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Abstract:
By analyzing historical texts and literature it is possible to create a story of our worlds past. I
looked into how the history of empires can be applied to modern day America. My research
looked directly at the factors that led to the overall process of the collapse of the Russian and
Ottoman Empires. Beginning by looking at the unique stories each empire could tell the world, it
became more apparent that there were larger and smaller factors that fell into the collapse of
empires. The collapse fundamentally is due to economics, which may be expressed through
militaristic, religious, or political breakdowns. These findings mostly came from scholarly
articles based on the story and analysis of the unique empires fall. The overall implications
showed a large correlation between the actions America is taking today and the actions the
empires of old took.
11 March 2019
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Part 1- Introduction
It is said that history is simply a collection of stories, meant to teach what has happened
and what has yet to happen. History has long been recorded in order to teach us about what
happened at that time, for we could never witness the same event again. WWII will never play
out in 2019, and the signing of the Declaration of Independence will not happen in the next five
years. Ancient empires allow the modern man to learn of not one man's failure, but rather whole
nations’ failures. Observing how the colosseum became a pile of ruble thousands of years after it
happened, or learning of why entire societies disappear from existence millenia ago.
Empires have long been a large factor in the evolution of society, and how unique
societies and religions have evolved under and around imperial power. By looking deeply into
the history of a few of the most famous empires, it may be found that empires are an example of
when these societies worked and when they failed. Two empires above others created an impact
on the ideas and practices of their era. The Russian Empire demonstrated what happens when a
political system set in place by powerful leaders does not work, and why a collapse may take
over 100 years to take full effect. Following the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire was a
long-standing financial nation known in their time as an economically powerful country. Over
the centuries they had an unwillingness to change, and adapt to the world, eventually leading to
their own demise. Observing these empires and showing how the signs of their downfall and the
actions leading to said downfall should have been acknowledged but were rather ignored. By
applying these principles and observing them in modern day America we may be able to develop
the ability to analyze current actions being taken in America and predict if they are leading to
America's collapse. An empire's fall may be indicated by instabilities which often have
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underlying problems that lead to the empires collapse. The collapse fundamentally is due to
Part 2- History/Background
state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society.”(Michael Doyle).
This control over sovereignty and society causes the empires to push their ideals upon other
countries, creeds and ideals. An empires title is mostly a label and not a state of being. It is meant
to show the power that the collection of people have over others. These empires may be strong
because certain fundamental ideals work well in these countries. The most important of which is
economics.
opportunity to the unfortunate? In 1642, the Ottoman Empire had its own form of economic
success: setting up trade routes through their empire, expanding into foreign lands, conquering
those around them, allowing their empire to control the trade of more goods entering and exiting
Europe. Suleyman I, also known as Suleyman the Magnificent was a rich ruler beloved by the
Ottoman people, as he made a desolate empire into one of the richest in history. “The bonus of
the padishah to those who sacrifice their lives for him and bring heads of the foes of religion and
state being not more than the allowance a master gives his slaves, they [the kul] turned war and
combat into an infant's game.”(Murphey) He created a murder force that would infiltrate
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alternate countries and tear down their powers. The force was known as the kul and they were
commanded not to show their own mercy, only that of Suleyman. Suleyman however could not
be Sultanate forever, eventually age caught up to him and Selim II stepped in as Sultanate of the
Ottoman Empire.
In the following centuries after Suleyman I, the Ottoman people lost their economic
success and trade routes due to the evolution of technology and the development of new trade
routes leading around the Ottoman Empire. Making their main form of income almost
completely obsolete. They did however, maintain their military power over the centuries, sadly
losing the economic status to fund it. The success that they had been a part of caused them to
clinging to the power and ideals that worked for them in their time of grandeur. Even from 1500
when Suleyman I lead the Ottoman people around the Black Sea till the day WWI crashed upon
the doorsteps of Europe and Britain, Russia and France invaded, their economic structure never
altered to be suitable to the modern market. However in the comparison of empires the Ottoman
peoples resilience and stubbornness is nothing compared to the people of мать Россия1.
Russia was powerful as an empire, spreading their ideals and power across the east and
south. Invasions reaching into the Caucasus mountains, and having battled the Mongolian
Empire for centuries, had become strong willed. They were resilient people, living in a
never-ending blizzard, keeping warm with thick hide coats, furry hats, and водка2. An empire
built to carry on the great ideals of Caesar, with their own Tsar. Tsarist Russia was a Russian
form of a kingdom. They shared some of their ideals with Caesar of Rome but had more of the
political structure of 1800’s Britain, with less money. The Russia people were poor while the
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Mother Russia
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Vodka
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Tsar was rich, holding its power over its people, but failing to hold power over outside forces.
