Southwest Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1750

image that I've used before I don't think I've used it in this class it takes off from Heraclitus statement that you cannot step into the same river twice thinking of time and the passage of time as being a river and I maintain that that while that is obviously true it is very important when you do step into the river whether you are facing upstream or downstream and historians face downstream they don't know what's going on but they see it as it passes them the turbidity of the water the ripples the currents the flotsam and jetsam floating along maybe a fish jumping or something and they see the pattern as it flows past them and in some cases the farther downstream the water flows the more apparent the pattern is and so this is or the trade of historians other people say people in political world in particular step into the stream facing upstream and they have water in their face and foam and they can't see a damn thing for more than about three inches so they don't you know projecting patterns forward if you do not have a historical view of what they were in the past really is almost impossible to do as witness the thousand and one different interpretations for example of the Arab Spring and what may come next great story alright so so I'm interested in the patterns of the past and obviously in a world history textbook the structure of the book implies patterns even if they are not explicitly spelled out so that in the chapter I've asked you to read for this week the one dealing with the Ottoman Empire the Safavid Empire and the Mughal Empire as well as with what I call the maritime empires of Islam and the European extension into the Indian Ocean about there's question of what is the what is the underlying pattern that would that would justify this kind of grouping of topics there are a couple that are fairly obvious but are not necessarily the ones that the authors had in mind for example is this simply talking about have a chapter to say what were the Muslims doing between 1500 and 1750 is it just sort of grouping the Muslims and since the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire in Iran and the Mughal Empire in India were indeed Islamic states and were arguably the most powerful and influential Islamic States now you could say well yes that that is sort of what it is but that is that was not what was in the minds of the authors when they carved out this chapter because they were very conscious that there were other parts of the Muslim world for example Morocco has a a kingdom that is very robust this time you have a number of very important in Islamic polities arising in West Africa and you have Islamic policies in Central Asia north of the Ottoman Empire and north of the of Iran and what now is Pakistan but then was the Northwest Frontier of India and these Islamic policies are not covered so this is not meant to be what's happening with Islam between 1500 and 1750 there is the old rubric and I mentioned before the notion of gunpowder empires this was a phrase that was coined by Marshall Hodgson who has written a very influential very long and well let's say the influential and long three-volume work called the venture of Islam that is highly admired in some quarters and he said that this is a period in Islamic history that you have you know four beginnings of Islam then you have the classical Caliphate and then you have the collapse of the Caliphate and then you have the Gunpowder empires states that are implicitly power defined by their ability to exert power and conquer territory rather than by something explicitly ideological so I mentioned in the lecture previously one problem with this is that all the empires of that time or gunpowder empires the spread of military technology is terribly important all the way from from britain across to to japan and the different ways in which the new the new weaponry become engrossed into the national culture and into the political and economic institutions will vary a good deal and they vary among these three states so that what you have in the ottoman empire really isn't quite the same as what you have in the safavid empire what you have in the Mughal Empire so I I don't really like the the phrase gunpowder empires I don't think it gets you very far except that it does say implicitly that what is defining these states is more in the in the political military realm than in the religious ideological realm I think there is substance to that that would say that the that prior to the 13th century Islamic states or states had primarily a Muslim citizenry had Muslim rulers were more oriented toward issues of ideology religious legitimacy of the state and so forth than these later Muslim states and that's partly because there are changes in the in the political thinking within Islam that I will get to so we move along but again gunpowder empires is not what we had in mind early modern Muslim states was not what we had in mind what was more germane in the author's thinking was the idea that you have an important distinction that seems to arise at this time and not earlier between land empires and maritime empires and that the these states represent a the continuation of land empires into a period which increasingly becomes dominated by by maritime power so the fact that this chapter includes maritime sections in the later part of the chapter but does not include the Muslim states of Central Asia that were contemporary with the Ottomans contemporary with the Southlands and the moguls and indeed were for all three states very important historical and ethnic touchstones because they were Turkic States in Central Asia those states in central asia did not have any any seacoast so they are by definition not part of a growing maritime world last week we talked we talked about I talked about Europe and how we define it and so forth next week we have a chapter called northern Eurasia which will include Japan China and Russia but