In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized.

Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The military s incorporation into the state was most prominent in the Ottoman Empire, whose rulers created a new type of military force that drew its manpower mostly from Islamic ruled parts of Europe. These Janissaries (Christian boys conscripted to serve in Ottoman infantry units) were either recruited from Europe or abducted from countries under Ottoman control.

And that's why the Ottoman Empire in its last decades turned into a proto democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time.

Instead, Turkey s role inspired reservations among Egyptians after all, the Ottoman Empire had ruled over Egypt. And, on the Turkish side, there was a sense of superiority vis à vis the Arab world.

Sunni Shia tensions tend to rise sharply during geopolitical power struggles, such as in Iraq in 2006 2008. Prior to that, the last great Sunni Shia battle in the Middle East involved near constant war between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and Iran s Shia Safavid Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

My guess is that we're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years I say 400 years because it's the end of the Ottoman Empire of the hegemony of Western power, Western institutions and Western values.

In seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, the exoticism of the Ottoman Empire was used as a mirror to project Europeans own shortcomings and insecurities. In France, one spoke of Turqueries, such as in Moliere s play The Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners by the people in the rest of the world like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire who said in a book published in 1731, Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?

In the early nineteenth century, the friezes and sculptures were removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, Britain s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803. Elgin sold them to the British government, which put them in the British Museum.

The Middle East has been a hotbed of instability fueled by historical tensions since the fall of the Ottoman Empire almost a century ago. Now it is on fire not least because the West s repeated interventions have been guided by shortsighted tactical concerns.

VMS Empire

And that's why actually in the 19th century the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion.

But political thinking in the Middle East is often linked to the second timeline. Indeed, it is impossible to grasp the region s contemporary history and politics without understanding the emergence of the regional state system after World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

This is the Silk Road connecting the Chinese Empire and the Roman Empire.

Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters.

Everybody did empire.

Avatar and Empire

Embracing the Empire

The Accidental Empire

Some of Ukraine s regions have historically been a part of Russia, Poland, or the Ottoman Empire. Peter the Great, whose eighteenth century Westernization of Russia was portrayed in Sochi, fought the Crimean Tatars, many of whose descendants were dispersed by Stalin to other parts of the former Soviet Union.

JERUSALEM The horror stories emerging from northern Iraq, as well as the continuing slaughter in Syria s civil war, point to a tectonic shift in the Middle East. Almost 100 years after World War I, the regional state system established after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is unraveling.

In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called meddah.

Serbia considered Kosovo as the birthplace of its nation and the cradle of culture, because Serbia had built its most powerful country here in the 12th century. However, the Albanian people settled here in large numbers only after the Ottoman Empire invaded and the Serbian army retreated to the north.

America is an empire.

Russia s Illiberal Liberal Empire

Russia s Pipeline to Empire

The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire.

The Empire of Human Rights

Until the year 1500, almost all Persians were Sunni Muslims. Then, Shah Ismail the first Shah and the founder of the Safavid Dynasty began a brutal policy of forcing Persian Muslims to become Shia, in order to distinguish his iteration of Persia s empire from the more powerful Constantinople based and fervently Sunni Ottoman caliphate.

Historically, the Kurds who are distinct in language, culture, and historical consciousness from Arabs never had their day in court. After World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Allies promised them a state of their own a promise that was cynically betrayed when British and French imperial interests took precedence.

So the empire can strike back.

The Roman Empire has been defeated

The Roman Empire has been defeated

Brothers fight over 500 million property empire

They increased the territory of the empire.

The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there.

In fact, events in today s Middle East continue to be shaped by the radical changes brought about after World War I. Previously, most Arabs had been grouped together under various caliphates. After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, two nation states (Iran and Turkey) emerged, while the Arabs were distributed among 22 new countries, generally under British or French colonial domination.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the great powers of the day, Britain and France, carved out successor states in order to ensure their control over the Middle East s oil, geopolitics, and transit routes to Asia. Their cynicism reflected, for example, in the Sykes Picot Agreement nbsp established a lasting pattern of destructive outside meddling.

In parts of the Balkans long ruled by the Ottoman Empire, trust in government is lower than in nearby regions that just happened to have been ruled by the more efficient Habsburgs. In regions where earlier inhabitants engaged in farming rather than herding, forcing them to cooperate more extensively, their descendants are more likely to form bonds of trust today.

Most international borders in the Middle East and North Africa were drawn by imperial powers Britain, France, and Italy either after World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire (the Sykes Picot agreements), or, as in Libya and Sudan, earlier. But in no case did these borders correspond with local popular will, or with ethnic or historical boundaries.

At the beginning of the twenty first century, when dialogue with the Islamic world is one of the Western world s key challenges, Europe would commit a historic strategic blunder if it were to close its doors to Turkey. To do so would push back the inheritors of the Ottoman Empire back onto an Asian, Muslim, and Middle Eastern historical trajectory.

I want to say that I think the powers that be know that empire building is actually that feelings get in the way of empire building.

Think of the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center.

It has happened with the fall of the Roman Empire.