French thinkers rationalized Ottoman decline through several rival theories

Evidence

Though Michaelis’s enquiries and Niebuhr’s discoveries epitomized Orientalist interest in the Middle East in this period, at the same time French politicians, merchants and soldiers had developed a more predatory interest in that region. There were plenty of French theorists ready to argue that Ottoman Turkey, a typical Oriental despotism, was in full decay, because, as the statesman and economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot argued, despotism conduced inevitably to slavery, polygamy and softness. Others held that it was Turkey’s espousal of a satanic religion that had doomed it. Others again attributed it to the Ottoman lands’ failure to keep up with Western commercial and industrial developments. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 236

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a clean survey of ‘Oriental despotism’ discourse varieties — religious, moral-economy, and underdevelopment framings.

Related

• Ottoman decline stemmed from institutional resistance to Western science, not internal decay (similarity 0.79)
• Europe’s image of the Semitic Orient emerged only as Ottoman power declined (similarity 0.79)
• Ottoman decline eventually made Western charges against the Turks partly accurate (similarity 0.79)
• The concept of Oriental despotism was devised to justify European empire (similarity 0.79)
• Mustafa Rasid Pasha’s Anglophile outlook proved decisive for the Ottoman Empire’s future (similarity 0.78)
• Contemporaries overestimated Ottoman strength even as the empire was declining (similarity 0.78)
• Orientalism is chiefly a British and French cultural enterprise (similarity 0.78)