1541 RIS 40.2_06_1300018 325..347


Review of International Studies (2014), 40, 325–347 6 2013 British International Studies Association
First published online 17 Jun 2013doi:10.1017/S0260210513000181

The Ottoman origins of capitalism: uneven and
combined development and Eurocentrism

KEREM NISANCIOGLU*

Abstract. The history of capitalism’s origins is unmistakably Eurocentric, placing sixteenth-
century developments in politics, economy, culture, and ideology squarely within the unique
context of Europe. And while the disciplinary remit of International Relations (IR) should
offer a way out of such European provincialism, it too has been built on largely Eurocentric
assumptions. In Eurocentric approaches, the Ottoman Empire has been absent, passive, or
merely a comparative foil against which the specificity and superiority of Europe has been
defined. And yet, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the most powerful actor in the Early
Modern period. In this article, I argue that any history of capitalism’s origins must therefore
account for the historical importance of the Ottomans. In doing so, this article seeks to address
the non-European blind-spot, both in theorisations of capitalism’s origins and in IR theory, by
reincorporating the material significance of the Ottoman Empire in historical processes, which
led to the transition to capitalism. I do so by utilising the theory of Uneven and Combined
Development, and in the process seek to defend its credentials as a non-Eurocentric social
theory on the one hand and as a sociologically and historically sensitive theory of international
relations on the other.

Kerem Nisancioglu is a DPhil Candidate and Associate Tutor in the Department of Interna-
tional Relations at the University of Sussex.

Introduction: capitalism, Eurocentrism, and uneven and combined development

European sixteenth-century history occupies a peculiar place in historical narratives.1

Compared to the preceding medieval age, it was a period of striking social alteration
and development; both in its encounter with unchartered territories and in its own
self-definition, this was very much Europe’s ‘Age of Discovery’. And yet, the sixteenth
century bore none of the explosive marks of social unrest, revolution, and radical
transformation that came to define the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries. Such a duality is represented in the period’s very characterisation as ‘Early

325

* I would like to thank Jamie Allinson, Alex Anievas, Gurminder Bhambra, Kamran Matin, Justin
Rosenberg, Cemal Burak Tansel, and four anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and
encouragement during the writing of this article. I am also grateful to the participants at the Historical
Materialism Conference (2012), Millennium Conference (2012), and Spectrum Conference (2012). Any
mistakes are, of course, my own.

1 Here and throughout the article, the term ‘Europe’ and ‘European’ is deployed with the problematic
implications of anachronism and intra-European divisions firmly in mind. As such it is used, unless
specified, in a basic geographical sense, predominantly (but not exclusively) denoting England, France,
Low Countries, Portugal, Hapsburg Spain and Austria, Germanic principalities, Hungary, and Italian
city-states.



Modern’. The term ‘Modern’ anticipates the developments of the next three hundred
years, whereas the prefix ‘Early’ suggests an epochal budding that has not quite
blossomed, or the embryonic shaping of a society that is yet to come. Just as the
culture of the Renaissance was defined by a Janus-faced view of the past and future,
its geopolitics was characterised by new inventions in diplomacy and warfare that
were nonetheless bound by the social relations of the old. And while filling the
womb of a bloated aristocracy, trade, commerce, and production displayed its first
signs of tearing open this archaic order with the deep breath of primitive accumula-
tion that preceded capitalism’s screeching birth.

The flux of this historical moment is brilliantly captured in German Renaissance
painter Hans Holbein’s 1532 masterpiece The Ambassadors (Figure 1), which illus-
trates a meeting between French envoys Jean de Dinteville and George de Selve in
London. The painting astounds because these two aristocratic subjects are placed at
the periphery, and the only explicitly religious symbol, a cross, is heavily veiled by a

Figure 1. Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533

326 Kerem Nisancioglu



curtain. While these two pillars of medieval power – the church and the aristocracy –
are symbolically pushed to the side, the painting’s focal point – the table – is littered
with objects, with commodities. Was this a prophetic, if unwitting, forecast of
feudalism’s imminent decline? Did it anticipate a capitalist future where social rela-
tions would become ‘mediated by things’?2

Notwithstanding such speculation, the objects on Holbein’s table constitute a
vivid record of the geopolitical milieu that defined European International Relations
in the early sixteenth century.3 On the bottom right hand side of the table, a book of
Lutheran hymns sits by a broken lute signifying the discord and growing divisions in
Christendom. To the left of these items rests Martin Benhaim’s terrestrial globe,
made under the commission of Nuremberg merchants seeking to break the Portuguese
hold on the spice trade. The globe is tilted, so that after European towns, ‘Affrica’
and ‘Brisilici R.’ (Brazil) are the most legible markers, portraying the significance
of the noticeable Linea Divisionis Castellanorum et Portugallenum (‘Line of division
between Spain and Portugal’). This line demarcated the division of the New World
between Habsburg Spain (west of the line) and Portugal (east of the line), signifying
the growing import of Atlantic sea routes, and the subsequent competition between
European states over commercially profitable territories.

In front of the globe is Peter Apian’s A New and Well Grounded Instruction in All
Merchant’s Arithmetic, an early textbook of commercial scholarship that covered
profit-loss calculation, trading customs, navigation, and route mapping. Placed
alongside Benhaim’s globe, it demonstrates the inseparability of commercial interests
from maritime exploration, as well as the increasingly global – and increasingly com-
petitive – character of trade. Above these items, on the top of the table, numerous
scientific instruments highlight the rapid development of techniques in seafaring.
Continuing the theme of Christendom’s decline, it also indicates a mounting shift
away from the divinity of religion as the predominant episteme toward the rationality
of scientific inquiry and humanism.

Finally, linking the resting arms of the two ambassadors, and tying the objects
together, is a Turkish rug. This alerts us to the fact that in the context of growing
Atlantic trade, rebellion against Habsburg rule, and the primitive accumulation of
capital, the Ottoman Empire was a persistent and prominent presence, lying behind
and in many ways underpinning these manifold European developments.4 In this
period, the Ottomans constituted the most prevalent non-Christian ‘Other’ that con-
fronted Europe,5 ‘persistently capturing the headlines and profoundly transforming
the geopolitics of (and beyond) the Mediterranean world’;6 this was ‘an Ottoman
Europe almost as much as it was a Venetian or Habsburg one’.7 Yet despite the
latent centrality implied by Holbein’s painting, dominant theorisations of Early
Modern Europe have been constructed with the Ottomans in absentia. Whether in

2 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 157.
3 The ensuing interpretation is owed to the brilliant appraisal of The Ambassadors in Lisa Jardine,

Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Papermac Macmillan, 1996), pp. 425–36
4 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (New York:

Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 50.
5 Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1999), p. 3.
6 James G. Harper, ‘Introduction’, The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450-1750, ed. James G.

Harper (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 3.
7 Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press 2004), p. 225.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 327



the sphere of the politics, economy, culture or ideology, the emergence of capitalist
modernity is generally understood as a sui generis development specific to Europe.
In short, the history of capitalism’s origins is an unmistakably Eurocentric history.

There are two moments to the Eurocentric approach that I will be the subject
of scrutiny and criticism in this article. The first is historical priority: based on the
assumption that any given trajectory of development is the product of a society’s
own immanent dynamics, Eurocentrism ‘posits the endogenous and autonomous
emergence of modernity in Europe’.8 Thus we find in cultural history that the flower-
ing of the Renaissance was an intra-European phenomenon.9 Analyses of absolutism
and the origins of the modern form of state are similarly conducted entirely on the
terrain of Europe, with non-European cases appearing (if at all) comparatively.10

And the rise of capitalism is understood as an exclusively Western Europe phe-
nomenon, wherein non-European societies appear only as an exploited and passive
periphery.11 In such accounts, Eurocentric historical priority tends to be fortified by
the idea that it was the inherent superiority of Europe socially, politically, culturally,
and materially which made it exceptionally conducive to the development of capitalist
modernity.

This is not to say that studies of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire have been
heedlessly avoided.12 But where its imperial apogee has been studied, it has been
considered ‘social formation apart . . . largely a stranger to European culture, as an
Islamic intrusion on Christendom’.13 Here becomes evident the second moment of
Eurocentrism: an internalist methodology. Expressed either through the comparative
approach14 or methodological nationalism,15 Eurocentrism tends to overlook the
multiple and interactive character of social development. Through this method the
Ottomans (among other non-Europeans) have been opposed to Europe, either as an
ideological ‘Other’16 or as a comparative case study, against which the specificity and
distinctiveness of Western modernity has been defined.17 Through numerous socio-
logical trends the East has in turn been (re)constructed as an intransigent and threat-
ening primordial foe, representing a fundamental and irreconcilable challenge to the

8 Kamran Matin, ‘Redeeming The Universal: Postcolonialism and the Inner Life of Eurocentrism’,
European Journal of International Relations (iFirst: 2012).

