Part 6. Change in the Balance of Power

One of the big historical debates in Middle East History is how to explain the seeming decline of Middle Eastern civilization vis-à-vis Western countries between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries.  In the ninth through twelfth centuries, Middle Eastern civilization was arguably the most advanced in the world in areas such as science, medicine, mathematics, architecture, art and literature.  Even though the Abbasid empire broke up during this period, Islamic civilization continued to thrive.  Despite the shocks unleashed upon the Middle East by the Crusades, Mongol invasions, and various plagues in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta verifies the continued vitality of Islamic societies in his rihla (travel narrative) composed in the mid-fourteenth century.  Around this time there was a rival of great Islamic dynasties with the rise of the Islamic Gunpowder Empires (Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal), whose dominions spanned great swathes of territory stretching from Algeria in the west to India in the east.

Nevertheless, some historians see a slow and subtle decline already beginning to take place at this time.  Despite the great achievements of the Gunpowder empires, none of them are known for original scientific, literary, medical or mathematical achievements equal to those that took place under the Abbasids.  By the seventeenth century, Western economic, political and military power began to challenge that of the Islamic Gunpowder empires.  In 1699, the Ottomans were forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Karlowitz with the Austrian Habsburg empire, ceding their territories in Hungary and Transylvania.  It was the first time that the Ottoman empire had relinquished substantial land holdings to the Europeans.  However, it would not be the last time.  Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottomans repeatedly lost wars to the Habsburgs, Russian empire, British and the French.  They also made considerable economic concessions in the capitulations, which were agreements through which European businessmen were allowed to sell manufactured products throughout the empire without paying the taxes that local Ottoman merchants had to pay.  Meanwhile, the Safavid empire collapsed in the eighteenth century and the Mughals eventually succumbed to British imperial expansion throughout the Indian subcontinent.

How had this happened?  Historians generally explain the change in the balance of power between Islamic civilization and the West by emphasizing one of two major themes:

• 1) Ottoman decline. There is a question as to when the Ottoman empire began to decline, but there is no debating the fact that it actually did decline significantly between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Major areas in which change took place include the following: a) The Ottoman military moved away from strict adherence to the devshirme system which had manned successful slave armies (as well as the Ottoman administration) in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.  By the seventeenth century it had become apparent that the Ottoman army no longer held a military advantage over European armies; b) There was a noticeable decline in the quality of Ottoman leadership following the sultanate of Suleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566).  Sultans became more inward focused and rarely left the confines of the Topkapi palace, while grand viziers and other top officials increasingly took control of Ottoman politics.  This situation led to more political intrigue, corruption, and government stagnation than before; c) The central government lost control of the provinces, many of which became functionally independent.  While some historians question whether this represents decline or simply change within the empire, there is no doubt that the central Ottoman government became weaker and less able to resist Western military, economic and cultural initiatives; d) A conservative religious establishment and administration resisted modernizing changes that would have helped the empire keep pace with transformations in Europe.  For instance, the printing press, actively used in Europe from the 1450s, was not allowed by the Ottoman government to operate within its realms until 1727, almost three hundred years later.

• 2) Transformation within Europe. While Ottoman decline was certainly a factor in the change in the balance of power, there is no doubt that changes within Europe were at least as important, if not more so.  Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, European societies underwent such substantial transformation that Europeans were able to exert their dominance over most of the world by the nineteenth century.  In addition to the Ottomans, great ancient civilizations such as China and India were also overwhelmed by European colonialism in the nineteenth century.  The fact that the Ottomans didn’t change quickly enough to keep up with Europe didn’t make them any different from those civilizations, or from other societies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.  The most important changes within Europe during this period included: a) the European Renaissance (14th-16th centuries), b) the Protestant Reformation and Wars of Religion (16th-17th centuries), the latter of which contributed to a military transformation that would equip European armies to conquer Asian and African societies in the succeeding centuries, c) the voyages of exploration that took European power to the farthest corners of the globe (15th-17th centuries), d) the Scientific Revolution and beginnings of capitalism (17th-18th centuries), which laid the groundwork for a new understanding of the world and substantial economic transformation within European societies, e) the Enlightenment and political revolutions of the 18th century, which resulted in the United States and the beginnings of secular democratic governance in the Western world, f) the rise of the European nation-state system and the idea of nationalism (17th-19th centuries), g) the Industrial Revolution (18th-19th centuries), and h) the age of European Imperialism (17th-19th centuries) when European governments would establish colonial rule in most of the rest of the world.

By the eighteenth century, Middle Eastern leaders had begun to realize that they were falling behind the West.  The Ottoman sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703-1730), after some early military successes against the Russians and Habsburgs, sought to imitate Western cultural and architectural styles and to reform the Ottoman administration by returning to policies that had made the empire great two hundred years earlier.  But the use of capitulations expanded, granting Europeans more control over the Ottoman economy, and another war with Russia from 1768-1774 ended badly for the Ottomans.  The ensuing economic crisis, made worse by natural disasters and famine, left much of the empire in turmoil.  Selim III (r. 1789-1807) took advantage of this crisis, along with European preoccupation with the French Revolution, to institute widespread military and administrative reforms within the Ottoman empire.

Unfortunately for the Ottomans, Selim’s reforms would ultimately be unsuccessful.  In 1798, a French army led by Napoleon conquered Egypt with the intention of cutting off British access to their colonies in India.  The conquest took a little more than three weeks and demonstrated conclusively that Middle Eastern armies were completely incapable of withstanding a full scale invasion by Western powers.  In fact, it took an alliance with the British to enable the Ottomans to finally drive out the French in 1801.  This sent another message that the only hope for Middle Eastern states to survive Western aggression was to play Western powers off against one another.  A few years later, Selim III was overthrown by a Janissary rebellion.  The Janissaries, recognizing that Selim’s plan was to replace them with a modern Western-inspired army, acted proactively to prevent military reform.  Thus the empire entered the nineteenth century decentralized, weak, and vulnerable to further Western aggression.

Image below: Painting of Sultan Selim III by Joseph Warnia-Zarzecki