8.10 — The Gunpowder Empires and Why They Fell Behind

In 1600 an informed observer asked to name the world's most powerful states would have said the Ottoman Empire, Ming China, and Mughal India, with the Safavids of Persia close behind. Any of them could have raised armies larger than all of western Europe's combined. The Ottomans had besieged Vienna in 1529 and would do so again in 1683. Mughal revenue exceeded that of any European state by a wide margin (Chapter 6.11).

By 1800 all of them were in serious trouble, and by 1900 two were under European domination and the third was carved into spheres of influence.

This chapter asks why, and it is the chapter this Part exists to reach.

The three empires

The term "gunpowder empires" was coined by Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill for three Islamic states that expanded in the sixteenth century using artillery and firearms against opponents who had less of both.

The Ottomans, from around 1300, took Constantinople in 1453 (Chapter 7.3), and at their height held the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, North Africa and Arabia. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, 1520–66, they were the strongest state in the world by most measures.

Their administrative innovation was the devshirme: a levy of boys from Christian villages in the Balkans, converted to Islam, educated at state expense, and placed in the army — as the janissaries, the first standing professional infantry in Europe since Rome — or in the civil administration. The most senior posts in the empire were routinely held by men of slave origin, which produced an elite loyal to the sultan alone and with no hereditary base. It also, eventually, produced an entrenched military caste that could depose sultans.

The Safavids, from 1501, unified Persia and — the decisive act — imposed Twelver Shia Islam on a largely Sunni population. This gave Persia a distinct religious identity that survives, and it made permanent enemies of the Sunni Ottomans and Central Asians. Under Shah Abbas, ruling from 1588, Isfahan was rebuilt as one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

The Mughals, from 1526, are Chapters 6.11 and 6.12.

All three shared features: conquest by cavalry armies using artillery; legitimacy combining Islamic and Persianate imperial traditions; land revenue as the fiscal base, assigned to military officers in exchange for troops; Persian as the language of high culture and administration; and enormous architectural investment.

The standard explanations, tested

"Islam is hostile to inquiry"

This fails on the evidence. Chapter 7.2 covered five centuries of the opposite. And the timing is wrong: if a religious doctrine adopted in the seventh century caused a decline in the eighteenth, one has to explain the thousand years in between.

A narrower version has some force. The relationship between religious scholars and the state in these empires gave the ulama effective veto power over some innovations, printing being the clearest case (Chapter 8.2). That is an institutional fact about a particular configuration of authority, not a claim about a religion.

"They were despotisms and Europe was free"

This is a period claim rather than a finding, and it comes largely from European writers who had every reason to make it. The concept of "oriental despotism" — that Asian states were arbitrary, that property was insecure, and that no independent institutions existed — was developed by Montesquieu and others and used to justify colonial rule for the next two centuries.

Where it has some substance: these empires did lack certain intermediate institutions — the chartered self-governing town, the guild with legal standing against the ruler, the corporation, the representative assembly with the power to refuse taxes (Chapter 7.4). That absence is real and it matters for the reasons below.

Where it fails: property was not routinely arbitrary. Ottoman court records show extensive litigation by ordinary people, including women, over property and contracts, frequently against officials, with judgements against the powerful. Mughal and Ottoman legal systems were sophisticated and functioning. European monarchies of the period were also absolutist — Louis XIV was not a constitutionalist.

"They ignored technology"

Not true in the sixteenth century — all three adopted gunpowder rapidly and effectively. Increasingly true in the eighteenth, and the question is why, which is what the rest of this chapter is about.

What the evidence actually supports

1. No competitive pressure

This is the strongest explanation and it is Chapter 8.3's argument.

Europe's states were roughly matched, adjacent, and at war constantly. A state that fell behind in drill, artillery, fortification or finance was conquered by its neighbour. The number of European polities fell from hundreds to dozens, and the sorting mechanism was capability.

The three empires had no peer competitor for long periods. The Ottomans fought Habsburgs and Safavids, which is genuine pressure and less continuous. The Mughals faced no external state threat at all after the 1550s until the Persians in 1739 — their wars were internal, against Rajputs, Deccan sultanates and Marathas, all of whom fought in the same style with the same equipment. A military system only has to be better than what it actually faces.

When the pressure arrived it arrived suddenly and from an unexpected direction, and by then the gap was a century wide.

2. The revenue-assignment trap

All three ran on land revenue assigned to military officers — the timar in Ottoman practice, the jagir in Mughal (Chapter 6.11).

The system has a structural problem that Chapter 6.12 traced in India and that applies to all three. It requires a continuously expanding supply of assignable land. When expansion stops, the number of claimants grows against a fixed pool, assignments shrink, officers extract harder from cultivators, and the state's actual revenue falls while its nominal obligations rise.

And it produced no incentive for anyone to invest in productivity. A temporary assignee maximises this year's extraction. Compare a landowner with secure heritable title and a market for the produce, who has a reason to drain, enclose, fertilise and experiment — which is what happened in England before its industrial revolution (Chapter 9.5).

3. No fiscal state, and therefore no public debt

Chapter 8.3 described the fiscal-military state. This is where its absence bites.

European states developed permanent taxation, funded national debt, and central banks (Chapter 9.2 and 9.7). The Dutch and then the British could borrow enormous sums at low interest against future tax revenue, which meant they could fight a war now and pay over thirty years.

