Ottoman History Podcast - The Ottoman Empire and Eastern World Orders

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

with Ayşe Zarakol hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | What did the international system look like before the rise of the West? What was the place of the Ottomans within it? How did the Ottomans claimed sovereignty and recognition from other states in the sixteenth century world order? In this episode Ayşe Zarakol discusses the rise and fall of Eastern world orders from the Mongol times to the mid-eighteenth century. She critically interrogates both Euro-centric and Sino-centric histories of international relations in order to emphasise the Chingisid universal claims and their evolution throughout the centuries. Considering the Ottomans within this longue duree history, Zarakol emphasises the notion of millenial sovereignty that put the Ottomans in competition with the Safavids and the Mughals and how the crisis of the seventeenth century dismantled this world order and contributed to a sense of decline. « Click for More »

Every, again, historian of the Ottoman Empire knows about how things compare to Europe, but why should we not also have comparisons with China and Russia and other places. Welcome to Ottoman History Podcast. This is Zeynep Azar Badagan, and in this episode, we're talking to Ayse Zarikol about her newest book, Before the West, the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders. In Before the West, Aisha Zarikul traces the rise and fall of multiple world orders from the 13th century Mongol Empire to the rise of European empires. She studies the rise and fall of different modes of claiming sovereignty and recognition in the Eurasian international system based on the Chinggisid

world order, the Timurid astrologically based Sahib Karan, and the millennial sovereignty that the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals shaped and claimed in the 16th century. This not only incorporated the West Asian empires, but also the East Asian ones, such as China, and affected how the Habsburgs in Europe defined themselves in competition with the Ottomans. Why did you decide to write this book? This story deserves being told because people in this space need to remember that they have shared connected histories that we had forgotten about, not because these models can be brought into the present. In fact, I think this is kind of a defense against

that. If we have connected global histories, maybe we will be less vulnerable to modern day political projects of centralization that are legitimated around, you know, nationalistic or religious claims and so on. Another starting point for this comparison was my realization that we lack histories, international relations histories for regions outside of Europe. Most students who study politics and international relations will learn about how order was developed in Europe and then spread around the globe. And that's where our modern international system comes from. But most of us know nothing about how international relations

or world politics worked outside of Europe. So I grew up in Turkey myself, we learned about the Ottoman Empire, but didn't really know much about the bigger context of those wars or diplomacy. So it's not just a European-Western problem. I think our understanding of history is very fragmented, mirroring, I suppose, how it's taught in the West. What I wanted to do in this book is to write a connected history of, quote-unquote, the East. I mean, the term itself is, of course,

to some extent problematic. And then, you know, take that history and then apply what we learned there to maybe some present-day debates about modern international order. So, the book starts with the Mongols in the 13th century, way before the Ottomans come into the picture. Why did you decide to start with the Mongols in the 13th century, way before the Ottomans come into the picture. Why did you decide to start with the Mongols? You know, initially, before even I had the idea for the book, I was working on the concept of sovereignty, because I knew the history of sovereignty in Europe. I was trying to see how it was different in other contexts, because there's this idea or assumption people have that sovereignty is uniquely European. But I was suspicious of this idea.

Initially, I was teaching myself early modern Ottoman history. And then I started discovering historians arguing that various developments in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th, 16th century are rather unusual within the longer Islamic context. The degree of centralization is unusual. The idea that the sultans started asserting themselves over the ulama, that they started making laws that were supposed to supersede Sharia, etc. You know, these were unusual developments within the longer Islamic trajectory. And then I came across some comparative works about the Mughals and the Safavids,

and claims that these developments were a result of the influence of the Timurids, and then maybe going back even further to Mongol notions of Yasa law, the ruler as the lawgiver. So the beginning point was the Ottomans. But then I thought, well, if these are shared experiences, or if you see parallel developments around the same time, across West Asia, again, the terms are imprecise, but this geography from the Ottoman Empire to the Mughals, I asked myself, where else do you see these similarities? After all, the Mongols were ruling over North Asia, the area that we call Russia now, and of course, China and Central Asia. So I started pulling that thread backwards. And then I decided that given my motivation to write a connected history outside of Europe, I thought, why not start with the Mongol Empire, which plays a similar historical role, I think, for the space as the Roman Empire for Europe. It's not that there isn't anything important before that,

but it's just a moment in the 14th century, moment of convergence, moment of shared experiences, shared institutions, which then have legacies that I could trace. We talk a lot about post-colonial legacies today, but you could use the same logic with any empire. Once they rule over people and geographies, you can see the effects of that rules. So I went all the way back to the Mongols, and then I traced their influences in different parts of Asia, including, of course, the Ottomans, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries.