9 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin, 1990).
10 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974); Charles Tilly (ed.),

The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975);
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to
A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

11 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the Euro-
pean World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (London: Academic Press, 1974); David S. Landes, The
Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Are Some So Rich and Some So Poor? (London: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1998); Robert Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-
Industrial Europe’, in T. H. Aston, et al., The Brenner Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987); Robert Brenner, ‘The Agrarian Roots of Capitalism,’ in T. H. Aston, et al. (eds), The Brenner
Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 213–328

12 Two giants of European historiography, Braudel and Ranke insisted on the inclusion of the Ottomans
within the Europe in the age of Phillip II and Charles V respectively. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterra-
nean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, volume II (London: Collins, 1973); Leopold
Ranke, The Ottoman and the Spanish Empires in the Seventeenth Century (London: Whittaker & Co.
1843).

13 Anderson, Lineages, p. 397.
14 Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Historical sociology, international relations and connected histories’, Cam-

bridge Review Of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), pp. 127–43.
15 D. Chernilo, ‘Methodological nationalism and the domestic analogy: classical resources for their

critique’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), pp. 87–106; see also Matin, ‘Redeeming’.
16 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
17 Malcom E. Yapp, ‘Europe in the Turkish Mirror’, Past and Present, 137:1 (1992), pp. 134–55.

328 Kerem Nisancioglu



values and traditions of the West.18 In establishing this ‘Iron Curtain’19 of mutual
obstinacy, both Eurocentric internalism and notions of historical priority have been
reinforced, not only ideologically but also materially.

One might expect International Relations (IR) – ‘a discipline that claims to be . . .
of relevance to all peoples and states’20 – to offer a way out of this Eurocentric cul-
de-sac. However, IR too has been built largely on Eurocentric assumptions.21

Mattingly’s classic account of Renaissance diplomacy rests on the discoveries of the
Italian city-states in their relations with each other.22 Similarly, the 1648 treaty of
Westphalia – the very foundational ‘myth’ of modern IR as a distinct practice
and academic discipline23 – is generally considered the product of intra-European
dynamics.24 Where they do exist, substantive engagements with the East tend to
emphasise the ‘Iron Curtain’ of ideological and cultural difference.25 The historical
sociological turn in IR (HSIR)26 has not fared much better. Concerned explicitly
with challenging ahistorical and unsociological conceptions of the international,
HSIR has developed convincing arguments that uncover the transience, mutability,
and thus the historical specificity of modern IR. But HSIR too has predominantly
conducted its analysis on the basis of European history.27

Recent scholarship in the field of World History28 and Postcolonial Studies29 has
attempted to ‘ReOrient’30 historiography in order to both destabilise and potentially

18 Samuel P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996).

19 Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 12.

20 Branwen Gruffyd-Jones, Decolonising International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2006), p. 2.

21 John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–
2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

22 Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Dover Publications, 1988).
23 Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (London: Verso, 2003).
24 See John M. Hobson, ‘Provincializing Westphalia: The Eastern Origins of Sovereignty’, International

Politics, 46:6 (2009), pp. 671–90; Turan Kayaoglu, ‘Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Rela-
tions Theory’, International Studies Review, 12:2 (2010), pp. 193–217.

25 For instance in the English School. See Martin Wight (ed.), Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester Uni-
versity Press, 1977); Hadley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London:
Macmillan Press, 1977); Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (New York: Routledge,
1992).

26 See Stephen Hobden, International Relations and Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1998);
Stephen Hobden and John Hobson (eds), Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); George Lawson, ‘Historical sociology in international relations:
open society, research programme and vocation’, International Politics, 44:4 (2007), pp. 343–68.

27 Bhambra, ‘Historical sociology’; Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Talking Among Themselves? Weberian
and Marxist Historical Sociologies as Dialogues Without ‘‘Others’’ ’, Millenium, 39:1 (2011), pp. 667–
81.

28 James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China,
Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004); Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jack Goldstone,
Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500-1850 (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008).

29 Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Con-
nected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies,
31:3 (1997), pp. 735–62; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and His-
torical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey,
‘The postcolonial moment in security studies’, Review of International Studies, 32 (2006), pp. 329–52;
Robbie Shilliam (ed.), International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism
and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010); Amitav Ancharya, ‘Dialogue and
Discovery: In Search of International Relations Theories Beyond the West’, Millennium, 39:3 (2011),
pp. 619–37; B. Gruffyd Jones (ed.), Decolonizing; Bhambra, ‘Talking’; Bhambra, ‘Historical’.

30 A. G. Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998).

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 329



escape the Eurocentric trap. However, despite providing extensive additional empiri-
cal frameworks that have decentred the historical priority of Europe, these works
have tended to eschew any concomitant theorisation of capitalism’s origins in light
of these empirical findings. In the absence of such an endeavour the dominant Euro-
centric theorisations of capitalism’s origins have either suffered no fatal blows or, at
worst, been actively reproduced.31 To modify Frederick Cooper’s call to arms: in
order to truly ‘provincialise’ Europe one must dissect European history itself, and
there is no more central myth to be dissected than that of narrating European history
around the history of capitalism.32 A truly non-Eurocentric interpretation of history
should seek to pose an alternative theoretical framework to Eurocentric conceptions
in which to conduct historical and sociological study.33

Attempts to expand Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development
(U&CD) as an historically and sociologically sensitive theory of the international34

have sought to rescue historical materialist accounts from the charge of Eurocen-
trism, and in doing so provide precisely the sort of alternative theorisation of history
that World Historical and Postcolonial approaches have hitherto elided.35 However,
there remain certain tensions that the theory is yet to overcome. John Hobson
suggests U&CD is no less guilty of conflating ‘the international’ with exclusively ‘in-
tra-European relations’, thus falling prey to the typical Eurocentric assumption of
‘Western priority and Eastern passivity’.36 Similarly, Gurminder Bhambra suggests
that for all of U&CD’s focus on societal difference, its very origins and dynamism
remains wedded to a Eurocentric conception of capitalism derived from the Enlight-
enment conception of stadial development.37 Without problematising the European
origins of capitalism, the non-West remains excluded as an empirically significant
yet theoretically secondary entity.38 For U&CD to simply invoke inter-societal pro-
cesses is therefore not enough. It must also be capable of establishing an alternative
conception of capitalism that includes the historical significance of non-European
societies as active agents while departing from a stadial conception of development.

31 Sandra Halperin, ‘International Relations Theory and the Hegemony of Western Conceptions of
Modernity’, in B. Gruffyd Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2006), p. 43.

32 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), p. 22.

33 Matin, ‘Redeeming’, p. 12.
34 Justin Rosenberg, ‘Why is There no International Historical Sociology?’, European Journal of Inter-

national Relations, 12:3 (2006), pp. 307–40; Justin Rosenberg, ‘Basic Problems in the Theory of
Uneven and Combined Development. Part II: Unevenness and Political Multiplicity’, Cambridge
Review of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), 165–89; Kamran Matin, ‘Uneven and Combined Develop-
ment in World History: The International Relations of State-formation in Premodern Iran’, European
Journal of International Relations, 13:3 (2007), pp. 419–47; see also Neil Davidson, ‘Putting the Nation
Back into the International’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22:1 (2009), pp. 9–28; Jamie
Allinson and Alex Anievas, ‘Approaching the ‘‘international’’: beyond Political Marxism’, in ed.
Anievas Marxism and World Politics (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 197–214.

35 See Matin, ‘U&CD’; Matin ‘Redeeming’; Robert Shilliam, ‘The Atlantic as a Vector of Uneven
and Combined Development’, Cambridge Review of International Relations, 22:1 (2009), pp. 69–88;
John Hobson, ‘What’s at Stake in the Neo-Trotskyist Debate? Towards a Non-Eurocentric Historical
Sociology of Uneven and Combined Development’, Millennium, 40:1 (2011).

