Abstract

Notwithstanding the abiding interest from a number of scholars in the history of the Ottoman Empire and regular flow of works devoted to this polity, it should be recognized that studies which apply synchronized historical and political science approaches to the transformation of Ottoman statehood are still rare. Hence, serious gaps exist in the formation of systemic ideas about the rise and fall of the Sublime Porte, which, in the author’s opinion, can be partially filled by resorting to the topical areas of modern political science, especially the concepts of “state sustainability” and “political stability”. The main hypothesis of this study is the assumption that the roots of both the rise and the decline of the Ottoman Empire lay mainly in the same phenomena: centralization of power, closed personalistic rule, the concomitant institutional deficit, as well as the overly conservative modality of center-peripheral relations and the lack of consistent implementation of unifying principles in the Empire’s social and information space. The author’s research follows the methodology of historical institutionalism and the pivotal idea of a “path” (“dependence on the chosen track”), addresses the views of the theorists of the political regime and political stability, and also looks at some of the most characteristic topical scenarios of domestic policy in the Ottoman Empire. As a result the author concludes that among the reasons for the political crisis and the gradual deterioration of the empire’s state structure were, on the one hand, the essentially irrational desire to maintain the competitive advantages that characterized Ottoman policy at a certain stage of history, and, on the other hand, the inability of the political class to build a strategically new vector for the development of the country, different from the usual regime models. Thus, an attempt is made to supplement the comprehension and analysis of extensive historical data by the methodology of political research, evaluating the Ottoman Empire as a type of statehood in the broad sense of the word.