those those Central Asian states really we never are going to talk about so they don't show up in the book and so now you get into a problem even though we were thinking in terms of land versus Seabourn power was there a subtext in which we were kind of anticipating that over the course of time the Muslims of Central Asia would become part of Russia in other words were we not talking about Leos Beck's or the Crimean Tatars because we had already kind of fallen into a 19th century model in which Russia is already sort of granted a hold over much much more extensive parts of Central Asia than they held for example in 1500 in 1500 not only was Russia not a Central Asian power but it was very very strongly under the influence if not the domination of the Muslim states of Central Asia that had initially been set up in the course of it in the aftermath of the Mongol conquest of the 13th century so you know for an American point of view of course during the Cold War the idea that you have a Soviet empire and then you have things on the fringe of the Soviet empire that becomes a standard theme but my concern is whether we're reading back that sort of later thing into this earlier time there is a you know there there are people who come up with grand theories of how the world works or how the world has worked and these grand theories are pretty much always wrong I've come up with a number of them myself but being wrong doesn't mean that something is not useful indeed sometimes some of the most important questions that have been studied by historians have come into examination because of some wrong idea that historian has put forward in a particularly forceful fashion so one of the ideas that you have that is in question somewhat in this chapter is the heartland theory there was an English geographer named Halford mackinder who came up with the heartland theory he was a pioneer in the study of geography in Britain he was the first person to teach geography at Oxford in the before World War one he became a professor of geography and was one of the founding figures of the London School of Economics and his work was was very influential he died in 1947 so his work primarily deals with the pre World War 2 era he argued that there is the the great world island which today we would call Africa the African Eurasian landmass but he was focusing primarily on Eurasia and then you have an inner series of islands around it which would include say England and Japan then you have an outer series of islands that would include North and South America and Australia but essentially the world focuses on on something in the center and he calls that the heartland in 1919 he wrote an essay on this this was after in the aftermath of World War one in which he said whoever whoever controls the Eastern Europe controls the heartland whoever controls the heartland controls the world island whoever controls the world island controls the world and this thinking that identified a certain central part of Eurasia as the heartland it was not a great idea let me make it clear I think he was wrong but it was a very influential idea at the time on the one hand German theorists in the Nazi era took it up and said this shows that we must conquer and assimilate Eastern Europe to to the the Nazi Reich Western Europe should be conquered but Eastern Europe and particularly going into Ukraine and Caspian Sea area with it's about time great oil resources that became a an important aspect of what was called the drive to the east the Braun nach osten from a British point of view McKenna argued that Britain is living in a fool's paradise if they think that they can remain powerful simply by controlling the seas and that controlling the seas will not in the long run succeed because what you need to do is to control the heartland now for him the heartland is Central Asia basically what is now what became the southern parts of Russia than the southern parts of the Soviet Union including Iran and Afghanistan and his argument was that this area included very high proportion of the world's significant resources that it was you could have land contact with every place so you don't have to go around everything and that it had great potential if it could ever be controlled by by people who had the bigger and the resources to to make it work so this was something that was very appealing to Soviet thinkers because they they had the heartland the question was what to what to do with it there are people now who look at the difficulty of carrying out a war in Afghanistan or the near impossibility of carrying out a war in Iran who say well you know if we only had bases in lose Becca stone and Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and so forth we could do something so the question of who controls a Heartland now is still there you also have increasingly it's increasingly evident that the resources of Central Asia whether in terms of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea area or in terms of minerals from the mountains of Central Asia that this is economically not only a crucial sure area but one that is sort of up for grabs because it's under a bunch of very weak states and no power dominates whereas Weekender said it's very important for it for the powers whatever the powers may be to see this as a place to dominate I think implicit in this was the idea that this is where the Mongols had had their empire and that the Mongols had demonstrated as no one else ever had the idea if in earth together have enormous control in the world the Mongols did not survive as a coherent state very much past 1,300 but they produced a number of states that were influenced by the Mongols and to some degree descended from the Mongols so that the Ottoman Empire was came into being during the period of the of the late Mongols and in some degree saw a kind of legitimacy in that Mongol that Mongol century of rule from 1200 to 1300 the Ottoman ruling family had a fixed understanding that if the family ever