Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was the Islamic world-state spanning three continents for six centuries — and, in Infrared discourse, a key exhibit in rethinking what economic organization outside Western capitalism looks like.
Features relevant to the discussion
- Timar system: land held in exchange for military service, not alienable private property — a feudal-military tenure blocking landlord accumulation.
- State control of strategic production: gunpowder, munitions, key manufactures as imperial monopolies; price regulation (narh) in Istanbul's markets.
- The devshirme and the kul order: a slave-administrative elite serving the Sultan — the state standing above society's property classes.
- Millet system: confessional self-governance of Christians and Jews under Islamic sovereignty — pluralism of a non-liberal type.
- Decline through the 18th-19th centuries: capitulations to European trade, debt administration (1881), finally dissolution through WWI and the nationalist revolution of Atatürk.
Infrared usage
Like the Qing, the Ottomans appear in Haz's "actual socialism" provocations: an economy subordinated to political-social ends, usury legally constrained, markets governed — demonstrating that the capitalist market's primacy is historically exceptional, not universal. The deeper point connects to Communism is Islam: Islamic civilization possessed its own ordered political economy, destroyed by colonial penetration, whose recovery is part of the anti-imperialist project (see Sharia, Tawhid, Qing Dynasty).