ABSTRACT
In the early sixteenth century the Mamluk regime in Egypt, eroded by corruption, extravagance, and the general shrinkage of the economy, was overcome by its kindred Turkish regime in Anatolia. For four centuries Syria and Egypt were to be part of the Ottoman Empire; the Barbary States along the North African coastline as far as Morocco knuckled under to the Ottoman state, and when the Osmanlis finally wrested Iraq away from Persia in 1639 they were in complete control of the Arabic-speaking world.