died out that the power in the Ottoman state would be taken over by the rulers of the Crimea or what what they call the the CREM Tatars who were a Turkish or a Turkic speaking population in what is now southern Ukraine ruled by a family the gear I family who were different and subjected the assassins had risen in Iran in the apple of the mongol period there were there was a mongol population that ended up in the heart of afghanistan and in particular the Moghul Empire in India is established by people who claim descent from the rulers in Central Asia so the Mongols create an empire they collapse and then you have other states appearing on the periphery of that Empire leaving the question of the center of the Empire somewhat somewhat unresolved well I don't think that McAndrews notion of a heartland who works politics and the way in which he thought of it but in some ways it's a very helpful reminder that land connections are not necessarily inferior to see boring connections in other words you can always get to in pre-modern period get from China to let us say Paris faster by walking than by getting on a boat in the Yellow River and going out into the you know the Sea of Japan and down to the South China Sea and then into the Indian Ocean and then across the Indian Ocean and around Africa and up the Atlantic coast and finally you get up to Spain and Western Europe and then you can you know you can get on a pony and go to Paris but these interior lines of connection are intrinsically more more efficient than the peripheral lines of connection so one of the questions that arises here is when we talk about these empires and particularly in the latter part of the chapter the the maritime aspects of the Islamic world at that time and the extension of European powers into the Indian Ocean into areas like Indonesia is this what do we read into this is this a matter that that the Europeans really did find a better way to to organize political and military and ultimately economic power or do we focus on this maritime side for other reasons the argument for there being other reasons is partly a historiographical one that is to say we have sources the Dutch East India Company which becomes function after 1600 and a bit later the British East India Company produced huge archives they did a lot of business to be sure but they did not monopolize the business in these in these seas there are also a huge archives in Portugal from the earlier stage of Portuguese influence in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia are going back to Vasco da Gama's first sailing around Africa in the 15th century so so we have a lot of sources and these sources are still I know means thoroughly explored there just aren't that many people who can read 16th century Dutch handwriting there are so far as I can tell precisely to who work on this area of scholars at least in the United States and they're able to come out with book after book after book of completely no material simply by reading through the archives of the Dutch East India Company for the for the heartland first of all Russian is a common language for scholars in Europe in the United States and this is partly a product of of course Bolshevik Revolution in the Cold War so that Russian sources become less easily explored than then sources in Western European languages also during the Soviet period you have very strong ideological slant imposed on Russian sources by communist dog-bone and yet it's it's fairly recently become clear that once you get past that those people who can work with Russian sources and who are able to sort of see through the the ideological distortions that affected stuff written after the Bolshevik Revolution that there's material dealing with Central Asia that probably will one day will be worked into a much more that's more a much more effective history and people like the u.s. Beck's will no law in the crib Tatars will no longer be sort of excluded from the story this has been a very ideological issue for example we had for many years here at Columbia a professor who was probably the best informed scholar in the country dealing with with materials written in was back which is a Turkic language written in Cyrillic script and through his efforts the Columbia library has perhaps the best collection in the country of books and magazines newspapers published during the Soviet period in Central Asia in local languages but this gentleman was also a very ardent cold warrior and did not think that people should read anything in Russian dealing with these areas because anything in Russian would be distorted by Soviet baloney and so you had a division between right here in this neighborhood you'd have one superb scholar who could tell you everything in the Uzbek sources and another one I think it was at CCNY I'm not sure who had read all the Russian sources but couldn't read those back and so we never brought it together and since the fall of the Soviet Union the reluctance to recognize Central Asia as a as an area in the in the context of area studies which had gone into sort of Eclipse after the fall by the time of the fall of Soviet Union has still left this area very very poorly understood so we have a problem of having a reservoir of historical studies for the Central Asian side of things comparable to what we have for the maritime side and this leaves us with with difficulty and sort of correcting for the errors or the biases that might have come into our view of things in the very broad sense my personal interest in this you didn't ask but I'll tell you anyway is embodied in an essay I finished writing last night for a conference this weekend called welcome to the camel zone I raised the question of why do we refer to two parts of the world as zones and whether doing so is by assigning one word to a particular geographical area it's always going to be loaded one way or another and so I said for example we refer to to Europe as being in the temperate zone and temperate is such a nice