empire to fracture, General Mustafa Kemal seized power, reorganized the scraps of Ottoman Anatolia into modern Turkey, and was renamed ATATURK, meaning "Father of Turks".
Ataturk was born in Ottoman-controlled Greece, and was typical of a class of military officers at the time who were well-educated and "Europeanized". He wanted to turn backwards Turkey into an advanced Western country - and Western countries were mostly secular. He saw Islam - the religion of the old Ottoman Empire - as a roadblock, and passed various laws meant to relegate it to the margins of public life.
Though the government protested these threats from the military, a week later tens of thousands of women in Ankara held a demonstration against Islamists called the "Women's March Against Sharia", aligning many civil-society groups and opposition leaders with the secular military. As tensions between the TAF and the government continued to escalate, on February 28 [1997] the military-dominated Turkish National Security Council held a meeting to discuss the issue of "reactionism", a code word for Islamism since the late days of the Ottoman Empire. Following the meeting, they issued a list of 18 policy recommendations, making it clear that failure to comply would result in serious sanctions. One of the most important "recommendations" was the imposition of eight years' mandatory secular schooling, which would force the closure of Imam Hatip middle schools. [...]
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
Zeihan gives us a story of the Ottoman Empire entering a prolonged decline as deepwater navigation technologies took off in the fourteenth century. These technologies enabled the European powers (first Portugal and Spain, and then England) to capture increasing shares of trade with Asia, dropping prices in Europe and depriving the Ottomans of much of the income to which they had grown accustomed. Most significantly, they turned “the ocean from a death sentence to a sort of giant river.” Trade became global, but it was still mostly among people with nearby water-based transportation.
Where does Zeihan go wrong? In a book that covers everything from the dawn of sedentary agriculture to the present, from the Ottoman Empire to American hegemony, I’m sure there are a few errors. One shouldn’t nitpick though; we should focus on his thesis, his model, and his main predictions. So what about the overall thesis? The main objection I had was the tension between Zeihan’s competing stories of why we get rich. He might not even see that he told competing stories about that.