So one of the main concepts in this book is the idea of world order. What is a world order? And what kind of world order did the Mongols shape that the Ottomans came into afterwards? I mean, as I said, I start with the Mongols because it's a moment of convergence. But they're also interesting to international relations scholars because they had a universalizing vision. So their understanding of sovereignty, which was very centralized, all the power in the Great Khan, Genghis Khan is the ideal typical example of this, as the lawgiver was legitimated by the idea that this person was all powerful, almost having godlike powers, is also a world conqueror. In order to almost empirically prove this person should have all this power, he has to

rule over the world. Because this is the model that they're operating with, always trying to expand, they're trying to conquer, they are chasing world empire, and I argue as a result, chasing world empire. And I argue as a result, they end up ordering the world. And then the successor states or houses, I say it's better to think of this world as being made up of competing great houses rather than states. So it's an inter-house order in a way. They also have similar aspirations. So you can see that Timur is also chasing world empire. By the time we get to the 15th century, that mantle of chasing world empire, universal empire has been taken up by the Ottomans. Of course, the Ottomans are not only getting this from the Mongols.

There are other traditions that they are drawing from. There is also the universalizing claims of Islam, and then there's the Persian, Byzantine, the Roman tradition as well. So it's a mixture. But in the book, I emphasize the Asian-Mongol side, because I think in a lot of the studies on the Ottomans, the Roman angle is always very emphasized. But really, I think, at least with the early Ottomans, it was more the notions that they brought from the East, again, quote unquote. So from the Mongols to the Ottomans, this notion of sovereignty and world order evolves. What is that evolution? How does it change by

the time of the Ottomans? It was actually the Safavids who innovated a new version of this universal claim. So Shah Ismail is essentially the big innovator in this period, and the Ottomans, in competition with the Safavids, developed their own version of millennial universal sovereignty claims, universal empire claims. And then, of course, the Mughals, who are directly linked to the timeline via the Timurids and so on, they also come into the picture. I try to advance an understanding of 16th century, wherein what really drove world politics was the competition between these three great houses. And then others, we could include the Scheibannids, the Uzbeks as well. And then the Habsburgs increasingly come into this rivalry via their rivalry with the Ottomans.

And Moscovy in the north is operating with similar notions. But instead of assuming that 16th century is all about what's happening in Europe, and then the Ottomans are trying to join a European order, my argument is that from the 13th to the 16th century, really the rivalry competition about universal empire, universal sovereignty is located in Asia, and Europe is peripheral. And only by a competition with these West Asian empires, the Europeans start developing similar notions of universal empire or centralization, especially the Habsburgs. And then subsequent developments in Europe are

resistance to that or backlash against that. And that has been overlooked, I think, in the European story. So what is this millennial sovereignty? And how is it different from the Chinggisid world order? I'll start with the Mongols. Genghis Khan's model, Chinggisid sovereignty, as I explained, relies on the idea that the ruler has to be a world conqueror. But the ruler can't always be a world conqueror. And as a result, at some point, the empire fragments, there are four Khanates, and then they end up in a situation where they have to coexist, which creates a problem. So the

end of conquest always creates a legitimation crisis for this understanding, because if you're no longer conquering, it's not clear why you should, as the Khan, have all this power. As a result, the Khans end up trying to find alternative ways to legitimate themselves. So China, they sinicize, and in other parts, they usually end up converting to Islam, which has its own symbolic repertoire for legitimation and universal claims and so on. But it's always a problem how to reconcile the two. By the time we get to the Timurids, you see the ideas of the Chingizid sovereignty or the Turk-Mongol elements of legitimation having to coexist with Islamic ideas. And they don't always make an easy fit because in Islam, God's word has come down