even sensible word as opposed to let's say Central Africa be in the torrid zone in the tropical zone and there you get a very different meaning for words like that you take the torrid zone and with its pejorative connotations you take it down to the American Southwest and you call the Sun Belt and suddenly instead of thinking of you know endless perspiration and dying of thirst you think of playing golf and Phoenix and and the term just sort of gets turned around you could call Europe instead of calling up the forest zone you could call the temperate zone you could call the forest zone because Europe a Western Europe like Manchuria and Japan they're parallel in the Far East we're heavily forested areas we don't call them the forest zone partly because particularly in this time period all the forests were cut down and you know used for you know charcoal or coke or things like that so but forest zone would be a reasonable term to use and of course if you read Grimm's fairy tales you know all about the European forests and what happens to little boys and girls who wander off into the forest and are never seen again but you could also call it the mud zone if you're dealing with the history of transportation the great abiding characteristic of Europe of Western Europe was that you couldn't that the roads were almost always impassable they were you know we have many many many accounts of how terrible the transportation is and I've talked about that in this class before so when I use the word camel zone as a synonym for for what I call the free energy zone that this is the area from northwest China across to the Atlantic Ocean and down to the borders of sub-saharan Africa this is the area where the most important source of energy in the pre-modern period was essentially free because it was animal energy using animals that were raised by pastoral nomads pastoral nomads over here I'm going back to something I talked about last week pastoral nomads regard their livestock as wealth a cow or horse is you know is like a you know a deutsche mark or a you know a Krugerrand or something it's simply as well so you don't have material goods of an inanimate sort you don't acquire coins you don't acquire a lot of jewelry you don't acquire real estate you don't acquire many things because as a pastoral nomads you are on the move and you can't carry everything around with you the question of how much you can acquire is is relative to how much you're willing to slap from one pasture to another so your wealth is not in in inanimate goods you know jewels and coins your wealth is inanimate goods that can walk from place to place with you and you don't have to carry them so result is that the livestock that they raise in the camels own is not is not proportional to the market for the livestock in other words this difference nice talking about in the Western Hemisphere where you develop ranching cultures where it is the the animals that you sell or the animal parts that you sell that determine your wealth simply having animals on your on your land is not in and of itself a clear marker wealth so you don't have a you don't have herds that rise or fall because the market for wool or for meat or for any other product of the herds rises and falls because the value is is relative to your own cultural assignment of value to the living animal as opposed to to simply the products of the animal or the parts of the animal so result is that people who live in this zone or on the borders of this zone come to use a tremendous amount of animal energy to carry goods or to haul goods or to operate irrigation devices or to operate industrial devices such as machines to crush sugar cane or machines to press linseed and get linseed oil or something like that they use the animals and the animals are very very close to being free in terms of cost but what I mean by that is that you you do have to buy the animal but once you buy it you don't have to feed it it seems odd but the animal is bred on land that cannot be used for agriculture desert or semi desert or long grass steppe lands in Central Asia it grows to maturity with no dollar cost as we would phrase it so the animal is it's a source of wealth for the for the pastoralist who owns the animal but it's not a it hasn't cost anything in in financial terms to to raise the animal so now you take the animal you go to a market you buy the animal the animal can now live on on desert grazing because in most parts of the camel zone you are very limited in your agricultural land but you have a lot of waste land and you can put animals out to graze there was a study done by a University of Pennsylvania economist and several colleagues in Pakistan in 1985 that asked the question of why do you have camel carts in use in Karachi and other big cities in Pakistan and they did an economic study of it and concluded the reason is that a camel cart can compete economically with a suzuki mini truck or with a gasoline-powered irrigation device or sugar cane device oppressing device something like that because it is so cheap and the budget was actually published as part of this article the costs to the person who rents out the camel and it had you know let's say two labouring days per year cost of feed 0 100 labouring days non laboring days a year cost of feed zero but then you have the cost of the harness which was I think 50 rupees which is basically nothing then the cost of medicines which traditionally would have been much less than they are now and then you had the replacement cost of the animal when the animal gets worn out and dies then you have to replace it so there you have the ammeter due date the amortization over a certain number of years for the prospective lifetime of the animal and you add it all up and you look to open you could rent out the camel for in the labor market and you found out that that it was much more efficient than a gasoline operated device and therefore you continue to have camel carts pulling loads because it's efficient