36 Hobson, ‘What’s at Stake?’, p. 153.
37 Bhambra, ‘Talking’, p. 676.
38 Bhambra, ‘Talking’, pp. 668, 673; cf. Bhambra, ‘Historical’, pp. 128, 135; Cemal Burak Tansel, ‘Deaf-

ing Silence: Historical Materialism, International Relations, and the Question of the International’,
Paper presented at ‘First Spectrum Conference on Global Studies: Historical Sociology, Historical
Materialism and International Relations’ (2–3 November 2012), pp. 1–25, pp. 10–12.

330 Kerem Nisancioglu



In this article, I propose we ‘return to Holbein’ via Trotsky, and attempt to re-
capture the significance of the Ottomans in the geopolitics of the long sixteenth
century by deploying the U&CD as a theoretical framework. In particular, I seek to
bring out the causal impact of the Ottoman Empire on the primary historical themes
in The Ambassadors – the political fragmentation of feudal Europe in resistance
to Habsburg attempts at Empire building, the structural shift away from the geo-
political and commercial centrality of the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic, and
the primitive accumulation of capital. I argue that these developments – each crucial
to the emergence of capitalism – were causally inseparable from Ottoman geopolitical
pressure on Europe. In developing this argument, I seek to challenge and criticise
Eurocentrism through the theory of U&CD and in the process defend its non-
Eurocentric credentials. I argue that U&CD can make a positive and illuminating
contribution to these debates because it speaks directly to each of the two moments
of Eurocentrism identified above. By positing the multilinear character of develop-
ment as its ‘most general law’,39 uneven development provides a corrective to the
ontological singularity and attendant unilinear conception of history that underpins
assumptions of historical priority.40 By positing the inherently interactive character
of this multiplicity, ‘combined development’41 challenges the methodological inter-
nalism of the comparative approach.

How this theoretical framework is operationalised can be demonstrated through
an outline of U&CD’s core concepts – unevenness and combination. Unevenness
denotes spatial and temporal variations between societies as an ontological feature
and thus perennial sociological condition of human history. As both cause and effect
of this international differentiation, unevenness is also expressed in the forms of
internal differentiation that give localities their own peculiar form of development.42

For example, in The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky emphasises how
imbalances in Russia’s institutional, cultural, and class relations contrasted with
‘more advanced’ European forms43 due to its peculiar inter-societal position standing
both geographically and historically between Europe and Asia.44 The ontological
fact of multiplicity thus disrupts any conception of unilinearity implied by stadial
theories of development:

[A]t any given historical point, the human world has comprised a variety of societies, of
differing sizes, cultural forms and levels of material development. Empirically speaking,
there is not, and never has been, a single path taken by social development.45

Moreover, such differentiation in social forms is not generated hermetically and
autonomously, but interactively. Developmentally differentiated societies constantly
impact upon one another’s development – what Trotsky called ‘the whip of external
necessity’.46 Consequently the unevenness of social development is constituted not
only by internal social relations but also by social relations between societies. The

39 Leon Trotsky The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Pathfinder Press, 2007), p. 28.
40 Rosenberg, ‘Why?’, p. 313.
41 Trotsky, History, p. 28.
42 Luke Cooper, ‘Uneven and combined development in modern world history: Chinese economic reform

in the longue durée of capitalist modernity’, Paper presented at ‘International Studies Association
Annual Convention’, San Diego (1–4 April 2012), p. 6.

43 Trotsky, History, pp. 474–76..
44 Trotsky, History, p. 26.
45 Rosenberg, ‘Why?’, p. 313.
46 Trotsky, History, pp. 28, 477.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 331



relational character that emerges out of this interactive multiplicity is what Trotsky
terms ‘combined development’. For example, Trotsky argues that the impulse for
Russia’s capitalist development was the necessity of ‘catching up’ with the develop-
mentally more advanced European states. The ‘privilege’47 of Russia’s backwardness
meant that this catch up occurred by assimilating the ‘ready-made’ developmental
achievements of advanced capitalist countries, allowing Russia to skip over the
‘intermediate steps’ of development.48 In contrast to the European model that Russia
sought to emulate, capitalist development was refracted through pre-existing local
social relations, giving rise to further developmental unevenness between Russia and
its European counterparts. It was this peculiarity of Russia’s combined development
that made it uniquely open to proletarian revolution. Combined development thus
involves a ‘drawing together of the different stages of the journey’49 – of combining
the spatio-temporally variegated experiences of different societies – into amalgams of
‘contemporary and more archaic’.50

In short, U&CD posits that historical processes are always the outcome of
multiple determinations arising from spatially diverse developmental trajectories
that converge or combine in any given conjuncture. Thus instead of reproducing a
stadial conception of development, U&CD ‘scrambles and subverts it’.51 And rather
than eliding the significance of non-Western agency, U&CD opens the potential to
reinsert it into our historical narratives and theoretical conceptualisations. Seen in
this light, the Eurocentric emphasis in the historiography of capitalism’s origins
becomes questionable. For a singular emphasis on Europe would constitute only
one of many ‘spatio-temporal vectors of U&CD’52 that would have to be com-
plimented and combined with other determinations analysed from alternative spatial
vantage points;53 one that would have to be related to – among others – extra-
European determinations bound in the histories of colonialism,54 slavery55 and
global trade.56 Put simply, U&CD stresses an ‘internationalist historiography’57 of
the origins of capitalism.

However, I do not intend to argue that capitalism’s origins were entirely extra-
European, for this would substitute one ethnocentrism with another; nor do I seek
to substantially diminish the centrality or uniqueness of Europe in this process. As
such, and despite the provocative nature of the title, this article does not provide a
full or total account of the origins of capitalism. It is rather restricted to the con-
siderably more modest claim and demonstration that the Euro-Ottoman relations of
the Early Modern period constituted one of many determinations that needs to be

47 Trotsky, History, p. 27.
48 Trotsky, History, pp. 27, 476.
49 Trotsky, History, p. 26.
50 Trotsky, History, p. 27.
51 Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, ‘What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the

Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West’, Millennium (forthcoming, 2014).
52 Alex Anievas ‘1914 in World Historical Perspective: The Uneven and Combined Origins of the

First World War’, European Journal of International Relations (iFirst: 2013); see also Anievas and
Nisancioglu, ‘What’s at Stake’.

53 Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003),
p. 110.

54 Blaut, Colonizer’s Model.
55 Shilliam, ‘Atlantic’.
56 Jairus Banaji, Theory as History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), pp. 262–76.
57 Banaji, Theory, p. 253.

332 Kerem Nisancioglu



integrated, indeed combined, with other spatio-temporally distinct historical deter-
minations, both European and extra-European. But this article seeks to go beyond
simply adding an alternative empirical framework to our understanding of capitalism’s
origins. What must also be stressed is that in addition to challenging Eurocentrism in
a negative sense, a positive elaboration of U&CD can also provide an alternative
theoretical framework in which capitalism’s origins can be understood.

In the ensuing examination of Euro-Ottoman relations, these two core concepts –
unevenness and combination – will order the structure. In the first section I aim to
challenge the Eurocentric assumption of historical priority, by demonstrating that
sixteenth-century Euro-Ottoman relations were marked by material relations of
uneven development. Accordingly unevenness denotes, firstly, the political, military,
economic, and territorial advantages held by the Ottoman Empire over Europe; and
secondly, the unevenness in social forms of internal differentiation – of ruling and
ruled class in agrarian production on the one hand, and between merchant and state
on the other. These forms of unevenness entailed both an Ottoman ‘whip of external
necessity’ and a European ‘privilege of backwardness’, which I argue were crucial
preconditions for the eventual emergence of capitalism within Europe.58 In the
second section, I attempt to expose the limitations of methodological internalism by
examining the importance of the extensive interactivity that this whip of external
necessity entailed – a form of combined development. In particular I argue that the
Euro-Ottoman ‘combination’ causally impacted European development in three
crucial ways. Firstly, it curtailed the imperial threat of the Habsburgs, abetting the
fragmentation of Europe; secondly, in doing so it brought about a structural shift
from Mediterranean to Atlantic trade and north-west European dominance; thirdly,
these two factors combined to give England the geopolitical space in which the
primitive accumulation of capital could take place.

