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Very one-sided and subjective, sounds more like an opinion piece than an encyclopedia article. Is the situation similar in other articles in WikiProject Ottoman Empire? Definitely needs to be rewritten. Nozulani ( talk) 18:11, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't see how it's one-sided and subjective when it's based very thoroughly in the academic literature. Can you explain? Chamboz ( talk) 19:28, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
It's one-sided because it gives impression that the decline has been rejected by virtually all mainstream scholars, when in fact several eminent scholars have supported it at least in part, the late Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert to name two. You wouldn't guess that from the current edit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.18.221.196 ( talk) 02:25, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
Here, in brief, is the decline paradigm regarding the Ottoman Empire. Let me be clear: I believe this paradigm to be incorrect and misleading.
Donald Quataert, "Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes towards the Notion of 'Decline,'" History Compass 1 (2003), 1.
It's true that İnalcık retained more elements of the decline thesis than most other scholars, but he was also the man who popularized the notion of transformation: İnalcık, Halil. "Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700." Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980): 283–337.
Even were İnalcık still alive, it would still be fair to say that there is no mainstream scholar who supports the decline thesis. Chamboz ( talk) 12:28, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
This article reads like a straw man argument, i.e., it suggests a specific formulation of the "decline" hypothesis which is easy to dispute, and then disputes it. But who is actually talking (or still talking) about the decline of the Ottoman Empire on its own? There was no decline of the empire itself, but there definitely was a decline compared to the countries of Europe who continued to improve (in technology, economy, science, military etc.) while the Ottoman empire did not. The empire conquered Muslim countries which previously were at the forefront of science and technology, but stopped inventing new science and technology and was late to adopt ideas coming from the west (even such monumental ideas as the printing press and clock technology). Also, the empire, by giving the Sultan absolute power to seize anyone's property or life (a power that did not exist in Europe at the time), made Capitalism impossible and hurt the economy and the military of the empire. Corrupt and counter-productive ideas such as slavery, which were abandoned in Europe, were never abandoned in the Ottoman empire (see Slavery in the Ottoman Empire). None of this is a "decline" of the Ottoman empire per se - the empire did not become any worse - it just didn't improve (or improved slowly), and declined **compared** to its European neighbors and enemies. Nyh ( talk) 08:40, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Chamboz, I side with Nozulani and Nyh's comments: this article seems quite one-sided. Or, rather, it makes an elaborate argumentation in orderto disprove a theory, called the "Ottoman decline thesis", that it hereby labels as such (I don't think Bernard Lewis or any of the so-called "20th century scholars" you mentioned ever called it a thesis). Without claiming to have an extensive knowledge of the question, I think you are using a lot of argumentative strategies that are reminiscent of other elaborate contre-argumentative/apologetics strategies (such as conveying a false feeling of unity from a dissassembled set of thinkers i.e. the abovementioned strawman argument, claiming that the history of thought goes one way i.e. using whig history) that are out of place in an encyclopedia (and would rather remind me of some politically engaged literature). As far as I am concerned, the Ottoman decline is a fact of history (as indicated by the fact that it lost gradually large swathes of its territory over 3 centuries, before eventually disappearing!), although you could of course discuss its causes, and I am pretty confident most specialists of International Relations would feel the same.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Énéwiki ( talk • contribs) 15:34, 3 September 2018 (UTC)
One of the most momentous changes to have occurred in Ottoman studies since the publication of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent [1966] is the deconstruction of the so-called 'Ottoman decline thesis' – that is, the notion that toward the end of the sixteenth century, following the reign of Sultan Suleyman I (1520–66), the empire entered a lengthy decline from which it never truly recovered, despite heroic attempts at westernizing reforms in the nineteenth century. Over the last twenty years or so, as Chapter 4 will point out, historians of the Ottoman Empire have rejected the narrative of decline in favor of one of crisis and adaptation
students of Ottoman history have learned better than to discuss a "decline" which supposedly began during the reigns of Süleyman's "ineffectual" successors and then continued for centuries.
Ottomanist historians have produced several works in the last decades, revising the traditional understanding of this period from various angles, some of which were not even considered as topics of historical inquiry in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to these works, the conventional narrative of Ottoman history – that in the late sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire entered a prolonged period of decline marked by steadily increasing military decay and institutional corruption – has been discarded.