that would apply pretty much throughout the camel zone to camels and donkeys less so to two horses but over many areas particularly in Central Asia it would apply to point well does not apply to mules at all because mules are sterile and therefore they are of no intrinsic value as living animals they are only of value as as they are used so you don't produce a mule and say hey I have 150 mules aren't high rich yeah you have 150 mules are going to go grow old and die and then you won't have any mules at all that isn't Madison wealth it doesn't have any pay any interest so to speak so mules you had to breed and and sell so a mule train is always more expensive than a camel caravan so result is that for let us say from 300 BC or so down to around 1700 here in this chapter with the cost of transportation overland in the camel zone is is the lowest in the world it's incredibly inexpensive to carry goods from one place to another particularly in comparison to costs in the mud zone in Europe we're carrying goods from one place to another overland is so expensive and so difficult that you have people digging so they can carry them by boat and then later on building railroads so if you get over the problem of of the the rainfall muddying up the track so now there's a problem it's often observed that the maritime trade supply it's the overland caravan trade of Eurasia in this period and that may be true but I've never seen it spelled out very did it really become cheaper to have things go by boat from India to Portugal around Africa from India to England or - well yes then you get the question of the other factors involved such as safety what you have for maritime training is the growth of insurance and the growth of shared risk in the form of joint stock companies and then doubtedly those two things after 1600 you know make the cost of maritime transport cheaper you also have the growth of of market transparency although that comes along rather slowly if you go back to the pre 1500 period traders tended to know what was the price they could get for something in a particular market but prices were never posted it was not a public it was not a transparent market the reason traders knew what price they could hope to get was because they had an associate who wrote to them from that market and told them what the price was or they had had some recent experience themselves or they had experience with the seasonal character of certain markets that if you bring goods from one place to another at the right point in the year they'll sell for a high price but if you miss that window by a couple of months the price will collapse markets were extremely opaque this was a situation that gave a peculiar benefit for advantage to merchants who were locked into or not locked into but who benefitted from inside information so sometimes is referred to as the ethnic division of trade so that Jewish merchants would send letters to other Jewish merchants saying you know you know deal brother Avram if you get here before November you'll be able to sell your coffee beans at a good price but that would only be for with people within the network or you have Armenians Armenian trade networks were became terribly important particularly in Iran all the way to Paris so the first coffee houses in Paris are run by Armenians with Iranian connections who know what the prices are in different places you have a Hindu trade network in this period so that Hindus sell goods you know buy goods in India sell them for transport northward from the Persian Gulf up to the Black Sea and they have an interior communication system there are actually places in southwestern Iran far far far away from India where there are certain caves and you go in and the walls are covered with Shaivite Hindu religious writings because they were places of religious significance to people in the Hindu trade network Muslims of different sorts can have a trading network so that as long as you had no transparency in the markets there was an advantage to having a ethnic connection well that ethnic connection becomes replaced or not replaced but supplemented or complemented in the European case by the company so that the this massive quantity of Correspondence that we have for the East India Company or the Dutch East India Company this mass amount of correspondence is the equivalent of the the letters that that a Jew in Baghdad would write to a colleague in Bombay or to a colleague in Livorno and in Italy talking about the nature of things eventually once the Europeans gain further control they they stipulate prices and they try to force everyone to to buy and sell at the prices that the company has as designated in so over the course of this period you have a disappearance of of this not a total disappearance but a diminishing of this ethnic division of Commerce and a growth of the markets that are transparent but are also fixed this in turn leads to to swindling you know piracy things like that particularly agents of the European companies that do a little trading on their side on the side of a higher price all the customary deficiencies of a of a fixed market system so the intrinsic economy of land transport in the camel zone is now being challenged by changes in the maritime commercial area the safety is actually greater overland boats can sink if a camel dies you take the things off and you put it on another camel you you you can't you can't have your entire cargo sink in the on dry land so so there is so there is safety so one of the questions that arises is does the what seems to be quite probably clear is that long distance trade overland diminishes relative to maritime trade in this period is this because of the new institutions that the Europeans set up in the joint stock companies and insurance and so on or is it because they captures certain strong points where they can control the trade and ultimately set the prices and then after setting the prices then they eventually embark at the very end of the period on to