Since the Industrial Revolution and the so-called European glories of the nineteenth century, this history has been rewritten to portray European ascendancy as somehow stretching back to Columbus. This is a historical absurdity. Not only does it paper over the deep fissures in early modern Europe, it also masks the fact that the Ottoman Empire struck fear into the world for centuries before it earned its derogatory nineteenth-century sobriquet, “the sick man of Europe.” Some historians claim that the Ottoman Empire began to decline from its peak of imperial might around 1600, just as the
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