Ottomanist historians have largely jettisoned the notion of a post-1600 'decline'
In the scholarly literature produced by Ottomanists since the mid-1970s, the hitherto prevailing view of Ottoman decline has been effectively debunked.
Regardless of what one may think of an individual revisionist work, or a particular method or framework, the cumulative effect of the scholarship has demonstrated the empirical and theoretical invalidity of the decline thesis, and offered a portrayal of an internally dynamic Ottoman state and society. It has also established the comparability of the Ottoman empire to other - mainly European - societies and polities, and concomitantly revised the existing scheme of periodization.
An editor has recently dropped a huge amount of text into this article from a different page (increasing its size by almost 30%), apparently in an attempt to merge the two articles. Merging some sections of the articles may be a good idea, but I think the way this was done was problematic: the new text isn't integrated into the article at all and most of it doesn't even address the actual topic (the decline thesis as a historiographical concept within Ottoman history). Instead it's just a collection of musings on various aspects of Ottoman history post-16th century. I think most of it would need to be removed or heavily reworked in order to fit into the article. This article is about the historiographical concept of the decline thesis, so it's very inappropriate for the first thing confronting the reader after the introduction to be a random collection of comments on the Ottoman economy (though some parts of this text could potentially be integrated into the section of the article discussing the relationship between the decline thesis and the Ottoman economy). Sorry to whomever added this text, but I feel that I've got to revert it. Chamboz ( talk) 05:14, 24 June 2019 (UTC)
I have to agree with the critics above, it's absolutely one sided, the article clearly supports the "non decline" theory, and is trying to disqualify the decline thesis, this is not exact science, a lot of scholars agree with the decline thesis, the time in which one argument was presented is not a serious factor, so if in XIX century the decline thesis was more accepted, and nowadays this is supposedely not the case, this not show that the thesis is "wrong". Sorry for the possible mistakes in my english spelling.
Most of this article seems to try to explain that the Ottoman Empire never declined (if so, where is it today?) despite the fact it gradually lost territory and wars and was wracked by internal political instability throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. If this article is to be believed the Ottomans are the only empire to have never suffered a decline, and its enormous lost of territory over the centuries is not indicative of anything. Wordbearer88 ( talk) 00:57, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
The entire bias nature of this article needs to be rewritten from the ground up and get rid of the 1984-style propaganda that the Ottoman Empire never declined as every other empire has in history.
I'm not sure about the inclusion of the footnote at the end of this article. Particularly the statement, "'Oriental despotism' was a term deployed in Marxist historical analyses." The term "Oriental Despotism" comes from Plato, and, while Marx himself did use the term, it did not feature heavily in his analysis (his primary focus was on modes of production not political structures.) Some Marxian historians will refer to the "Asiatic Mode of Production" when analyzing the Ottoman Empire; however this is a rather contentious subject.
Also, the note itself is overly-long and written in an extremely biased manner. It presents the views of Zachary Lockman as fact rather than opinion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Piknmen ( talk • contribs) 08:06, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
I assume it's this article that's ridiculously overstated and POVy... but at the same time I don't doubt that plenty of Western scholars want to have decent careers being contrarian and pretending the Ottoman state wasn't nearly as bad and poorly managed as it actually was. In any case, please direct comments and replies to Talk:Decline and modernization of the Ottoman Empire, because one of the two articles needs to be rehashed from the ground up. — LlywelynII 03:34, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
Disclaimer: I am not the author of this wikipedia article. I just noticed that over the past few days there has been some confusion on the talk page over what contemporary historians mean by "decline" and why they no longer take it to be a valid understanding of Ottoman (or any empire's) history. I thought rather than respond to each individual comment, it would be better to start a brief new section on it here.
When the majority of contemporary Ottoman historians such as Dana Sajdi, Toledano Ehud, Jane Hathaway and Baki Tezcan etc critique the "decline thesis," they are not saying that the Ottoman Empire never declined in terms of its overall territory, or relative economic power in comparison to its rivals. Rather, they are critiquing the prevailing tendency of certain mid-20th century historians to characterise entire portions of any empire's complex and dynamic history as "periods or states of decline/stagnation." The reason for this is that this is not how historical empires work. For example, whilst it would be okay to describe the Eastern Roman Empire as declining in military power vis à vis the early Ottoman sultanate, it would not make sense to describe the Roman Empire from the reign of Justinian to Constantine XI as a "period of decline" simply because they collectively lost more territory than they gained. It's important to be specific with regard to what is meant. Likewise, it would be fine to describe the early 19th century Ottoman military as declining and modernising relative to Russia or France, there is a whole page on this period. However, it would be inaccurate to view the entire Post-Suleiman era as a state of stagnation and decline leading to an inevitable collapse, as was once prevalent.
