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Competition and Coincidence: Venetian Trading Interests and Ottoman Expansion in the Early Sixteenth-century Levant
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
Extract
Historiography generally has excluded the “oriental” empires from the competition for world economic power. The Chinese sailed to Africa in the early fifteenth century. Then one day the ships “just stopped coming.” The Mongols “swept” across the steppes for the love of conquest, pastures, space. The Ottoman armies marched to Yemen, Tabriz, Vienna. Yet this marching was somehow instinctual, a reaction of blood, training, temperament. One might suppose that this “oriental” failure to be an economic contender resulted from a state of mind rather than an act of will, a naiveté or an intellectual conceit rather than a lack of the power to compete. Thus, while Eurocentric historiography has not disarmed the Ottomans, it has mentally incapacitated them, thereby dispensing with the need to evaluate economies of conquest and ignoring competition with European states for markets rather than territory.
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- Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1991