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This is a fairly ridiculous premise. You cannot trivialise an empire that lasted more than 400 years and held together one of the most fractious region on earth
by sn41 7y ago
This is a fairly ridiculous premise. You cannot trivialise an empire that lasted more than 400 years and held together one of the most fractious region on earth (look at what happened after the Ottomans) and say that it was so brittle that a drink could bring it down. Very few empires in history last that long.
It may just be that other regions went ahead in historical pace. Even with all the outpacing, battles like Gallipoli (which is the basis of the Anzac Day in Australia and NZ) show that Ottomans were a force to be reckoned with, even in their twilight.
Just like pop science, pop history is also a form of spam.
- macspoofing 7y ago>You cannot trivialise an empire that lasted more than 400 years Why not? It wouldn't be the first time that a great empire was brought to its knees due to the introduction of something novel.
- geofft 7y ago"Overt catastrophic failure occurs when small, apparently innocuous failures join to create opportunity for a systemic accident. Each of these small failures is necessary to cause catastrophe but only the combination is sufficient to permit failure. ... complex systems run as broken systems. The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws." https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/ This is as true for empires as it is for your distributed monolith on Kubernetes. A forgotten cup of coffee might be what actually causes a replication alert to be missed that brings everything to its knees, but if it was, the system was on the verge of failing, anyway. Robust systems can suffer many missed alerts without falling over. Put another way: for want of a nail, and for a systematic lack of maintenance of the other nails, the shoe was lost. For want of a horse, which could have been provided by the local stables which were somehow also not in operation, the rider was lost. For want of a message which should have been sent by multiple riders if it was that important, the battle was lost. No lessons on how to hold a kingdom together can be learned from a postmortem process that says, "Root cause: want of a nail."
- kingofpandora 7y agoHow novel was coffee though really? Tea is the real drink of the Middle East and if coffee was really that of a distabling influence, why did it take several hundred years for the effect to take hold? And why did this coffee-inspired nationalism in the Ottoman Empire just happen to coincide with its emergence in Europe?
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoTea did not take off in the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century. While yes, now tea has utterly eclipsed coffee in Turkey as the everyday beverage, it is actually a pretty recent introduction.
- kingofpandora 7y agoAbsolutely - and that's when the alleged impact of coffee struck the Ottoman Empire (19th-century national movements). So even more likely it was tea than coffee, no?
- jcranmer 7y agoI'm struggling to think of any great empire that was brought to its knees due to the introduction of something novel.
- zappo2938 7y agoAround the time people started drinking coffee instead of beer,lots of changes in art, math, and science began to happen. To use a phrase from startup culture, coffee was very disruptive.
- wyattpeak 7y agoA lot of things were happening in that (very long) period, most of them with a much more obvious connection to changes in learning and culture than coffee. A connection would require better evidence than contemporaneity.
- twobat 7y agoI guess I could say that when I was born computers started happening. My, I am so disruptive.
- acjohnson55 7y agoIs it really one of the most fractious regions on earth? For about 2000 years, it was controlled by as few as one as many as 3 major powers. The imperialism -> nationalism transition has gone poorly most places that are neither the successor state of imperial powers nor new empires.