with the Quran and it's supposed to be interpreted by jurists. So you can't have the Khan make all the laws because there is Sharia which precedes that. Even the ruler is accountable to God. Even the caliphs are accountable. And the rulers are supposed to be less powerful than caliphs and so on. So there are always tensions around this and there are always innovations around this tension. And that's why in the 15th, 16th century, more hybrid experiments have emerged in reconciling the different legitimation models. And millennial sovereignty around the concept of Sahib-Kuran, which initially a Timurid innovation,

but it's taken up really by all these great houses in the 16th century. And it's a mode that manages to reconcile Islam with the Turk, among all Chingizids' ideas via astrology. This idea that it's the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction, the end of the world is coming, and the rivalry is marked by this millennial turning point. point. And then the rulers, you know, in this period, they're claiming to be millennial sovereigns, universal sovereigns, but also millennial sovereigns who stand at the end of time. So their universalizing vision draws both from Islam and also local traditions and also Chingiz and Timurid notions. And all of it is made reconcilable by the fact that astrology, which has almost a scientific veneer at this point, makes all of these claims compatible because you can point to various star charts and say all of these legitimation claims essentially are translations of the same thing,

the fact that these people are marked by millennial signs, millennial sovereign signs. So we are at this point where the Ottomans have come into this world order, claiming notions of millennial sovereignty and universal sovereignty based on the Chingizid model. But in the 17th century, they face a crisis, which ultimately leads to the rise of Europe. What is this crisis? There is a growing interest, I think, in recent years in historians' work, especially Ottoman historians' work, on the 17th century being a period of general crisis. The historiography on this goes back further. It's been long held in European history that the 17th century was a period of general crisis because of the Third Year's War and the English Civil War, all sorts of difficult developments that then gave birth to modern Europe.

And recently, global historians have been saying this was not just a European period of general crisis, but a global period, or at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it was a period of general crisis. And Ottoman historians have also taken up on that idea because for the Ottoman Empire, it's a period of the Jedi rebellions and there are demographic problems, population contractions, and all sorts of political problems as well. And the overriding claim right now, or the most popular explanation, is that this was an environmental or climate-related crisis. And this is why you're seeing it all over Eurasia, that the pressures brought up by climate change.

I mean, it was a particularly colder period and unpredictable weather patterns, which then had knock-on effects on agriculture and, of course, not being able to feed people and so on. Maybe the rebellions are related to that and disruptive effects on overland trades, etc. Also, I mean, I should say not everybody agrees that this is the right way to think about the 17th century. I'm not taking a strong stance on what the causes were. What I take from the historians' debate about this period, that it was a tumultuous period

for the areas that I'm looking at, whatever the cause, whether climate or economic or something else. And that was a prolonged period of turbulence and disruption, almost lasting a century. And what ended up happening, I argue, is that the empires that I'm focusing on, that, as I said, controlled much of the world, you know, in the 16th century, the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, they, as a result of this period of turbulence, they ended up turning inwards. I mean, you could argue the Habsburg turned inwards too, except Europe looks different. I mean, it hasn't been centralized. So, you could argue the Habsburg turned inwards too, except Europe looks different.

I mean, it hasn't been centralized. So what's happening to the Habsburg looks like interstate war. The Ottomans are dealing with their own rebellions. You have the time of troubles in Moskovy. The Safavids and the Mughals are less affected, but the Mughals end up burrowing into the subcontinent and the Ming are already in trouble anyway, and then there is dynastic change in China.

Even though, you know, there is material recovery after this period, when, you know, things settle down, as a socially and economically connected space, Asia has been fragmented. Trade has been disrupted, but also rivalry has been disrupted. I mean, the fact that the Ottomans, the Safavid, and the Mughals are competing with each other in the 16th century to be millennial sovereigns, they end up reinforcing these Asian Eastern sovereignty norms. But the more they turn inwards, the less they compete with each other, the less those norms are reinforced via inter-house competition, the more localized and regionalized their worldview becomes.

And this is a tendency anyway that always happens with the Chinggisid empires. They have a tendency after a period of settlement to take more on the practices and norms of wherever they are. So taking away the competition, that tendency is exaggerated. And essentially, the empires themselves are not really lost. I mean, there is dynastic change or maybe periods of material difficulty, but many of them do recover materially. But what they cannot recover or reestablish is this connected base of shared norms, institutions, and practices. So we see essentially in 17th century and its aftermath fragmentation of Asia-Eurasia as a space that is still organized by shared norms and institutions from previous centuries.

