The Worlds which the Portuguese, the Russians and the Turks Created: Empires on Europe’s Periphery

The revealing analogies among the Portuguese, Russian, and Turko-Ottoman empires add analytical depth to our understanding of the evolution of modern world-system. The empires emerged simultaneously with capitalism and equally relied on the new power techniques of gunpower, bureaucracy, state control over trade, and official religion. Starting from the geopolitical margins of Anatolia, the Pyrenees, or Russian forests, the new empires soon achieved tremendous territorial gains and wealth. But after their first century of success, these empires came under the penetrating pressures of emergent capitalist forces (the Netherlands and later England).The empires reacted by selectively adopting the organizational and technological innovations of capitalism in the bouts of Absolutist reforms under Peter I, Pombal, or during the Tanzimat period. All three empires underwent another wave of modernizing efforts through the constitutionalist revolutions in 1905-1910 that nonetheless failed to prepare them for the military catastrophe of 1914. The developmentalist dictatorships of Salazar, Atatürk, and Stalin, for all their ideological differences, equally sought to strengthen the production bases under the conditions of state direction and economic autarchy. The global wave of democratic rebellions in 1968 undercut all three versions of developmentalism pushing the bureaucratic and capitalist elites in all three states to seek the preservation of their positions through European integration — whose outcome remains to be seen.