Two Past Experiments
significance for human evolution and need to be studied for that purpose. They can teach us that civilizations and cultures do not exhaust the possibilities of collective human experiments. That we have to take into account those lives which individually and collectively are used to test viability per se. In the Ottoman Empire, we find a vast number of collectivities which continued for 500 years to perpetuate a way of life they had before the Turks arrived and subjugated them (i.e. made subjects of them). So long as they observed the peace and paid tribute they could go on being as Montenegrins or Sudanese, as Bulgarian and Carthaginians, as Greek or Armenian, as Arab nomads or Albanian farmers or fishermen, cultivating their past cutoms, rites and rituals, music and arts. In the courts of many Sultans, different ethnic groups could be assimilated because the experiment essentially consisted in maintaining an administrative superstructure on top of social units with deeper roots in their own histories and culture. The Ottoman subjects experienced in general the benefits of their rulers’ tolerance and were incensed mainly when squeezed of their means of livelihood to finance an imperial project which had nothing to do with them. There was no ideological basis for belonging to the Empire. Nationalism as such was a creation of the 19th century. Ethnicity was better defined and locally meaningful. So long as the unfolding of the years of the Empire were peaceful and with minimal pressures, the subjects had no special reason to rebel. Most of the 17th and 18th centuries can be considered in that vein, the Experiment was proving successful if the feedback was that most inhabitants could go with what mattered to them and the source of their inner and community lives. The establishment of the Empire within the boundaries through victories and imposed by defeats, took the first hundred years and there was not really a collective experiment then. Wars of conquest and domination of the inhabitants of many areas around the Mediterranean were not new or unique, even if the Turkish Lords were special in visible ways. The time the Turkish-Ottoman Experiment began was when all was quiet on the various fronts. 11