The Tsar’s people starved and froze yet they endured because of their unbreakable wills and
strong spirits. After years of fighting for the Tsar and receiving nothing in return the last Tsar,
Nicholas II, was overthrown and executed by the Bolshevik family for his inability to rule his
The Romanov family rule ended and the Tsar was cut out of Russia. 1918 and the
following years were harsh, as everything changed for the Russian people who now after years of
civil war, looked to a man who had been a strong figurehead,Vladimir Lenin. He sought to
instead of creating a new government rather, have the Slavic people try to run a country with no
one true leader, however inevitably it failed. In 1945 when Russia defeated Adolf Hitler and
ended WWII their system of no true leader was ended as well. After Lenin's death Joseph Stalin
took power to become supreme ruler of Russia. However, he was revered as a champion by his
people because he led them to be the heroes of one of the largest wars in history. From there
Soviet Russia degraded. A dictator now controlled all the money and the people had none.
Everything had changed yet nothing had changed because they were in the same place as 70
years earlier. The following leaders stepped where Stalin did and carried on in Josephs absence.
These leaders carried on with the Cold War, almost a death threat hanging over themselves and
the Russian people. If one man shot they were all dead. Eventually it all had to come to end and
the Russian people spared. Then on December 21, 1991 Russia was dissolved as an Empire.
Russia then became a Democratic oligarchy state by electing their first president.
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The Ottoman Empire wasn’t just a country built on trade routes, they were worked deep
into the economic market of their time. By forcing themselves to be a part of Eastern European
trade and politics, they created a market that they could tax and draw money from. For their time,
they were rich and were able to enforce their imperial status upon Europe, however, in the end,
their stubborn spirits inevitably lead them to be a poor country with leaders who sought money
rather than well being. “The Ottoman Empire has the body of a sick old man, who tried to appear
healthy, although his end was near.”(Sir Thomas Roe) Due to them maintaining military prowess,
they appeared to be strong and well functioning, while behind the scenes, their economic funds
and trade had all but vanished. Then as their ability to fund themselves grew thinner, they were
led into a battle they could not win, in a war, they should not have been a part of. Times were
low in the Ottoman empire, but a leader stepped into a position of power. The public placed him
on a pedestal for the time only to later realize their mistake. Dr.Nazim Bey, a leader known for
his role in the Armenian genocide took power over a major part of the Ottoman Empire,
including the military, he then led the Ottoman armies into WWII against the Allied Powers.
Sultan Mehmed VI was the rightful ruler of Ottoman who many perceived as a fair ruler, Dr.
Naziem, however, saw his unwillingness to fight in WWI as a problem. In his disagreement with
the Sultanate, he and his supporters interject themselves into the politics of their country and
attempted to push their power across the European states. His first and last action after joining
the Central Powers was an attack on the Russian base in the Black Sea.
The Black Sea Raid launched Ottoman straight into a war with a few of the strongest
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empires of the time. Britain, France, and Russia gathered together to take action against the
Ottoman threat. After Dr.Nazeim Bey was cast out, one of the forefront generals of the Ottoman
Empires armies looked to defend his people. Enver Pasha was a wise and tacktile leader, he
immediately set out to create defenses across the Ottoman Empire. Together with his army, they
held the Ottoman Empire at the Caucasus mountains and the great city of Constantinople. In the
end, the Ottoman Armies only held a portion of their once great empire. Then in 1918, the
Ottoman Empire was dissolved and for the following years, and all the way to present day,
carried on as a country. Come 1923 they were officially established as Turkey once all their
other provinces were separated into individual states governed by France and Britain.
If the Ottomans had been willing to change, willing to advance their economic market to
modern times, to industrialize with the movement of the world, the Ottoman Empire at the very
least would have been capable of carrying on their centuries of legacy. Their economic failing
led to a lack of supplies to defend their country fully. With an inability to adapt their beliefs and
ideals to modern times, they forced themselves to remain in an older version of the world,
eventually leading to the fall of their once great empire. A chain of events set in place by first
having great economic success. Isaac Newton once said, 3“To every action, there is always
opposed an equal reaction.” Laws of nature stand strong even for empires built on power and
money, therefore their economic collapse was inevitable, the Ottoman Empire was just a larger
Who made it farther? The rock that lay in the stream, or the bear in a boat who crashed
five miles downriver? The answer seems fairly obvious, “Well the bear. I mean he made it five
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Thank You For Referring Back
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miles farther than the rock.” But is that true? The common perspective of the person reading this
would be to look at the bear, and see that it moved farther downstream than the rock. Now if you
take a step back and look at this question from a completely new angle you will see that both the
bear and the rock ended at the bottom of the river. So when asked who made it farther, the Slav
or the Turk? You could say they both ended up, at rock bottom.