Unevenness: a clash of social reproduction

Ottoman relations with the outside world have primarily been constructed through
an idealised and uncritical notion of diplomatic precepts rooted in Sharia law.59

Here, the supposed self-regarded superiority of the Ottomans constituted the basis
of a unilateral policy toward international affairs, and a religious commitment to
permanent war with Europe. This mystified conception of Euro-Ottoman relations –
articulated as a continuation of the eternal clash between Christianity and Islam –
was captured in the literature, philosophy, and art of Early Modern Europe. In the
work of artist Leonardo Dati, Sultan Mehment II was portrayed as a minion of the
devil,60 while Martin Luther argued that the Ottomans were a punishment from God
for the degeneration of Christianity.61 Yet alongside this widespread belligerence,

58 Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World (London: Verso, 2008), p. 141; Hobson, ‘What’s at
Stake’, p. 148.

59 Jacob C. Hurewitz, ‘Ottoman Diplomacy and the European States System’, The Middle East Journal,
15, Spring (1961), pp. 145–6; Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1968), pp. 30–2; Thomas Naff, ‘The Ottoman Empire and European States System’, in
Hadley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of the International Society (Oxford: Clarendon,
1984), p. 144.

60 Bisaha, Creating, p. 162.
61 Mustafa Soykut, ‘Introduction’, in Mustafa Soykut (ed.), Historical Image of the Turk in Europe: Fifteenth

Century to the Present (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2003), p. 26.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 333



there were also significant levels of European appreciation for Ottoman achieve-
ments. For example, reflecting the resistance to the Habsburg alliance, German
pamphleteers downplayed the need to intervene militarily against the Ottomans,
with some pointing to the Turks’ efficiency as a model for German reform,62 while
the legal code established by Suleiman II was studied by a legal mission sent from
England by Henry VIII.63 In their examinations of European state forms, Machiavelli,
Bodin, Bacon, Montaigne, and Giovolo all heralded Ottoman military discipline and
administrative efficiency.64

This mixture of fear, awe, belligerence, and admiration reflected a material relation
of unevenness in which the Ottomans held numerous direct advantages over their
European allies and foes.65 The Ottomans were able to raise vast and loyal armies
for military campaigns, while maintaining comparatively uninterrupted lines of com-
munication and supplies.66 Ottoman intra-ruling class unity also contrasted signifi-
cantly with the fragmentation associated with the parcellised sovereignty of feudal
Europe,67 a developmental advantage often exploited by the Ottoman Empire in
military campaigns68 making them geopolitical accumulators – empire builders –
extraordinaires. This relation of unevenness was neatly captured by Aeneas Sylvius
(future Pope Pius II) who, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, reflected on the
existential threat the Ottomans posed to a disunited Christendom:

[Christendom] is a body without a head, a republic without laws or magistrates . . . every state
has a separate prince, and every prince has a separate interest . . . Who will make the English
love the French? Who will unite the Genoese and the Aragonese? Who will reconcile the
Germans with the Hungarians and Bohemians? . . . If you lead a small army against the
Turks you will easily be overcome; if a large one, it will soon fall into confusion.69

While Europe struggled with divisions, the Ottomans faced them as a unified resource-
ful and disciplined force,70 one that was able to consistently expand into Europe and
beyond, absorbing and converting Europeans to the ‘Ottoman way’. As a contem-
porary lamented:

how it comes to pass, that so many of our men should continually revolt, and abjuring all
Christian rites, become affectors of that impious Mahumetane sect, whilst on the other part
we finde none or very few of those repaying unto us.71

62 Stephen A. Fischer-Galati, Ottoman Imperialism and German Protestantism 1521-1555 (Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 18.

63 Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. 683.
64 Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London: University of Washington Press: 1987),

p. 37, fn. 82.
65 Mehmet S. Birdal, The Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans: From Global Imperial Power to Abso-

lutism (London: I. B. Taurus, 2011), pp. 119–20.
66 Gabor Agoston, ‘Ottoman Warfare in Europe 1453–1826’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), European Warfare,

1453–1815 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 118–44; Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare,
1500–1700 (London: UCL Press, 1999), pp. 85–104.

67 Teschke, Myth, pp. 43–4.
68 Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517) and the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century

World War’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 4:1 (1973), pp. 55–76, esp. pp. 72–4.
69 Paul Coles, The Ottoman Impact on Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 100.
70 Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, p. 73. See also Fischer-Galati, Ottoman Imperialism, p.

18; Murphey, Ottoman, p. 6; Bisaha, Creating, p. 162; Soykut, ‘Introduction’, p. 26; Süheyla Artemel,
‘The View of the Turks from the Perspective of the Humanists in Renaissance England’, in Soykut
(ed.), Historical Image of the Turk in Europe (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2003), pp. 149–73, esp. pp. 161, 163;
Suriaya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: IB Taurus, 2004), p. 101.

71 Matar, Turks, p. 9.

334 Kerem Nisancioglu



The unevenness between the Ottomans and Europe was underpinned by the predom-
inant practices of social reproduction created by forms of internal differentiation.
This internally differentiated form of unevenness was expressed in two ways. The first
was in the relations that pertained among social classes based on predominantly
agrarian production: between exploiter and exploited (and therefore also in the forms
and character of surplus appropriation by the ruling class in these respective societies);
and between different sections of the ruling class (and hence political relations as
such). The second was the relationship between merchants and states that these
respective forms of social reproduction gave rise to. These forms of unevenness will
be considered in turn.

Agrarian class relations and ruling class reproduction

Ottoman society was characterised by a tributary mode of production, defined firstly,
by the vertical opposition of a ruling, tax collecting, class in a contradictory relation-
ship with a class of peasants that were exploited for the appropriation of productive
surplus;72 and secondly, by the horizontal differentiation between ‘landed nobility’
and ‘patrimonial authority’ within the tax collecting class, wherein the latter con-
trolled the former as well as the means of production.73

The first – ruling class-peasant – division was distinct from the lord-peasant rela-
tion in Europe due to the appropriation of surplus through tax (as opposed to rent)
collection and the regulation of appropriation by regional and central agents of the
Ottoman state.74 This meant that in comparison to Europe, peasants had greater
access to their surplus because of the preservation of subsistence plots, as well
as state fixed limitations on taxation by local intermediaries.75 Peasants also had
inalienable rights to land,76 were better protected from market fluctuations,77 had
the option – albeit limited – to legal recourse should their conditions worsen78 and
were legally considered free.79

The second division – between landed nobility and patrimonial authority – was
distinct from intra-ruling class relations in Europe because all land was formally
owned by the Sultan, while military fiefs were predominantly non-hereditary,
changeable, and regularly rotated amongst individuals in the ruling class.80 This

72 Halil Berktay, ‘The feudalism debate: The Turkish end – is ‘‘tax – vs. – rent’’ necessarily the product
and sign of a modal difference?’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 14:3 (1987), pp. 291–333, esp. p. 311.

73 Banaji, Theory, p. 23.
74 Caglar Keyder, ‘The Dissolution of the Asiatic Mode of Production’, Economy and Society, 5:2 (1976),

pp. 178–96.
75 Halil Inalcik, ‘State Land and Peasant’, in Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert (eds), An Economic and

Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
pp. 103–78, esp. p. 115.

76 Huri Islamoglu-Inan, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional
Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia During the Sixteenth Century (Brill, 1994), p. 57.

77 Islamoglu-Inan, State, p. 8.
78 Islamoglu-Inan, State, pp. xiv–xv.
79 Suriaya Faroqhi, ‘Rural life’, in Suriaya Faroqhi (ed.), Cambridge History of Turkey Vol. III: The

Cambridge History of Turkey: the Later Ottoman Empire 1603-1839 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2006), p. 383.

80 Anderson, Lineages, p. 370.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 335



created a contradictory distribution of political power and surplus, forming a centre-
periphery sociopolitical structure between sections of the ruling class.81 Located pri-
marily in Constantinople, the Ottoman centre consisted in the Sultan and his slave
corps – comprising a large and unified bureaucratic administration and the Janissary
standing army. This centralised state was coupled with devolution of power and
relative autonomy of authority, jurisdiction, and religion in the Ottoman provinces.82

As an offshoot of the devolution of power, the Ottomans often conquered territories
without fundamentally transforming their own peculiar rules of reproduction be it
legal, ideological, and even material.83 Consequently the Ottomans proved adept
at mobilising local resources and absorbing the material and ideational advances of
occupied territories. (Geo)political accumulation also played an essential role in
maintaining the loyalty of disparate sections of the ruling class, as well as coercing
rebellions when necessary. Provincial power holders and Janissaries were allocated
spoils of conquest – often booty, but primarily land – as a means of maintaining
consent, while the practice of relocating notables to different regions of the empire
displaced any potential accumulation of provincial power.84

These devices of ruling class reproduction proved remarkably efficient, consider-
ably more so than the contemporaneous feudal form found in Europe. Due to the
nature of Ottoman power-sharing and the relocation of provincial landholders, there
was limited potential for unified class interests acting outside the purview of – or
counter to – the interests of the Ottoman state.85 Instead, discontented sections
of the ruling class sought to articulate disaffection within the confines of the extant
political system, while the state was able to maintain the internal integrity of the
empire by co-opting local elites86 or coercively centralising power.87 Furthermore,
the relatively lenient form of surplus extraction levied on Ottoman peasants, as well
as tolerance for local religions and identities, meant that rebellion in the countryside
was a less marked feature of the Ottoman tributary mode than the European feudal
mode.88 Hence there was little impulse or necessity for reform of the tributary system
from above, or significant pressure for revolution from below.