plantation economies where they grow the goods and control the price that way is this what happened hmm well navigation doesn't change a whole lot period yep you can't you cannot shorten by navigation the distance from China to England if you have to go around Africa ultimately you build the Suez Canal but that's not until 1869 yes now that you can have some some marginal improvements in in navigation you can build larger boats and so on but the basic economy of the overland transport remains for shorter distance transport not going from China across the old Silk Road to to Europe but within a state within the Ottoman Empire or within the Safavid state in Iran or within mogul India the economy of of Overland Commerce remains remain strong that is say we have lots of commerce that goes up from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea overland through Iran that does not go around Africa because it's just a lot shorter and a lot cheaper the states that are involved the Ottoman state and the Safavid state in the mogul state have comparatively Valletta let's say not minimal interests in what's happening in the maritime realm but rather changing interests the Mughal Empire rules most of India and has no Navy they are interested in trade but they're perfectly happy to see the English or the Dutch or anyone else the Portuguese do the transporting saying we we produce products we sell these products to foreign merchants the merchants take them away and sell them somewhere else and that's fine with us they don't feel they have to have a Navy to protect their themselves from these people the same thing with Iran Iran has essentially no Navy except for some very brief moments at one point when Iran wishes to expand its Imperial reach to go to Bahrain for to Italy on the other side of the Persian Gulf they're perfectly happy to to ask the Dutch of the British to carry them across and their boats because they don't have their own shipping there you know as with the Indians as with the Muslims in India none of the moguls there they seem to see the world in terms of the interior lines of communication and to under under appreciate the changes that are taking place in the maritime realm for the Ottoman Empire this was for a long time considered to be the same case as well but just recently there is a some new work by up a scholar at the University of Minnesota named Giancarlo complain that that focuses upon efforts of the Ottomans seem to have made to extend Ottoman power into the Indian Ocean and through the Red Sea he has found a surprising amount of information to show that the Ottomans found through say the 1560s or so really did try to to be as adventurous in the Indian Ocean as the Europeans were being at the same time in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic in other words that lead the era of discovery was not exclusively a European era but it was an era that the Ottomans shared him and then you get that comes to an end by the by the late 1500s in the same way that a parallel effort in China to explore you know new areas by sea comes to an end interestingly when the ottoman effort to extend power into the Indian Ocean comes to an end you have a new plan which they have which never comes to fruition which is to build a canal that would connect that would go through what is now southern Russia and it would connect the Don River which flows into the Black Sea the Volga River which flows into the Caspian Sea and the project for a Volga dong canal would have made it possible for someone to to go from the Mediterranean all the way to the northern coast of Iran on the Caspian Sea and it would have been possible to have a maritime route by using canals that would have been immeasurably shorter than the routes that the Dutch and the Portuguese and the English were using that had to go around Africa in Soviet times this canal was eventually built but it was not completed during the Ottoman period but it it reflected Casali argues I think it's fairly fairly clear that this sound that it it showed a some consideration of the relative advantages of handling your commerce in one fashion or handling yourself to another having another fashion so that the Ottomans were trying to achieve a maritime route to Eastern products namely those from Iran particularly silk that would be entirely through Muslim territories until they got to the Mediterranean as opposed to having them trade out of the Persian Gulf and travel around Africa so it's not completely a negative story with respect to to a maritime enterprise but it is one of the one of the general lessons that we tend to teach dealing with chess which is that these early modern Muslim land empires showed a kind of a surprisingly surprising lack of awareness of what was happening in the in the maritime world where the Europeans were gaining more and more more and more strength and more and more confidence and the question is whether this was a lack of awareness that was was because they just weren't very on the ball or whether they saw things with having other alternatives having to do with a continuation or extension of of Overland trade options that were intrinsically cheaper than the maritime ones this has gotten involved in a debate which is a very not a wonderfully productive debate but a very active debate in the field of Middle Eastern history which is debate over did you have a decline of the Muslim world most people I'm sure you teach about the Middle East as their specialty will bristle at the word decline because if these are two syllables that are just horrible syllables because they seem to have a an implication that Islamic society was inferior to Christian society the seal of decline has drawn out highly ideological scholarship on both sides some people arguing that it's very clear and that the Europeans were just a hell of lot smarter and more inventive and aggressive and better than the Muslims and the Muslims preferred to sit around in their harem and you know smoke water