A felkelés éghajlata: Sam White környezettörténeti elmélete az Oszmán Birodalom hanyatlásáról - The Climate of Rebellion: Sam White’s Environmental Theory about the Decline of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

The book of Sam White has offered a new interpretation of Ottoman history from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The American author has argued that historians have to consider the ecological conditions of the early modern Near East and the profound impacts and repercussions of the Little Ice Age in order to understand the empire’s successes, crises and transformations. White’s study presents the expansive ‘imperial ecology’ underlying the rapid expansion in the classical age which made the empire increasingly vulnerable to war and natural disasters as the population pressure set in in the late 1500s. Sam White examined the impact of Little Ice Age and climatic fluctuation from the late 16th through the early 18th centuries, demonstrating the strong links between extreme climatic events and the outbreak of the Celali Rebellion and the recurring disorders of the 1600s. Finally, the author argued that transformations in human ecology – particularly the spread of nomadic pastoralism, migration to urban areas, and a shift to new crops for commerce and exports – slowed the demographic recovery of Ottoman lands, leaving the empire relatively depopulated by the mid-19th century.

Keywords

• limate history
• Ottoman Empire
• Celali Rebellion
• decline