The unity and stability of the Ottoman Empire contrasted significantly with Euro-
pean forms of social reproduction. These too were predominantly based agrarian
production where peasants had direct access to means of production and also there-
fore subsistence. And as with the Ottoman Empire this condition meant that an
aristocratic ruling class required political, ideological, and military means in order
to exploit this peasantry and extract a surplus for the purpose of lordly consumption.
However, unlike the Ottoman Empire these means were not controlled by or con-
centrated in a centralised and unified state, but were dispersed across the nobility.

81 Serif Mardin, ‘Power, Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire’, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 11 (1969), pp. 258–81; John Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Produc-
tion (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 159–69.

82 Coles, Ottoman Impact, pp. 98–9.
83 Goffman, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 8–12.
84 Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600 (London: Phoenix, 2000), pp. 107–

16; William J, Griswold, The Great Anatolian Rebellion: 1000-1020/1591-1611 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz
Verlag, 1983), pp. 9–10.

85 Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (London: Cornell
University Press, 1994), pp. 58–9.

86 Barkey, Bandits, p. 212.
87 Barkey, Bandits, p. 192.
88 Barkey, Bandits, pp. 91, 241.

336 Kerem Nisancioglu



Consequently peasants were more susceptible to coercive squeezes on their produc-
tivity, and had no recourse to outside legal protection from their lords. This regularly
led to declining living conditions and in turn, rural rebellions. At the same time, the
dispersion of coercive capabilities meant that political authority in Europe was frag-
mented, parcellised, and therefore also highly competitive, with heightened intra-
lordly struggle taking place over territory both within and outside of feudal ‘states’.89

In short, both war and rebellion was more pronounced within Europe than it was
within Ottoman territories.

Merchants, the state, and war

These conditions determined peculiar and uneven relations between merchants and
the state. Because of the fragmented and parcellised character of political power,
Europeans that wanted to make war required extraordinary financing outside of day
to day ruling class reproduction. In order to raise armies, European rulers borrowed
from international banking houses90 or asked wealthy and powerful sections of society
for contributions, either in terms of military support or taxes.91 This was often
conducted via ‘local estates and assemblies or city-leagues in which the merchant-
entrepreneurial class wielded significant – even military – power’.92 Hence a by-
product of European feudal war-making was an attendant rise in the political autonomy,
power and influence of merchants, with increasing degrees of representation in the
decision-making structures of states.93

In contrast, the Ottoman Empire had little requirement for monetary financing
outside of the customary levies already imposed on agrarian production. Conse-
quently, there was scarce potential for autonomous merchant activity outside of the
functional requirements of the tributary state. The relations between merchants and
the Ottoman ruling class were balanced considerably in favour of the latter, who e-
xercised significant control over merchant activity through the guild system;94 con-
flicts or tensions between merchants and guilds tended to curtail merchant autonomy
and power,95 while merchant access to state apparatuses and decision-making was
limited.96 Accumulation of wealth was discouraged and restricted by controlling
coin circulation, production, and prices and anti-luxury laws were deployed to
confiscate merchant fortunes.97 Interregional trade was heavily regulated, in which
provisions for towns came almost entirely from their own hinterlands thus narrowing
the geographical remit of production and distribution to local regions.98 Caravan

89 Teschke, Myth, pp. 43–4.
90 Eric H. Mielants, The Origins of Capitalism and ‘Rise of the West’ (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 2007), p. 70.
91 Tilly, Formation, pp. 73–4.
92 Mielants, Origins, p. 70.
93 Ibid., p. 79; see also Daniel Chirot, ‘The Rise of the West’, American Sociological Review, 50:2 (1985),

pp. 181–95.
94 Halil Inalcik, ‘Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire’, The Journal of Economic History, 29:1

(1969), pp. 97–140, esp. p. 104.
95 Inalcik, ‘Capital’, pp. 106.
96 Keyder, ‘Dissolution’.
97 Inalcik, ‘Capital’, pp. 104–5, esp. p. 107; Suriaya Faroqhi, ‘Trade: Regional Interregional and Interna-

tional’, in Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert (eds), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
Empire, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 474–531.

98 Islamoglu-Inan, State, p. 204.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 337



endpoints geographically coincided with seats of government authority, ensuring
close supervision of prices and commodities traded. Tax on trade enabled state
extraction of surpluses from mercantile activity.99

The tension between the state and merchants was also present geopolitically. For
a ruling class fundamentally dependent on agriculture and tribute for their reproduc-
tion, the capture of trade routes was considered functional to tributary power, to
bring those outside of it imperial purview within its tributary regime.100 While the
state could at times show signs of ‘economic intentionality’,101 merchants were not
considered important enough for state protection or support – agriculture remained
the priority. Following the capture of the Mamluk Empire in 1517, the Ottoman
naval commander Selman Reis believed that the Portuguese could have been driven
out of the India Ocean.102 But instead, imperial policy reverted to territorial expan-
sion into the agriculturally more fertile and populous territories of South East Europe.
That the Ottomans did not pursue the Indian course was primarily due to the repro-
ductive requirements of a ruling class based on agrarian production,103 reflecting the
swelling claims made by provincial notables on access to booty, land, and thus power
as such.104

In contrast, European powers were explicitly and intimately focused on bringing
under direct conquest and political control commercially valuable territories for
specifically commercial purposes. The reason was due to the relative backwardness
of European feudal reproduction, which was dependent of the wealth drawn from
merchants and financiers to either fund (geo)political accumulation (in the case of
Habsburg Spain and Austria) or for the direct reproduction of the ruling class itself
(in the case of city-states such as Genoa and Venice). Consequently, the state was
sensitive to, or at the behest of, merchant interests, wherein state resources, especially
military, were deployed in order to obtain commercial advantages.105 And such was
the extent and autonomy of merchant power that no European Emperor could have
withdrawn or demanded the return of ships in the Indian Ocean as the Ottomans had
done.106

These uneven internal relations – between ruling and ruled class in agrarian pro-
duction on the one hand, and between state and merchant of the other – can there-
fore be demonstrated as a determinant of an international relation of Euro-Ottoman
unevenness – the relative backwardness of the European ruling classes, and the com-
parative weakness in its form of social reproduction when opposed to the Ottoman

99 Keyder, ‘Dissolution’, pp. 179, 184.
100 Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Evolution of the Ottoman Seaborne Empire in the Age of Oceanic Discoveries

1453–1525’, The American Historical Review, 75:7 (1970), pp. 1892–919 esp. p. 1916; Hess, ‘Ottoman
Conquest’, p. 75.

101 Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 7.

102 Salih Ozbaran, ‘Expansion in the Southern Seas’, in Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar (eds), Suleyman
the Second (ie the First) and His Time (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), pp. 211–18, esp. p. 215.

103 Giancarlo Casale, ‘Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and the
Ottoman Plot to Rule the World’, Journal of World History, 18:3 (2007), pp. 267–96, esp. p. 291;
Hess, ‘Conquest’, p. 69.

104 Faroqhi, Ottoman Empire, p. 12.
105 Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade and World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1984), pp. 116, 128.
106 Ronald Findlay, ‘The Roots of Divergence: Western Economic History in Comparative Perspective’,

American Economic Review, 82:2 (1992), pp. 158–61; Leften S. Stavrianos, A Global History (New
Jersey: Prentice Hall 1999).

