Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
This is for Ibn Warraq. A bit terse, but I'm a bit pressed for time.
- No rivers. There are rivers, but only the Tigris and Nile are useful for transport. Mid Eastern rivers are two slow to provide water power, which was the primary source of energy for early industry.
- No forests. Wood was the other source of energy for industry.
- No resources. Anatolia has some, but it's hard and expensive to get to.
- Low population density. You know that map of the Ottoman Empire at its height? The population of that entire thing is the same as France at the same time. No labor surplus.
- Fragile ecology of Mediterranean region. No reliable surplus and frequent disaster.
- Gradual dessication of the Med. Climate change since the dawn of Islam has progressively impoverished the Mid East.
- Land tenure. Lots of communal land, little private property. Discouraged capital accumulation. Also, state owns substrata, not land owners. This turned out to be a huge advantage for oil exploration, but didn't help much in the early industrial era.
- Mongols. aka Location, location, location. It's hard to be on top of things when a giant horde of horse barbarians sweeps down and burns down your entire civilization. Also inconvenient to have that immediately followed by the Black Death. Being located in the path of invasion from everywhere, feudalization tends to occur to to make local defense possible.
- Terrain - compare building a rail network to building one in the Ottoman Empire, which is entirely composed of serious mountainage and huge stretches of desert, not to mention the low population density again. Very bad for rail, which is incredibly expensive to build and gives you a lowe return for investment. The state had to subsidize rail enterprise, hard to do when keeping up an army large an modern enough to prevent the Russians from destroying you.
- (Later) Ottoman military weakness and lack of capital. Led to too much expenditure on military forces, and commercial treaties that set import duties to 3% initially. That made Ottoman industry totally helpless against Western products. It was eventually raised to 8%, which helped a bit, then 11%, which help a bit more. By WWI industrial development was occurring.
I might note that Ottoman economic growth in the 19th c was actually very high, but was based largely on internal markets and export of primary goods and resources. The Ottoman portion of the Balkans experienced much higher economic growth than the non-Ottoman parts (except Bosnia), which stagnated or declined. (Happens when you massacre all the Muslim taxpayers and pursue expensive xenophobic nationalist projects and policies as opposed to Ottoman laissez-faire in a larger market...)
- No rivers. There are rivers, but only the Tigris and Nile are useful for transport. Mid Eastern rivers are two slow to provide water power, which was the primary source of energy for early industry.
- No forests. Wood was the other source of energy for industry.
- No resources. Anatolia has some, but it's hard and expensive to get to.
- Low population density. You know that map of the Ottoman Empire at its height? The population of that entire thing is the same as France at the same time. No labor surplus.
- Fragile ecology of Mediterranean region. No reliable surplus and frequent disaster.
- Gradual dessication of the Med. Climate change since the dawn of Islam has progressively impoverished the Mid East.
- Land tenure. Lots of communal land, little private property. Discouraged capital accumulation. Also, state owns substrata, not land owners. This turned out to be a huge advantage for oil exploration, but didn't help much in the early industrial era.
- Mongols. aka Location, location, location. It's hard to be on top of things when a giant horde of horse barbarians sweeps down and burns down your entire civilization. Also inconvenient to have that immediately followed by the Black Death. Being located in the path of invasion from everywhere, feudalization tends to occur to to make local defense possible.
- Terrain - compare building a rail network to building one in the Ottoman Empire, which is entirely composed of serious mountainage and huge stretches of desert, not to mention the low population density again. Very bad for rail, which is incredibly expensive to build and gives you a lowe return for investment. The state had to subsidize rail enterprise, hard to do when keeping up an army large an modern enough to prevent the Russians from destroying you.
- (Later) Ottoman military weakness and lack of capital. Led to too much expenditure on military forces, and commercial treaties that set import duties to 3% initially. That made Ottoman industry totally helpless against Western products. It was eventually raised to 8%, which helped a bit, then 11%, which help a bit more. By WWI industrial development was occurring.
I might note that Ottoman economic growth in the 19th c was actually very high, but was based largely on internal markets and export of primary goods and resources. The Ottoman portion of the Balkans experienced much higher economic growth than the non-Ottoman parts (except Bosnia), which stagnated or declined. (Happens when you massacre all the Muslim taxpayers and pursue expensive xenophobic nationalist projects and policies as opposed to Ottoman laissez-faire in a larger market...)