Therefore, I politely oppose the suggestion to either remove this page or the page linked above. I do not think either is necessary because they are discussing two entirely different subjects. I would instead recommend that those claiming the original author has engaged in "1984-style propaganda" or has been "extremely biased" to present evidence of this. As so far, I'm not convinced that citing what most [1] historians agree on a certain thesis constitutes a form of bias. Rather, it would be better to perhaps provide particular examples of where the author has in fact misrepresented or decontextualised the views of particular historians, so that they can be individually addressed. All the best. Adam Neuser ( talk) 16:57, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
As many editors have pointed out on this talk page, the impression the article gives is that the Ottoman empire never declined, it was just fine until it suddenly and inexplicably fell (due to a Dolchstoß, perhaps?). Reading this talk page, I see defenders of the current state of the article say that it is not trying to argue that the empire never declined. They admit that it did decline during some period, except that that happened later than previously assumed, in some respects and in comparison with some countries. Fine, but maybe they should consider the possibility that the current state of the article does give rise to such a 'misunderstanding', as expressed in the numerous objections of this talk page, and that it should be changed to avoid the 'misunderstanding'. Of course when you call the thesis that you are arguing against 'the Ottoman decline thesis', the most natural interpretation will be that you are arguing against the thesis that, well, there was an Ottoman decline. Ever. And, indeed, the article does not at any point admit that an actual decline ever happened at all, it just lists ways and periods in which it didn't happen. If the real point of the article is that the decline happened later, was relative and wasn't all-encompassing, then the text of the article should explain that clearly.
The argument that you can't describe any long period as a period of decline is basically a general argument in favour of not seeing the forest for the trees. Yes, there are shorter periods of rise and decline also within larger periods characterised by upward and downward trends. The former in no way negates the latter. 62.73.69.121 ( talk) 11:05, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
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Very one-sided and subjective, sounds more like an opinion piece than an encyclopedia article. Is the situation similar in other articles in WikiProject Ottoman Empire? Definitely needs to be rewritten. Nozulani ( talk) 18:11, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't see how it's one-sided and subjective when it's based very thoroughly in the academic literature. Can you explain? Chamboz ( talk) 19:28, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
It's one-sided because it gives impression that the decline has been rejected by virtually all mainstream scholars, when in fact several eminent scholars have supported it at least in part, the late Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert to name two. You wouldn't guess that from the current edit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.18.221.196 ( talk) 02:25, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
Here, in brief, is the decline paradigm regarding the Ottoman Empire. Let me be clear: I believe this paradigm to be incorrect and misleading.
Donald Quataert, "Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes towards the Notion of 'Decline,'" History Compass 1 (2003), 1.
It's true that İnalcık retained more elements of the decline thesis than most other scholars, but he was also the man who popularized the notion of transformation: İnalcık, Halil. "Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700." Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980): 283–337.