338 Kerem Nisancioglu



Empire. These European ‘privileges of backwardness’ encouraged and compelled its
people – both ruling and ruled classes – to develop and adopt new ways of securing
their social reproduction. At the same time, the relative strength of the Ottoman
social form entailed a ‘disadvantage of progressiveness’, wherein the stability of
social reproduction provided no immanent impulse for change or development. This
relation of unevenness goes some way to explaining why the so-called miracle of
capitalism would occur in Europe, and why it would not be repeated in Ottoman
territories. That this divergence was a product of Ottoman progressiveness and Euro-
pean backwardness suggests that Eurocentric assumptions of historical priority need
to be reconsidered. Moreover, these two elements – Ottoman strength; European
privilege of backwardness – were ultimately interrelated and co-constitutive phenomena.
As a consequence of its comparative strength, the geopolitical pressure of Ottomans
constantly affected and redirected European development, in turn compelling
changes in its forms social reproduction.107 This meant that while the Ottomans
were faced as a significant existential threat, they were also an opportunity for the
most backward part of Europe – the north-west – to outflank and outstrip the more
advanced Habsburg Empire and Italian city-states.

Combination: Euro-Ottoman geopolitical relations

Due to the European condition of backwardness, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
recovery of European feudalism, and the flourishing of commerce and the cultural
Renaissance that accompanied it, were directly connected to the establishment of
peaceful lines of communication and trade between East and West that followed the
expansion and consolidation of the Ottoman Empire.108 Through the institutional
support of the Ottoman state, Pax Ottomana lowered commercial protection and
transaction costs, established relatively uniform trading practices and hastened the
alacrity of trade. On land and sea Ottoman rule was crucial to safeguarding traders
from banditry or piracy, while building roads and canal routes that would facilitate
interregional trade.109 The emergence of a Pax Ottomana brought together highways
of commerce linking Russia and Central Asia with Europe via the Black Sea, and the
Levant and North Africa to the Indian Ocean where the bulk of Euro-Asian trade
was conducted.110 The Ottoman Empire thus brought about an economic and geo-
graphic combination of otherwise disparate communities, acting as ‘the hinge that
connected the rapidly growing economies of Europe with those of the East’ (see
Figure 2).111

107 What Trotsky would have called a ‘whip of external necessity’.
108 Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999), p. 123; R. J. Barendse, ‘Trade and State in the Arabian Seas: A Survey from the Fifteenth
to the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of World History, 11:2 (2000), pp. 173–225, esp. p. 192; Giancarlo
Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3.

109 James Mather, Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World (London: Yale University Press,
2009), p. 26; Inalcik, ‘Capital’, p. 97, fn. 2; Niels Stensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution in the Seven-
teenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (London: University
of Chicago, 1974), p. 62.

110 Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), p. 23; Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 93.

111 Thomas W. Gallant, ‘Europe and the Mediterranean: a Reassessment’ in Gerard Delanty (ed.), Europe
and Asia Beyond East and West (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 126.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 339



Trade and communication between the Ottomans and Europe gave rise to various
kinds of combined development assisting the transmission of social and technological
knowledge, leading to a spurt of development in European manufacturing, particularly
those sectors imitating Eastern products.112 The boost in French economic activity
following a trade agreement with the Ottomans led to the proto-industrialisation of
towns such as Marseille.113 The competition in silk markets between the Levant and
Venice inspired the creation of the hydraulic mill in Bologna, which would later
be adapted to construct Lombe’s Mill in Derby in the early eighteenth century114 –
arguably the world’s first fully mechanised factory.115 Because Ottoman merchants
themselves were active agents in bolstering trade within the Empire and beyond, their
own credit system and methods of accumulation such as the simsar monopoly asso-
ciation and mudaraba advance system became woven into the fabric of European
commercial relations, prefiguring the ‘complete control of a commodity from pro-
duction to sale’116 that would become the hallmark of company capitalism.117

Such combination was especially pronounced in the development of European
culture over the course of the Renaissance.118 In certain cases, European artists such

112 Jack Goody, ‘Europe and Islam’, in Gerard Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia Beyond East and West
(London: Routledge, 2006), p. 144.

113 De Lamar Jensen, ‘The Ottoman Turks in the Sixteenth Century French Diplomacy’, The Sixteenth
Century Journal, 16:4 (1985), pp. 451–70, esp. p. 464.

114 Murat Cizakca, ‘Price History and the Bursa Silk Industry: A Study in Ottoman Industrial Decline,
1550–1650’, in Huri Islamoglu-Inan (ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 247–62, esp. pp. 253–54; Goody, ‘Europe’, p. 143; Banaji,
Theory, pp. 270–73.

115 Gillian Darling, Factory (London: Reaktion, 2003), p. 104.
116 Geoffrey V. Scammell, The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Empires, c. 800-1650

(London: Methuen and Co. Ltd. 1981), p. 205.
117 Inalcik, ‘Capital’, pp. 100–1; Goody, ‘Europe’, p. 143.
118 Jardine, Worldy Goods.

Figure 2. Eurasian trade routes during Pax Ottmana

340 Kerem Nisancioglu



as Gentile Bellini and Constanzo da Ferrara spent time in the Ottoman court and
worked under the Sultan’s commission.119 Ottoman imagery was widely featured
often by Italian Renaissance painters seeking to elicit support for crusades by featur-
ing the Ottomans as the embodiment of the Islamic threat.120 Humanist literature –
from Thomas More to William Shakespeare – would similarly deploy the Ottomans
as a comparative of allegorical vehicle through which medieval forms European
statecraft could be analysed and criticised.121 This emphasis of Euro-Ottoman com-
parison therefore reflected a period of self-examination and criticism in the context
of Christendom’s breakdown as a unifying principle.122 It was in the context of
the Ottoman threat that propagandists, politicians, and thinkers began talking
about Europe as a normative as well as geographical concept: the aforementioned
Aneaus Sylvius invented the very adjective ‘European’ following the fall of Con-
stantinople to the Ottomans,123 while Habsburg and Polish publicists began appealing
to secular European values in order to defend Hungarian territories from Ottoman
incursions.124

An Ottoman ‘whip of external necessity’

Euro-Ottoman combined development was however most pronounced under the
‘whip’ of Ottoman geopolitical pressure on Europe. Indeed, despite the regenerative
effects of Pax Ottomana, for most of Europe the growth of the Ottoman Empire was
met with trepidation and hostility in equal measure. The efficacy of the Ottoman
military meant that from the mid-fifteenth century and ‘[u]p to 1596 there was no
question of international politics, which did not somehow involve the Ottomans.’125

Such involvement was permanent and regularly hostile. In an event that shook Europe,
the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453. By the end of fifteenth century,
they had captured Greece, Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, and Croatia. The Ottoman
whip of geopolitical pressure was not restricted to land and was often at its fiercest
in the Mediterranean, where military conflict tended to blight seafaring conditions
often ‘cutting the arteries of Venetian seaborne trade’.126 The Spanish and the Portu-
guese fared little better, failing to push into a sea rife with Ottoman sponsored corsair
attacks on merchant ships.127 Moreover, following Ottoman conquests of the Black
Sea and Red Sea, hitherto dominant European traders were only allowed conditional
admittance.128 Having obtained these territories, commercial activity became subject
to aforementioned state regulations and supervision thus limiting the export of key
commodities such as timber, horses, grain, and alum.129

119 Jardine and Brotton, Global, p. 42. Unsuccessful attempts were also made to tempt Leonardo da
Vinci and Michelangelo to the Ottoman court. See Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European
Thinkers on Oriental Despotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009), p. 13.