The Tsar of Russia, the bear of the world, our Slavic cousins, a group of people known to
be resilient and cold-hearted, forged an empire in the test of time, only to be torn down in the
face of internal conflict. They were a desolate country run by corrupt politicians and strong
rulers. Due to the extreme cold, they faced year in and year out, problems relating to, farming
food, importing goods and maintaining their people's ability to lead healthy was heavily
impacted. Potatoes were the only crop that would grow across the ice-ridden land, water was
hard to purify and led to many people's deaths with the lack of sanitization. It was an
underdeveloped empire that influenced its ability to conquer lands and push their imperial ideals
upon others yet failed to support their own people. In Russian culture a common saying is “Ба́ры
деру́тся -- у холо́пов чубы́ треща́т.”(When the rich make war it is the poor that die.) The Tsar
was willing to throw the lives of every man upon the battlefield and still said no prayer would be
said for them. The rich made war to show the power they wielded and the poor man suffered for
The largest separation between the Russian people was the wages earned. The rich of
Russia sought to get richer, even if it meant the poor became the ice sculptures on their back
lawn. The Tsar's people were freezing and starving and the rulers of the Tsar couldn't care
less.“Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son
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tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar
before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so
because Nicholas knew what he was called.”(Massie) Their society was set up backwards,
funneling everything away from those who needed into the pockets of those who wanted it.
Money was everything, and he who controlled the money controlled Russia. They pushed
themselves deeper and deeper into a cycle of paying to the highest power until a new power
stepped in to inherit the collection agency that was Russia's Tsar. “Defending human rights
should be an important objective of foreign policy, and that, too, will sometimes be hard to
reconcile with an economic agenda, especially when it comes to dealing with rich but repressive
players like China and Russia.”(Freeland) The Tsar wanted money in their pockets to push this
empirical power they had built over hundreds of years against the European states. Starve a dog
for long enough however and eventually they will bite back.
The money kept pooling up in the clot of political mistakes and economic breakdowns,
until one day the people of Russia rose up, killing the Tsar and taking back their own futures. In
the Tsar's place, the people of Russia banded together to form a set of rules to protect their
people and give them power over their own lives and give each one the needed things that they
themselves could not create. This was the USSR, the Soviet Union, the continuation of the Tsar
with the abolition of political withholding. Still Russia remained poor, the wealth was distributed
across the nation, but one man's treasure is not millions of civilians saviors.
They now had the freedom to live a healthy life but the inability to do so. In order to eat
you must work, and so every man, woman and child worked. The labor the Tsar enforced upon
the Russian people was brutal and yet still as their own governors, the Russian people were
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unable to go to bed with full stomachs. Their country had gone from the poor with a Tsar to
impoverished without one. “If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have
been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies instead of the land of corpses.”(Wright) They knew
there was no greater power to help them from the struggle they had inherited. This “land of
This lasted for nearly 40 years until one fateful war came crashing upon them like a
tsunami, screaming for action and change. One man answered, Joseph Stalin. He stepped up to
the plate, bat in hand, ready to hit a home run for the people of Russia. Joseph Stalin was an
incredible leader, capable of rallying his people behind him and charging them to victory in
WWII. He had a five-year plan to fix all the problems that had plagued their Soviet state.
However, he set in motion their inevitable further decline when he took power over Russia and
signed a dissolution4 form for the Soviet Union. In the end, their imperial status fell from their
hands and by 1991 Russia officially lost their status as an empire and their communist dream was
brought to a halt by a new Oligarchy. Their political corruption and economic dropouts pushed
their empire over the edge, eventually leading to the full economic cave in they experienced in
1991. This collapse was brought on and expressed by political failings, these failings acted as a
sledgehammer to the already shaky supports their empire had set in place around their economic
status.
The Empires that have risen throughout history have presented us with tales of woe to
rival that of even Shakespeare. An instruction manual to the ever-dwindling mistakes those who
came before us had to make. Once we realize the mistakes we ourselves should not make, is
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Abolish
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when we will find the balance of rich and poor, full and starving, falling and rising. Upon that
day we will all watch as our world ends, but until then we can only guess.
