ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role played by such ecological dynamics in the seventeenth-century political crises of Ottoman Turkey and Ming China. There could hardly be two more different imperial systems to compare than the Ottoman and Ming empires. The Ottoman Empire was a polyglot conquest empire, composed of pieces of the former Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate. Its political traditions were "an eclectic summation of ancient Middle Eastern, Persian, and Roman traditions, blended with Muslim and Arabic tribal conceptions". In centralized agrarian empires, such as the Ottoman and the Ming, the bulk of taxes were generally drawn from fixed land taxes, assessed on the basis of cultivated acreage. Such tax systems were extremely vulnerable to the effects of ecological change. The ecological shift, constituted by a rising population on more slowly, increasing cultivated land and a consequent rise in prices, created havoc in the traditional social order.
