The Ottoman Empire and Eastern World Orders

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.

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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.

Stream via SoundCloud 

Contributor Bios

Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. In addition to Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Zarakol is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the editor of Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Zeinab Azarbadegan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on the intersection of inter-imperial relations and history of science, technology, and medicine, in nineteenth century Ottoman Iraq

Credits

Episode No. 545
Release Date: 20 May 2023
Sound production by Zeinab Azarbadegan and Chris Gratien
Music: Monsieur Doumani - The System, Nima Janmohammadi - Dastgah Shur
Images and bibliography courtesy of Ayşe Zarakol

Further Listening

	Nicholas Morton	546 5/26/23	The Mongols and the Medieval Near East
	Joshua White, Zoe Griffith, Sara Nur Yıldız, Neelam Khoja	486 12/28/20	The Mongols and Muslim Societies The Making of the Islamic World
	Sara Nur Yıldız	186 3/13/15	New Perspectives on Medieval Anatolia
	Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim	336 11/4/17	Medicine Along the Musk Route
	Monica Green	512 8/26/21	Rewriting the Black Death
	Hüseyin Yılmaz	444 1/11/20	The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought

Images

Select Bibliography

Baumann, Brian. 2013. ‘By the Power of Eternal Heaven: The Meaning of Tenggeri to the Government of the Pre-Buddhist Mongols’. Extrême- Orient Extrême-Occident 35: 233–84.

Biran, Michal. 2007. Chinggis Khan. Oneworld Publications.

Brook, Timothy. 2019. Great State: China and the world. Profile.

Burak, Guy. 2013. ‘The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Post-Mongol Context of the Ottoman Adoption of a School of Law’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 55(3): 579–602.

Collins, Randall. 1985. ‘The Mega-Historians’. Sociological Theory 3(1): 114–22.

Dunlop, Anne, editor. 2023. The Mongol Empire in Global History and Art History. Harvard University Press.

Fleischer, Cornell. 2018. ‘A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’. Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 61(1–2): 18–90.

Fletcher, Joseph. 1986. ‘The Mongols: Ecological and Social Perspectives’. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46(1): 11–50.

Goldstone, Jack A. 1988. ‘East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political Crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey, and Ming China’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 30(1): 103–42.

Halperin, Charles J. 1987. Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Indiana University Press.

Hobson, John M. 2009. ‘Provincializing Westphalia: The Eastern Origins of Sovereignty’. International Politics 46(6): 671–90.

Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. 2016. ‘Astrology, Lettrism, Geomancy: The Occult-Scientific Methods of Post-Mongol Islamicate Imperialism’. Medieval History Journal 19(1): 142–50.

Moin, Azfar. 2012. The Millennial Sovereign. Columbia University Press.

Moin, A. Azfar and Alan Strathern, editors. 2022. Sacred Kingship in World History Between Immanence and Transcendence. Columbia University Press.

Necipoglu,Gülru.1989.’Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry’. Art Bulletin 71(3): 401–27.

Parker, Geoffrey. 2013. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. Yale University Press.

Robinson, David M. 2019. Ming China and Its Allies. Cambridge University Press.

Sneath, David. 2007. The Headless State. Columbia University Press.