120 Soykut, ‘Introduction’, p. 74.
121 Artemel, ‘View’, pp. 157–63.
122 Yapp, ‘Europe in the Turkish Mirror’, pp. 134–55; Coles, Ottoman Impact, pp. 148–9.
123 Yapp, ‘Europe’, p. 141.
124 Coles, Ottoman Impact, p. 148.
125 Halil Inalcik, Ottoman Empire, p. 35.
126 Scammell, World Encompassed, p. 132.
127 Coles, Ottoman Impact, p. 138; Hess, Forgotten Frontier, p. 125.
128 Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, p. 7; Hess, ‘Conquest’, p. 71; Inalcik, Ottoman Empire, pp. 129–33.
129 Fleet, European and Islamic Trade, pp. 132–3.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 341



Having pressed on to Budapest and Vienna in the 1520s, Ottoman armies came
into direct conflict with the Habsburgs, thus instantiating a geopolitical rivalry that
would continue unabated until the end of the seventeenth century. But aside from
the regular use of ‘hard power’ the Ottomans also sought to break the unity of the
Habsburg Empire by deploying the more ‘soft’ methods of alliance building.130 The
significance of these ‘unholy alliances’ was revealed in a candid admission by Francis
I in 1531:

I keenly desire the Turk powerful and ready for war, not for himself, because he is an infidel
and we are Christians, but to undermine the emperor’s power to force heavy expenses upon
him and to reassure all other governments against so powerful an enemy.131

The military pressure of the Ottoman Empire was a crucial contributing factor in
the origins and expansion of the Reformation.132 Lutheran revolts swept through
Germany during a period in which the Habsburgs were especially dependent on
German military support and financial aid in wars against the Ottomans. This only
proved forthcoming on the condition that Charles V agreed to religious reforms. In
this context, Lutherans sought to carve out greater religious freedom whenever con-
flict between the Ottomans and Habsburgs surfaced, using the Ottoman threat as a
bargaining chip in negotiations with Charles V.133 The ensuing spread of the Refor-
mation often occurred in territories that bore the mark of an Ottoman impact –
especially those affected by Calvinism.134 These pressures underwrote the break-up
of the Habsburg Empire – first into Austro-Hungarian and Spanish divisions,
secondly with independence for the Dutch. Here the Ottomans again played active
role, by attempting to cultivate coalitions with Protestants in the Low Countries
and Moriscoes in Spain.135 As the unifying power of Christendom receded under
military duress, Ottoman attitudes towards religious freedom and local autonomy
came to be replicated in European territories.

One of the more pertinent historical peculiarities of the fifteenth and sixteenth
century was the inability of the Habsburg Emperors to fulfil the holy mission of
establishing and maintaining an imperial hegemony in the lands of Christendom.136

In many ways it was the causal impact of the Ottoman ‘whip of external necessity’
that ‘frustrated universal imperial ambitions’ by perpetuating the ‘multiple polities
within the cultural unity of Christian Europe’.137 The uneven and combined devel-
opment of relations between the Ottomans and Europe therefore created further
developmental unevenness by exacerbating the fragmented and divided character of

130 Gabor Agoston, ‘Information, ideology and the limits of imperial policy: Ottoman grand strategy in
the context of Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry’, in Virginia Askan and Daniel Goffman (eds), The Early
Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2007).

131 John Elliot, ‘Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry: The European Perspective’, in Halil Inalcik and Cemal
Kafadar (eds), Suleyman the Second (ie the First) and His Time (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), pp. 153–
62, esp. p. 155.

132 Fischer-Galati, Ottoman Imperialism.
133 Fischer-Galati, Ottoman Imperialism; Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern

Europe (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 169.
134 Elliot, ‘Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry’, p. 155.
135 Coles, The Ottoman Impact, p. 128; Nexon, Struggle, p. 192; Andrew C Hess, The Forgotten Frontier:

A History of the Sixteenth Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), p. 94.

136 See also Wallerstein World-System, p. 167; Chirot, ‘Rise’, p. 183; and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 31–70.

137 Benno Teschke, Myth, p. 104; Tilly, Formation, p. 18.

342 Kerem Nisancioglu



European feudalism. Consequently, ‘combination’ was itself felt unevenly, with its
specific causal effects varying across different European states. The more ‘advanced’
European states constituted the primary focus of Ottoman military operations, while
alliances with more ‘backward’ European states were utilised to balance against the
Habsburgs. As such, while the Habsburgs, Genoese, Venetians, Spanish, and Portu-
guese were habitually engaged with the Ottomans, north-western European states
such as France, the Low Countries, and particularly Britain were afforded the geo-
political space required to conduct modern state-building. This ‘privilege of back-
wardness’ became manifest along two causal vectors of combination – firstly, by
bringing about a structural shift away from the dominance of the Mediterranean to
the Atlantic; secondly, by isolating England from Habsburg geopolitical pressure.

The Ottoman blockade and the emergence of the Atlantic

Through imperial conquest, many of the key channels of European trade with the
East fell under Ottoman control. Thus besides facilitating European commerce in
general, Pax Ottomana broke the monopoly previously held by leading traders (pri-
marily Venetian and Genoese) in the Mediterranean and Black Sea,138 exposing these
markets to competition from north-west Europeans, as well as Ragusan, Armenian,
and Jewish merchants under Ottoman suzerainty.139 By blocking the most dominant
European powers from their customary conduits to Eastern markets, the Ottomans
directly compelled them to pursue alternative routes. Having lost its Black Sea
monopoly, Genoa sought to circumvent the Ottoman passage to Indian and Far
Eastern markets,140 while turning to private business and financial operations in
Western Europe and the Atlantic.141 With the Ottoman dominated Mediterranean
inaccessible to Genoese capital, the Atlantic became a considerably more promising
avenue for commercial activity.142 Thus both in Spain and in Portugal, the relation-
ship between Genoese merchant-financiers and New World colonialists grew as
Genoa’s position in the Eastern Mediterranean declined. The Atlantic ventures that
this alliance gave rise to were ultimately possible through the investments of Genoese
capital that had been forced out of the Mediterranean by the Ottomans. ‘It was’,
writes Eric Mielants, ‘precisely the inter-city-state competition for access to Eastern
markets and the threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire that led to the discovery of
the Americas’.143

Capitulations144 came to play a major role in this process, mediating European
commercial and Ottoman geopolitical interests through alliance building on the one

138 Scammell, World Encompassed, pp. 93–6; Hess, ‘Conquest’, p. 59.
139 Ronald S. Love, Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415-1800 (London: Greenwood

Publishing Group, 2006), pp. 6–7.
140 Scammell, World Encompassed, p. 165.
141 Ibid., p. 170.
142 Coles, Ottoman Impact, p. 108; Charles Issawi, ‘The Ottoman Empire in the European World Economy,

1600–1914’, in K. Karpat (ed.), The Ottoman State and its Place in World History (Leiden: Brill, 1974),
pp. 107–17, esp. p. 111.

143 Mielants, Origins, p. 85.
144 These were unilaterally granted Ottoman diplomatic agreements which provided non-Ottoman recipi-

ents with basic legal rights and privileges within the empire’s territories while regulating trade relations
through the establishment of ordinary customs, taxes, and dues. Bulut has compared capitulations to
‘most favoured nation’ trade agreements, Mehmet Bulut, Ottoman Dutch Economic Relations in the
Early Modern Period 1571–1699 (Veloren: Hilversum, 2001), p. 108. See also Eldem, ‘Capitulations
and Western Trade’, in Faroqhi (ed.), Cambridge History of Turkey Vol. II, I pp. 283–55.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 343



hand and blockading rivals on the other. The most commercially ‘advanced’ Euro-
pean states – the Habsburgs, Genoese, Venetians, Spanish, and Portuguese – were
excluded, while the more ‘backward’ French (1536), English (1583), and Dutch
(1612) were granted capitulations. Political in scope for the Ottomans, these commer-
cial agreements proved an economic boon for the merchants of north-west Europe.
States that had been otherwise peripheral to the Mediterranean (and thus Eurasian)
commerce were now able to trade under significantly advantageous terms compared
to their competitors. Plugged into the security afforded by the Ottoman state along
its trade routes, north-west European connections with Asian commodity markets
were significantly expedited.145

Over the course of the sixteenth century, Ottoman geopolitical manoeuvres thus
brought about a ‘structural shift’,146 from the commercial dominance of Adriatic
city-states such as Genoa and Venice, towards English and Dutch supremacy. The
competition over markets that arose from this shift gave a major impulse to the de-
velopment of company capitalism and anticipated the increasing unity of merchant
and state interests that became a hallmark of the English and Dutch politics in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century.147 These developments would stimulate efforts
to build permanent circuits of capital through the advance system, in turn escalating
merchant intervention and control over international production.148

The Ottoman buffer and English primitive accumulation

The states best placed to take advantage of this structural shift were those where the
Ottoman geopolitical buffer was most keenly felt. As we have seen the protagonists
most intensely involved in the continental conflicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries were concerned with the Ottoman presence in the Mediterranean and
south-east Europe. In this context England featured as little more than an ‘impotent
onlooker’149 in European affairs. Compared to the near permanence of warfare on
the continent, Early Modern England was marked by a condition of geopolitical
isolation. England’s lack of involvement in continental conflicts from 1450 onwards
was a fundamental factor in its development towards capitalism.150

One of the more peculiar features of Tudor ‘absolutism’ flowed directly from this
isolation – a regression in the military resources held by the state and aristocracy.
For example, in the 1470s the Spanish and English military manpower numbered

145 Bulut, Ottoman Dutch, p. 168; Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in the Ottoman Empire: Taxation,
Trade and the Struggle for Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 4.