None of the three empires developed a comparable instrument. They fought on current revenue, and when it ran short they debased the currency, farmed the taxes to contractors — which raises money now at the cost of extraction and legitimacy later — or borrowed at high rates from individual bankers.

Chapter 6.15 showed exactly what this meant on a battlefield.

4. The trade routes moved

Chapter 8.4 and 7.2. Once Europeans sailed round Africa and across the Atlantic, the overland and Red Sea routes that had made Ottoman, Safavid and Central Asian cities rich were bypassed.

The Ottomans lost transit revenue. Safavid Persia was landlocked in the relevant sense and its silk exports depended on routes controlled by others. And the new Atlantic economy — silver, sugar, slaves, and the shipping and finance around them — was a growth sector that these empires were structurally outside.

5. Printing

Chapter 8.2 gave the numbers and the three-century delay. Whatever weight one gives it, three centuries of divergence in the rate at which knowledge could be accumulated, corrected and distributed is not a small thing.

6. No corporate form

This is the least obvious and it may be the most important.

Europe had a legal person that is not a human being: the corporation, worked out for churches, monasteries, towns and universities (Chapter 7.4), and applied to commerce as the joint-stock company (Chapter 9.3).

Islamic law, as developed, had no equivalent. Partnerships dissolved on the death of a partner, and inheritance rules — which are explicit in the Qur'an and divide estates among many heirs — fragmented capital in each generation. The waqf, a charitable endowment, was perpetual but could not change its purpose or engage in commerce.

Timur Kuran's argument is that this combination made it very difficult to accumulate large pools of capital that persist across generations — which is precisely what the East India Company, the Dutch VOC and the joint-stock banks did. The argument is debated and it identifies a real difference in legal infrastructure.

And it connects directly to Chapter 6.16. The East India Company was a permanent capital pool with limited liability and transferable shares. No Indian merchant house, however wealthy, had that form.

What is not the explanation

Culture in the vague sense. Every one of these societies had produced world-leading science, mathematics, engineering and commerce within the previous few centuries.

Religion in the vague sense. Chapter 7.2, and the fact that Catholic and Protestant Europe both industrialised.

Personal quality of rulers. It is tempting to blame Aurangzeb, or a run of weak sultans, and the structural problems predate them and continued after them. Chapter 6.12 was careful about this: Aurangzeb's policies made things worse and the jagirdari crisis was building before he took the throne.

The Ottoman attempt to catch up

Worth recording, because it shows they saw the problem.

The Nizam-i Cedid under Selim III from 1789 — a new European-style army, new taxes to pay for it, and technical schools. The janissaries destroyed it and deposed him.

Mahmud II succeeded in 1826 by destroying the janissaries first — the "Auspicious Incident", in which the corps was suppressed by force.

The Tanzimat reforms, 1839–76, were substantial: legal equality for non-Muslims, a secular commercial code, new courts, a modern army, telegraph, railways and schools.

And they were expensive. The empire borrowed heavily in European markets to pay for them, defaulted in 1875, and had its finances placed under the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881 — a body run by its European creditors that collected specified revenues directly. Reform funded by foreign debt ended in foreign control of the treasury, which is a pattern Chapter 12.5 shows repeating in Egypt and elsewhere.

The honest summary

No single cause. A set of institutional arrangements that had worked well and did not compound.

Each empire was, at its height, better governed and more prosperous than most of Europe. What Europe had was not superiority but a specific and largely accidental configuration: fragmentation producing constant competition, corporate legal forms permitting permanent pools of capital, fiscal institutions permitting borrowing against the future, printing permitting cumulative correction of knowledge, and an Atlantic economy that rewarded all of the above.

None of it was planned and none of it was inevitable. Chapter 16.3 draws the general conclusion, and it is one this volume keeps arriving at from different directions: what separates societies over the long run is rarely the quality of their people and almost always the quality of the institutions that let effort accumulate.

Where this shows up in your life

The world's income distribution today is substantially the shape this divergence created, and Chapter 9.4 and 9.14 measure it.

And the argument is politically live. Every account of why some countries are rich carries an implicit claim about blame and credit, which is why this literature is so contested. The version defended here — institutional and contingent, not cultural or racial — is the one the evidence best supports, and it is also the one that implies the outcome could have gone otherwise and can be changed.

What Part 8 established

A Renaissance that rebuilt on Arabic, Byzantine and medieval foundations while claiming to leap over them. A printing press that made knowledge cumulative and controversy uncontainable. Gunpowder that made war expensive enough to force the invention of the modern tax state. Ships with guns that connected every continent and taxed an ocean. A conquest of the Americas decided by microbes and by local allies, and an exchange of crops that changed every cuisine on Earth. A slave trade of 12.5 million people, documented by its own accountants. A century of religious war ending in a system of sovereign states. A method for checking claims that turned out to work. And a set of arguments about rights and government that its own authors frequently failed to apply.

What the next Part covers

Part 9 is money. Where it came from and why the barter story is wrong; banks, interest and the invention of public debt; companies, shares and the first bubbles; what actually makes a country rich; why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain rather than in China or India; capitalism and socialism and the real argument between them; central banks, inflation and the great hyperinflations; the Great Depression; the dollar system we live in; how markets work; and then the two chapters this volume has been building toward — how Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China got rich within a lifetime, and the honest comparison with India.