In his new book, “God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World,” the historian Alan Mikhail writes: “Whether politicians, pundits and traditional historians like it or not, the world we inhabit is very much an Ottoman one.” On this week’s podcast, Mikhail explains what he means by that.
“If we look at major world-changing events of this period that have resonances down to the present — so, Columbus, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of commerical relations — that the Ottomans have a hand in all of these things,” Mikhail says. “It’s not as though Columbus didn’t cross the Atlantic, of course he did, or that Martin Luther didn’t lead a Protestant Reformation, of course he did; but there are Ottoman and Muslim elements to those stories that we have ignored or not paid attention to. A lot of the work of my book is reinserting Islam and the Ottoman Empire into those stories to give us a fuller and, I would say, more empirically true story about all of these events that we think have something to tell us about the making of the modern world.”
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