146 Mather, Pashas, p. 154.
147 Mielants, Origins, p. 84.
148 Banaji, Theory, pp. 270–3.
149 Anderson, Lineages, p. 124.
150 Theda Skocpol, ‘Wallerstein’s World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical Critique’,

American Journal of Sociology, 82:5 (1977), pp. 1075–90, esp. p. 1086; Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts
on Material Civilization and Capitalism (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 101–2;
Derek Sayer, ‘A Notable Administration: English State Formation and the Rise of Capitalism’,
American Journal of Sociology, 97:5 (1992), pp. 1382–415, esp. p. 1391. Each of these authors em-
phasise on England’s island geography as an explanation for its isolation. The prevalence of naval
warfare by the sixteenth century suggests that such an explanation is severely limited; England was
open to invasion should the will or compulsion have arisen. See Susan Rose, Medieval Naval Warfare,
1000-1500 (London:Routledge, 2002); Michael A. Palmer, Command at Sea: Naval Command and
Control Since the Sixteenth Century (London: Harvard University Press, 2007).

344 Kerem Nisancioglu



20,000 and 25,000 men respectively. By the 1550s, Spain’s manpower had risen to
150,000 while England’s manpower had fallen by 5,000 to 20,000.151 Disarmament
among the English aristocracy was even more pronounced: ‘in 1500, every English
peer bore arms; by Elizabeth’s time . . . only half the aristocracy had any fighting
experience’.152 This demilitarisation meant that England effectively ‘skipped over’
the development of strong, tax appropriating bureaucratic state structures character-
istic of French and Spanish absolutism in the sixteenth century onwards.153

This exceptional historical trajectory proved especially conducive to capitalist
development in the sixteenth century. Firstly, demilitarisation within the nobility
meant limited access to the means of coercion required to raise feudal rates of exploi-
tation. This inability to ‘squeeze’154 peasant surpluses meant that the option of
dispossessing peasants and exploiting them through market mechanisms became an
increasingly preferable means for ruling class reproduction.155 Secondly, the English
state did not possess the coercive or administrative strength to prevent attempts by
the nobility to ‘engross, consolidate and enclose land’.156 This contrasted with, for
example, the French state, which competed with the nobility over agrarian surpluses
by habitually protecting the peasantry from attempts at dispossession.157 Thus,
thirdly, isolation meant that the English ruling class was unusually homogenous,158

with a relative absence of social stratification across the state, the pre-existing landed
aristocracy and an emergent commercial class. This was because under conditions
of demilitarisation, influence and office replaced patented peerage as a basis for
aristocratic power, making the landed class peculiarly ‘civilian’, ‘commercial’, and
‘common’.159

These three factors help to explain one of the fundamental propositions of Robert
Brenner’s argument of the origins of capitalism: that it was in England alone that
agrarian revolts were met with a unified and successful attempt by the state and landed
class to remove the peasantry from their land through the enclosures.160 As peasants
were dispossessed, they turned to an alternative means to secure their means of sub-
sistence and thus social reproduction: selling their labour to landlords and capitalist
tenants in return for a wage.161 The persistent success of the state-nobility alliance in
dispossessing the peasantry of the means of production therefore led to the emer-
gence of ‘free’ class of wage-labourers. The social property relations through which
surplus was appropriated were thus transformed, from the extra-economic means of
feudalism to the ‘economic’ or ‘market’ mechanisms of agrarian capitalism.

Considering that English isolation was such a crucial condition for the processes
outlined in the ‘Brenner thesis’,162 a fuller exposition of capitalism’s origins requires

151 Kennedy, Rise, p. 56.
152 Anderson, Lineages, p. 125.
153 Skocpol, ‘Wallerstein’s World’, p. 1086.
154 Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class’, p. 61.
155 Ellen Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, p. 53.
156 Skocpol, ‘Wallerstein’s World’, p. 1086; cf. Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class’, p. 49.
157 Brenner, ‘Agrarian Roots’, p. 263.
158 Wood, Origin, p. 47; Brenner, ‘Agrarian Roots’, p. 256; G. E. Aylmer, ‘The Peculiarities of the English

State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 3:2 (1990), pp. 91–108.
159 Sayer, ‘Notable’, p. 1394; Anderson, Lineages, p. 127.
160 Brenner, ‘The Agrarian Roots’, p. 252.
161 Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class’, p. 47.
162 For a more in depth critique of the limits of Brenner’s account, see Anievas and Nisancioglu, ‘What’s

at Stake’.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 345



that this isolation is satisfactorily accounted for. As the preceding argument has
shown, this isolation should be understood as an inter-societal condition arising
from the continental preoccupation with the Ottoman Empire. The peculiar social
form that this isolation gave rise to proved especially conducive to the symbiotic unity
of state and landed class interests that underpinned the growth agrarian capitalism
in England. When considered in this specifically international context, English
development in the sixteenth century can be best understood as a form of ‘combined
development’; the developmental outcomes of an inter-societal condition rooted in
the uneven relation of England to the Euro-Ottoman geopolitical milieu. Ottoman
geopolitical pressure must therefore be seen as a cause in the emergence of agrarian
capitalism in England.

Conclusion: the Ottoman Empire as a vector of U&CD

The duality of Euro-Ottoman relations – both belligerent and collaborative – was
thus a crucial driver in some of the key developments in the Early Modern period.
By establishing a node of international trade, the Ottomans contributed to the inter-
nationalisation of merchant activity and a cultural revival in Europe. But more
significantly, through its military conflict with the Habsburgs, the Ottomans abetted
the Reformation and break-up of Habsburg hegemony. This gave north-west Europe
the geopolitical space to conduct modern state-building. In particular, this buffer
gave rise to peculiar fusion of interests among the landed nobility and the state in
England, which was a crucial cause in the process of primitive capitalist accumula-
tion. Moreover, through its geopolitical policies, the Ottomans actively and directly
brought about a structural shift away from Mediterranean trade and the con-
comitant ascendancy of Italian city-states, toward the Atlantic powers that would
eventually come to dominate the world through colonialism. It must be emphasised
that none of these developments were sufficient conditions for the emergence of
capitalism; there were numerous other causal chains – vectors of uneven and com-
bined development – both European and extra-European that must be incorporated
into a full understanding of capitalism’s origins. Yet it is difficult to establish
a proper appreciation of the key developments in sixteenth-century history and the
European trajectory towards capitalism without looking at the Euro-Ottoman rela-
tion as a fundamental determinant.

This additional empirical framework raises serious questions around the theorisa-
tion of capitalism’s origins. Indeed, a central contention of this article is that the
spatial limitations imposed by Eurocentrism have had significant consequences for
the manner in which we theorise historical processes. In presenting this argument,
I hope to have contributed to the recent explosion in literature that has sought to
‘provincialise Europe’, by bringing out the international dimension of capitalism’s
development. But moreover, I have sought to provide an alternative theoretical
framework – Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development – within
which this non-Eurocentric historical analysis can contribute to a renewed conceptu-
alisation of capitalism’s origins. For U&CD not only helps us capture the historical
significance of interactive relations between societies, it also gives these relations
theoretical expression, thus elevating their importance as a field of investigation;
one that is irreducible to, yet fundamentally related to, the sociology and history of

346 Kerem Nisancioglu



any given society. In doing so, U&CD broadens our field of vision beyond the con-
fines of Eurocentrism, by internalising at the level of theory a dimension of concrete
reality – ‘the international’ – hitherto considered external to dominant studies of the
origins of capitalism. My argument thus also raises the significance of (a sociologi-
cally sensitive) IR as a privileged vantage point from which to analyse the socially
distinct determinations arising from the international that fed into the origins of
capitalism.

What of the supposed Eurocentrism of U&CD itself? As we have seen, the limi-
tation of U&CD to the capitalist epoch tends to reproduce the Eurocentric assump-
tions of historical priority and methodological internalism. I have argued that by
breaking out of the temporal fetters of capitalism, U&CD can also transcend the
spatial provincialism associated with Eurocentric social theory. By theorising the
very history of capitalism’s origins as the combined product of a multiplicity of
spatio-temporally uneven determinations, the incorporation of non-Europeans into
this process is opened as a potentially illuminating avenue for further research. As
such, both theoretical and historical elements also support calls for the extension of
U&CD beyond the epoch of capitalism alone by positing its transhistorical and
therefore general applicability.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism 347