And other cultural norms and practices become dominant. You have regionalization and fragmentation, and that allows Europeans to take over in 18th, 19th centuries. And the story then becomes, Asia was always fragmented, and it was the Europeans that connected this space for the first time into one larger international order. But that's not true. In a way, in the 18th century, Asia is more fragmented than it had ever been as a result of developments of the 17th century. The loss of those connections and the difficulty of finding an alternative way of looking at the world, I think is what creates the sense of decline rather than material decline.

Because we have known for a while now that the material decline of Asia, very broadly defined, doesn't really happen until later in the 18th, 19th century. So why is there this longer sense of having declined? It's because of this inward turn or fragmentation, social fragmentation rather than material loss, I think. So in looking at the evolution of the Chekhov's world order and where the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals come into this and centering West Asia, you not only decenter Eurocentric views, but also Sinocentric views. What is this Sinocentric worldview, and why do you decide to decenter it?

In international relations, we've been having debates about Eurocentricism for a while now, and I suspect history is similar. So for some decades, we've been arguing, you know, the histories we tell, the theories that are very Eurocentric. And recently, this critique, which has become generally accepted, and people think we should do something about it, it's been met by attempts to put other histories in. And usually that starts with China, because, you know, China is the rising power. And of course, we should know more about Chinese history. And people say, in order to make sense of present day China, which is debatable, but I think in general, you know, the instinct is correct. But there is a danger in that because China, or at least modern Chinese geography, has its own blind spots and silences and omissions. xenocentric distortion of international relations history, just as much as one could talk about

Eurocentrism as well. I mean, by the way, this is also true for Turkey, other parts of the world as well. It's not that China is especially to blame. But given the modern state project in China, there are certain things that are emphasized and certain things that are de-emphasized. So, I thought it was a bit problematic for international relations scholars to accept what China, modern China, tells us about itself, about its history. And I thought it would be interesting not just focus on West Asia, as we said, or like the Islamic empires and so on, but bring China into the story. Because it was part of the story.

I mean, for the periods that I'm talking about, China was very much connected to larger Asia, Eurasia. I mean, during the Mongol Empire, China and Russia and the Middle East today, they were all under the same sovereign. And the Yuan dynasty, they are essentially a house of the Mongols. And as I argue, the early Ming, they are very much influenced by their experience with the Yuan and so on. So we can't make sense of Chinese history just by emphasizing the scenic elements or the Han Chinese elements. I mean, that's a choice that modern nationalist history makes. We also need to, as with other regions, look at influences that come from elsewhere.

So that's essentially what I'm trying to do. Instead of taking for granted this idea of a monolithic, unchanging China that has stayed somewhat the same for 2,000, 3,000 years, I'm treating China like any other region that changes and responds with people coming in and out for better or worse. That's the story, again, of a connected place rather than an island that remains unchanging. So where is the place of China in the story that you're telling? And what is his connection with the Ottomans? Is there his connection with the Ottomans? Is there any connection with the Ottomans? Every, again, historian of the Ottoman Empire knows about

how things compare to Europe. But why should we not also have comparisons with China and Russia and other places? And it's not just a matter of comparison. Once you start digging into it, you see that there are certain influences that have shared deep roots. I mean, we could debate, and I'm sure it would be an interesting debate, to what extent were the Mongols initially influenced by Chinese notions of sovereignty and heaven's mandate and so on. It depends on where you start the story. But by the time you get to the 13th century, in the eve of Mongol conquests, the area that we call China now is fragmented into different states. And at that time, they don't have this idea of centralized, all-powerful ruler. So it's after they come under the control of the Mongols, the Yuan dynasty, that the Chinese state is transformed, becomes very centralized, as we've seen elsewhere in

other parts of Asia, becomes very interested in what's happening in the rest of the world, because as I said, the Mongols want universal empire, so they're always looking out rather than in, and they are great facilitators of trade. So not only the area we call China connected to, for instance, Persia or the Middle East through this postal system and trade routes, there are people that go from one end of Asia to the other end of Asia and vice versa. And these have very profound influences on art and science and other things. So that's how it's connected. In every way, it's connected. Once the Yuan are kicked out, the Ming dynasty takes over. The early Ming emperors, they don't act like Chinese rulers right before the Mongols conquered China. They act much more like Mongol