Even were İnalcık still alive, it would still be fair to say that there is no mainstream scholar who supports the decline thesis. Chamboz ( talk) 12:28, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
This article reads like a straw man argument, i.e., it suggests a specific formulation of the "decline" hypothesis which is easy to dispute, and then disputes it. But who is actually talking (or still talking) about the decline of the Ottoman Empire on its own? There was no decline of the empire itself, but there definitely was a decline compared to the countries of Europe who continued to improve (in technology, economy, science, military etc.) while the Ottoman empire did not. The empire conquered Muslim countries which previously were at the forefront of science and technology, but stopped inventing new science and technology and was late to adopt ideas coming from the west (even such monumental ideas as the printing press and clock technology). Also, the empire, by giving the Sultan absolute power to seize anyone's property or life (a power that did not exist in Europe at the time), made Capitalism impossible and hurt the economy and the military of the empire. Corrupt and counter-productive ideas such as slavery, which were abandoned in Europe, were never abandoned in the Ottoman empire (see Slavery in the Ottoman Empire). None of this is a "decline" of the Ottoman empire per se - the empire did not become any worse - it just didn't improve (or improved slowly), and declined **compared** to its European neighbors and enemies. Nyh ( talk) 08:40, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Chamboz, I side with Nozulani and Nyh's comments: this article seems quite one-sided. Or, rather, it makes an elaborate argumentation in orderto disprove a theory, called the "Ottoman decline thesis", that it hereby labels as such (I don't think Bernard Lewis or any of the so-called "20th century scholars" you mentioned ever called it a thesis). Without claiming to have an extensive knowledge of the question, I think you are using a lot of argumentative strategies that are reminiscent of other elaborate contre-argumentative/apologetics strategies (such as conveying a false feeling of unity from a dissassembled set of thinkers i.e. the abovementioned strawman argument, claiming that the history of thought goes one way i.e. using whig history) that are out of place in an encyclopedia (and would rather remind me of some politically engaged literature). As far as I am concerned, the Ottoman decline is a fact of history (as indicated by the fact that it lost gradually large swathes of its territory over 3 centuries, before eventually disappearing!), although you could of course discuss its causes, and I am pretty confident most specialists of International Relations would feel the same.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Énéwiki ( talk • contribs) 15:34, 3 September 2018 (UTC)
One of the most momentous changes to have occurred in Ottoman studies since the publication of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent [1966] is the deconstruction of the so-called 'Ottoman decline thesis' – that is, the notion that toward the end of the sixteenth century, following the reign of Sultan Suleyman I (1520–66), the empire entered a lengthy decline from which it never truly recovered, despite heroic attempts at westernizing reforms in the nineteenth century. Over the last twenty years or so, as Chapter 4 will point out, historians of the Ottoman Empire have rejected the narrative of decline in favor of one of crisis and adaptation
students of Ottoman history have learned better than to discuss a "decline" which supposedly began during the reigns of Süleyman's "ineffectual" successors and then continued for centuries.
Ottomanist historians have produced several works in the last decades, revising the traditional understanding of this period from various angles, some of which were not even considered as topics of historical inquiry in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to these works, the conventional narrative of Ottoman history – that in the late sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire entered a prolonged period of decline marked by steadily increasing military decay and institutional corruption – has been discarded.
Ottomanist historians have largely jettisoned the notion of a post-1600 'decline'
In the scholarly literature produced by Ottomanists since the mid-1970s, the hitherto prevailing view of Ottoman decline has been effectively debunked.
Regardless of what one may think of an individual revisionist work, or a particular method or framework, the cumulative effect of the scholarship has demonstrated the empirical and theoretical invalidity of the decline thesis, and offered a portrayal of an internally dynamic Ottoman state and society. It has also established the comparability of the Ottoman empire to other - mainly European - societies and polities, and concomitantly revised the existing scheme of periodization.
An editor has recently dropped a huge amount of text into this article from a different page (increasing its size by almost 30%), apparently in an attempt to merge the two articles. Merging some sections of the articles may be a good idea, but I think the way this was done was problematic: the new text isn't integrated into the article at all and most of it doesn't even address the actual topic (the decline thesis as a historiographical concept within Ottoman history). Instead it's just a collection of musings on various aspects of Ottoman history post-16th century. I think most of it would need to be removed or heavily reworked in order to fit into the article. This article is about the historiographical concept of the decline thesis, so it's very inappropriate for the first thing confronting the reader after the introduction to be a random collection of comments on the Ottoman economy (though some parts of this text could potentially be integrated into the section of the article discussing the relationship between the decline thesis and the Ottoman economy). Sorry to whomever added this text, but I feel that I've got to revert it. Chamboz ( talk) 05:14, 24 June 2019 (UTC)
I have to agree with the critics above, it's absolutely one sided, the article clearly supports the "non decline" theory, and is trying to disqualify the decline thesis, this is not exact science, a lot of scholars agree with the decline thesis, the time in which one argument was presented is not a serious factor, so if in XIX century the decline thesis was more accepted, and nowadays this is supposedely not the case, this not show that the thesis is "wrong". Sorry for the possible mistakes in my english spelling.
Most of this article seems to try to explain that the Ottoman Empire never declined (if so, where is it today?) despite the fact it gradually lost territory and wars and was wracked by internal political instability throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. If this article is to be believed the Ottomans are the only empire to have never suffered a decline, and its enormous lost of territory over the centuries is not indicative of anything. Wordbearer88 ( talk) 00:57, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
The entire bias nature of this article needs to be rewritten from the ground up and get rid of the 1984-style propaganda that the Ottoman Empire never declined as every other empire has in history.
