Why European Power Increased While Islamic Power Decreased

As Marshall Hodgson suggests, the Islamic world appears to have reached a high-water mark in its global influence in the early sixteenth century (Hodgson, 1993). Indeed both Western Europe and the Islamic world at that time were rebounding from periods of serious distress in the fourteenth century: Islamic territory had been rolled back from the west by Europeans, and from the east by Mongols; and Europe had suffered through plague, famine, financial catastrophe, and political disunion (Lewis, 833, 838). It appears that by the early sixteenth century both Europe and the Islamic world had recovered significantly and were poised to take universal dominance. Yet Europe, by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had achieved global preeminence, while the Islamic world (and especially the Ottoman Empire) were in serious decline (Burke, 45).

As Archibald Lewis notes, by the early sixteenth century the Islamic world had not only secured its western and eastern boundaries, but it had also begun to expand (Lewis, 835). In India and North Africa, Muslims were able to defend their frontiers and make some territorial gains, but it was in the West that Islam had its greatest successes, wresting the Balkans from the Latin West, capturing the city of Constantinople (1453), and advancing west in sufficient strength to besiege the Hapsburg capital of Vienna (Inalcik and Quataert [A], 21). In addition, Islam was represented in the West by the Ottoman Empire, a centralized state whose

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d Islam most significantly on Islam's western frontier, the tension between Europe and Islam is best exemplified by the rivalry between European powers and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The reasons for Europe's success and Islam's decline during the period in question are due in large measure to the responses of the Ottoman Empire to European mercantile and military prowess. That response, according to Inalcik and Quataert, can best be summarized as conservative and insular: The Ottoman state retained its longstanding imperial policy of territorial expansion to increase state revenues from taxation of peasants as opposed to pursuing a policy of increasing national wealth through mercantile capitalism like Europe ([A], 45). By the eighteenth century, the philosophy of European mercantilism had diverged substantially from the medieval economic theories that served as the common ancestor for both the Ottoman and European economies. For example, in the sixteenth century, both Ottoman and European governments shared the belief that political power depended on the amount of gold and sliver bullion (specie) in the national treasury ([A], 49). Both Ottoman and European powers enacted strict controls (or even prohibitions) on the export of

Category: History - W