The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

The Venture of Islam
is far
more than a work of area expertise. To call Hodgson an Arabist or an Islamicist
is to inaccurately diminish him. For in his hands, Islam is a vehicle to reveal the
most pivotal intellectual, cultural, and geographical trends affecting Afro-
Eurasian societies, the entire Old World, in fact, with the Oikoumene of antiquity
at its heart. This is not a work of geography per se. Hodgson spends as much
time defining Sufi mysticism as he does landscape, to say nothing of the other

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intellectual and sectarian traditions he unravels. And yet in bringing geography
into the discussion in the way that he does, he demonstrates how it interacts with
politics and ideology to produce the very texture of history. Take the Ottoman
Turks, who eventually replaced their Turkic brethren, the Seljuks, in Anatolia in
the late thirteenth century. The “monolithic military caste system” of the
Ottomans placed “inherent geographical limits” on the area under their control,
in contrast to that of Russia, say, or even of the primitive Mongols. The
Ottomans were accustomed to a single grand army, in which the 
padishah
, or
emperor, must always be present. At the same time, they had to operate out of a
single capital city, Constantinople, in the northeastern Mediterranean by the
Black Sea, where the sultanate’s vast bureaucratic structure was headquartered.
“As a result, a major campaign could be carried only so far as a single season’s
marching would allow”: Vienna to the northwest and Mosul to the southeast
were consequently the geographical limits of stable Ottoman expansion on land.
The army could winter in some years at Sofia or Aleppo, extending its range,
though miring it in great logistical difficulties. In general, however, this
absolutist system with all the power, both personal and bureaucratic,
concentrated in Constantinople had the effect of taking the capital’s geographical
situation and making it an all-determining factor. This was, after a fashion, the
inverse of human agency. And it had the effect of leading to the decay of this
military state, since once the Ottoman military’s geographical limits were
reached, morale as well as rewards declined within the ranks of the soldiery. A
less centralized state might have led to a more secure empire, rather than one at
the mercy of geography. In the naval realm, too, absolutism exaggerated the
tyranny of location, with Ottoman sea power mostly clustered in the Black and
Mediterranean seas close to home, with only “transient” success achieved
against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.
39
Hodgson, like his colleague in the Chicago history department McNeill, is less
an academic in the contemporary sense than an old-world intellectual aided by
the rigor of tireless, scientifically minded inquiry, an outgrowth perhaps of his