I'm not sure about the inclusion of the footnote at the end of this article. Particularly the statement, "'Oriental despotism' was a term deployed in Marxist historical analyses." The term "Oriental Despotism" comes from Plato, and, while Marx himself did use the term, it did not feature heavily in his analysis (his primary focus was on modes of production not political structures.) Some Marxian historians will refer to the "Asiatic Mode of Production" when analyzing the Ottoman Empire; however this is a rather contentious subject.
Also, the note itself is overly-long and written in an extremely biased manner. It presents the views of Zachary Lockman as fact rather than opinion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Piknmen ( talk • contribs) 08:06, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
I assume it's this article that's ridiculously overstated and POVy... but at the same time I don't doubt that plenty of Western scholars want to have decent careers being contrarian and pretending the Ottoman state wasn't nearly as bad and poorly managed as it actually was. In any case, please direct comments and replies to Talk:Decline and modernization of the Ottoman Empire, because one of the two articles needs to be rehashed from the ground up. — LlywelynII 03:34, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
Disclaimer: I am not the author of this wikipedia article. I just noticed that over the past few days there has been some confusion on the talk page over what contemporary historians mean by "decline" and why they no longer take it to be a valid understanding of Ottoman (or any empire's) history. I thought rather than respond to each individual comment, it would be better to start a brief new section on it here.
When the majority of contemporary Ottoman historians such as Dana Sajdi, Toledano Ehud, Jane Hathaway and Baki Tezcan etc critique the "decline thesis," they are not saying that the Ottoman Empire never declined in terms of its overall territory, or relative economic power in comparison to its rivals. Rather, they are critiquing the prevailing tendency of certain mid-20th century historians to characterise entire portions of any empire's complex and dynamic history as "periods or states of decline/stagnation." The reason for this is that this is not how historical empires work. For example, whilst it would be okay to describe the Eastern Roman Empire as declining in military power vis à vis the early Ottoman sultanate, it would not make sense to describe the Roman Empire from the reign of Justinian to Constantine XI as a "period of decline" simply because they collectively lost more territory than they gained. It's important to be specific with regard to what is meant. Likewise, it would be fine to describe the early 19th century Ottoman military as declining and modernising relative to Russia or France, there is a whole page on this period. However, it would be inaccurate to view the entire Post-Suleiman era as a state of stagnation and decline leading to an inevitable collapse, as was once prevalent.
Therefore, I politely oppose the suggestion to either remove this page or the page linked above. I do not think either is necessary because they are discussing two entirely different subjects. I would instead recommend that those claiming the original author has engaged in "1984-style propaganda" or has been "extremely biased" to present evidence of this. As so far, I'm not convinced that citing what most [1] historians agree on a certain thesis constitutes a form of bias. Rather, it would be better to perhaps provide particular examples of where the author has in fact misrepresented or decontextualised the views of particular historians, so that they can be individually addressed. All the best. Adam Neuser ( talk) 16:57, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
As many editors have pointed out on this talk page, the impression the article gives is that the Ottoman empire never declined, it was just fine until it suddenly and inexplicably fell (due to a Dolchstoß, perhaps?). Reading this talk page, I see defenders of the current state of the article say that it is not trying to argue that the empire never declined. They admit that it did decline during some period, except that that happened later than previously assumed, in some respects and in comparison with some countries. Fine, but maybe they should consider the possibility that the current state of the article does give rise to such a 'misunderstanding', as expressed in the numerous objections of this talk page, and that it should be changed to avoid the 'misunderstanding'. Of course when you call the thesis that you are arguing against 'the Ottoman decline thesis', the most natural interpretation will be that you are arguing against the thesis that, well, there was an Ottoman decline. Ever. And, indeed, the article does not at any point admit that an actual decline ever happened at all, it just lists ways and periods in which it didn't happen. If the real point of the article is that the decline happened later, was relative and wasn't all-encompassing, then the text of the article should explain that clearly.
The argument that you can't describe any long period as a period of decline is basically a general argument in favour of not seeing the forest for the trees. Yes, there are shorter periods of rise and decline also within larger periods characterised by upward and downward trends. The former in no way negates the latter. 62.73.69.121 ( talk) 11:05, 28 December 2023 (UTC)