Before you shut the pages of your history book, before you forsake what came before,
you must look at how it all happens, why it matters, who we should watch for the beginning of
the end. So let’s begin. In the Ottoman Empire, they hid their true intentions and abilities behind
a powerful facade. They became caught in the world that worked for their forefathers, they were
caught in tradition and followed a political system they only sought power while promising the
people well being. In their end, they were the same strong-willed people as when Suleyman I
had led them to victory. But they were poor, couldn’t change and in disagreement, their
government began to take too much power and ended up pushing them into their own grave.
Switch to today, although we may be rich, we are caught in tradition, our 45th president, a man
chosen by us, for us, pushes the idea of how economically strong we are, however, we may not
be as stable as you believe. A mass majority of our economic success currently comes from our
trade, not from our own production. In 2013 $11.3 million dollars worth of American salaries
alone. Now in 2019, the number is likely to have quintupled, due to the fact that in 2009 trade
made only $1.6 million worth of American salaries. If our trade stopped at this point there
would be massive problems and damages to our economy and the well being of almost every
citizen. It may seem impossible, however with a president such as ours, it seems as if our
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Now Russia starved their own people if it meant the rich gained more money, and they
would willingly change their own political structure to attempt to fix that, would we? We let
homeless people go hungry and laugh at their lack of money, we are a cruel society where a man
can’t live his own life that he built simply because someone else made the system work better in
their favor. Do many people deserve the money they have earned? Does our economy not
support each other? It appears as if we should because, in the face of internal struggle, Russia
executed their leader and forcefully took power, over their own lives. Russia was set on
communism, America on capitalism. Both extreme opposites of each other, both right in their
own regard. Then as Russia lost power the free market gained theirs. The Americans set their
empirical power in place as they fought this communist threat. Pushing back this beast and in the
process, all the time trying to look as good as possible for our sponsors. The American people
are unwilling to change, sounds familiar, they believe strongly in their country and have faith it
will prevail. In a report by Deagel, a company that creates predictions about the status of the
world by using surveys. It is noticeable that by the year 2025 American citizens predicted that
more than two-thirds of their own population will want to leave the country. The people of
America are known to be faithful to their country, however, at this point in time, they are the
laughing stock of the world, seeing as how most third world countries have a president with the
ability to at least act and perform professionally. A leader will inevitably be their downfall, and
they will see the chain of events set in motion by all those who came before. The Americans
were rich and they still are. But back in 1500’s time, so was the Ottoman Empire. Fore as Sir
Isaac Newton said…. Uh, hum, uh sorry I don’t wanna say it twice, refer back to footnote 3.
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. We execute what we see as good and never take a glance at the other side of the
argument, and that is why America is an Empire in 2019. Not because we have extreme power
over other countries, though we do remain in wars that afford much of our tax dollars meant for
the community. These wars are not needed in the modern day American thought, and because of
this inability to modernize and evolve with the times, we will eventually fall to our own
traditions. In comparison to empires of the past, as Russia showed the 100 year slide and the
Ottoman’s stepping stones to the end, America may only have 50-100 years, maybe even less,
until our economic imbalance, our militaristic overextension and our political withholdings lead
us to become, just like what we tore down. More capable of enforcing its power over its citizens
than its enemies and using faulty figureheads to conduct our universal trade and alliances. So
maybe it’s time to stop making America great and start finding it a balance.
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Bibliography
Malcolm, Noel. “Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century
Mediterranean World.” Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the
Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Güçlü,, Yücel. “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920.”
Middle East Policy, vol. 22, no. 2, Dec. 2015, pp. 177–179., doi:10.1111/mepo.12138.
Gingeras, Ryan. “Fall of the Sultanate.” Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIII, No. 3, Fall
2016, Jan. 2016, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199676071.001.0001.
Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. “Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central
Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914-1923 (Book).” American Historical Review,
vol. 109, no. 1, Feb. 2004, pp. 153–154. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1086/530172.
PINCUS, STEVEN. “The Rise and Fall of Empires: An Essay in Economic and
Political Liberty.” Journal of Policy History, vol. 29, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 305–318.
EBSCOhost, doi:10.1017/S0898030617000070.
Massie, Robert K. “Nicholas and Alexandra Book Summary and Study Guide.” Detailed Review
Summary of Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie,
allreaders.com/book-review-summary/nicholas-and-alexandra-24180.