Khans. They are all about centralizing power, absolute rule. They are interested in conquest. They are interested in what's happening in Inner Asia and competing with the rulers there. They want recognition from areas beyond the traditional sphere of influence of Chinese rulers. I mean, that's why you have the voyages that go south, but you also have inland emissaries and so on. By the mid-15th century, the Ming emperors have turned away from this type of engagement. Neo-Confucianism has made the comeback and the emperors have become, they end up becoming less powerful and more symbolic and more like traditional Chinese rulers rather than the Chinggis-style sovereign.

So it's not one thing or another, as in any place. I mean, just in modernity, you know, there are different influences and sometimes one gets emphasized and sometimes other influences get emphasized. But treating China as unchanging and always disconnected from the world, only interested in its own region or sphere of influences. That maybe gives you part of the story, but that's not the full story. So we tried to stay away so much from Europe that I want to bring you back in. So what is the place of Europe in the story that you're telling from the rise of the

Chinggisid world order up to the competition with the Ottomans that we've already mentioned? Instead of assuming that Europeans are always the primary actors and telling every historical story from the perspective of the Europeans or how it affected Europe, I deliberately don't bring the story into Europe for the most part, especially in the beginning. You know, 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, I don't really focus on Europe very much. The reason for that is Europe was peripheral to any world order until much later. I mean, the Europeans had their own regional relations. It's like there were things happening there. It doesn't mean there was nothing of interest happening in Europe. But just as when we write the story of modern day international relations, we focus on

the major players and we ignore regions and certain dynamics. I mean, we shouldn't. We shouldn't do that. We shouldn't ignore any part of the world. Every part of the world is important in its own way. But we emphasize the major players. And 15th, 16th century, they start coming into the picture. But I argue in the book that this was an exciting time for Europe because compared to what they had, things were improving. But compared to what was happening in Asia, economically, culturally, politically, they were still at best secondary players. Even after the discovery of Americas and so on, it takes a while for Europe to catch up.

It doesn't happen until much later. So this idea that Europe always being central to world history is just mistaken. I think the second provocative claim I make, which I've already referenced, the studying the Habsburgs only by looking at European history is a mistake. And in the 16th century, I think a much more reasonable take on what was happening with the Habsburgs is that their primary competition was the West Asian great houses, especially the Ottomans. And they were transformed by that competition. And nothing in their behavior makes sense if you edit out the Eastern part of the story. So the whole story of the evolution of sovereignty in Europe and so

on, it doesn't make sense unless you bring in this other story that starts in Central Asia. But maybe if we go back further than that, maybe in East Asia, right? There are influences upon influences. I think it's just more interesting. I mean, the world is more interesting when we recognize those connections rather than ignore them. So this is very much a macro history and also a long-during history of world orders coming from 13th century up to 18th century. Why is it important for us to write macro histories? As you know, this is not what mostly historians do right now. I mean, we do have grand narratives that organize our thinking, even if we're doing very micro work,

how that relates to the bigger picture in our minds, it's always organized by some kind of grand world historical narrative. And we know that the existing narratives are Eurocentric. I mean, we've been making those critiques for a long time now. But if we only make the critique, but don't supplant the existing grand narrative with an alternative, you know, if we don't offer alternatives, then the critique doesn't work because people need to organize their thinking about what happened, you know, in this century,

that century, and who influenced what. So I feel like this is a place where international relations scholars, historically oriented international relations scholars and oriented international relations scholars and historical sociologists can be of assistance to historians because we can bring all the interesting work that historians are doing

in larger macro narratives which is quite okay in my discipline but hopefully with a historicist sensibility so we're not simplifying and we're not creating false equivalences but so what I try to do in the book is macro history with historicist sensitivities.

That is respectful to the work of historians, but hopefully tying different threads together in a way that's accessible to both my discipline, but also general readers. readers. Thank you for listening to the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time.