pipes and dream of glory days that were long past this is the version of the decline theory that Edward Sayid was particularly exercised by saying that this is decline as a substitute for racist disparagement of non-western peoples there are other people who say well decline needs to be treated in a nuanced fashion that on the one hand did the ottoman and Safa de mogul empires experience decline recently I heard Giancarlo Kasauli say you know all those empires disappeared so I guess they declined unless you can just you know go directly to fall without passing through a decline on the way so so you can't you can't utterly eliminate the notion of decline and other scholars have point out that that the Arab world in its literature has talked about decline for a long time so that the word for decline in hip-hop shows up so that I'll say well you know Arabic poetry really declined after let us say well and we haven't had any poet since then of the caliber of the earlier poets except some individuals now in the 20th century although very often when they talk about the climb they also will explain why say well the reason we had decline was that we came under the control of the Turks and and therefore we were laboring under imperialist domination the rulers were Turkish they didn't understand the Arabic very well you know poetry comes when you have patrons who are great masters of the language and appreciate the high quality poetry and you just didn't didn't have it and therefore you had decline nowadays particularly with the warming of relations between the current Republic of Turkey world I think we'll hear less and less about how terrible the Turks were and how oppressive they were because this like arguments dealing with the Muslim is strongly inflected by by ideology so you have 303 States an ottoman state which is by population majority non-muslim and a mobile state which is by population majority non-muslim and the single or more Christians in the Ottoman Empire the Hindus and the Safavid state that is high percent Muslim great homogeneity there and great heterogeneity and the other two the Ottomans and the moguls are both Suneetha thus after birds are Shiites so you have a pronounced difference between between these and in religious terms you have a basically homogeneous Shiite state versus you know great heterogeneity in the surrounding Muslim states the bordering Muslim states if you were to go into Central Asia and include the khanates of the Crimea and and the O's backs north of Iran again you would have Sunni states although more homogeneous Lee Muslim than either the Ottomans for the Hindus all three of these states were glorious if you can if you could have gone to Istanbul in 1530 or to Isfahan in you know 1600 or 1630 or to Delhi or Agra the heyday of the Mughal Empire and you you compared it with the best that Europe had to offer at that time in terms of glorious artistic urban life you would have said these are magnificent states we have abundant travel accounts of Europeans who went and they were sort of overawed by many particularly of the capital cities so one of the problems the decline narrative is that the people at the time who went there usually didn't see it that way they saw these as wealthy thriving empires that that Europeans might in one way another emulate except for the fact that they did not believe in the Christian faith so this is as part of the problem that the decline narrative looks at thriving successful wealthy capital cities and says but they are they're edging into decline and then trying to define exactly what it is that is causing fat I know many Americans feel that way now about the United States and say you know this is really a great country a great society we're seeing some of us are really really wealthy but aren't we kind of edging into decline and isn't there something about say the projection of our debt over the next thirty years or the the rise of China or the impending change and the climb or disappearance of affordable gasoline or something aren't there things there that are pushing us into a an incipient an incipient decline well you know if this depends on your your your party affiliation and your your taste for gloom whether you fall into this kind of this way of thinking but but the the comparison here is that when we look at this period from 1500 to 1750 and look at these three these three states how much of the historical construction that we put on this history is the result of hindsight now are we grouping them and defining their several crises that they've had because we know that that they are going to come to an end and this is the exclusion of the centrum part of the camel zone because we know that it's all going to end up under the control of the Russians and end up in sort of a post-soviet state of chaos and disorder do we need to to to remind ourselves that historical objectivity should include some sort of guarding against an over an over reading of the hindsight that we have because we know what's going to to come later in some ways it's it's easier to write about the Roman Empire where everybody knows that then it is going to fall and you can appreciate it at its heyday than it is to to write about these states where you know there appears to be so much ideological baggage accompanied with the question of whether they are at the pinnacle of something or whether they post pinnacle moment where their fall is not yet fully appreciated this has been an extremely general lecture has it's quite obvious and I will talk on Thursday in on some issues that are more particular within this particularly the the nature of the crises that appear to have occurred in the area of taxation landholding and and changes in the military

Channel: Columbia University

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Keywords: columbia university, course, richard bulliet, history of the world

Id: M7CkyyfNhPI

Length: 72min 12sec (4332 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2011