The Progress of Delay

Fried Camel has been on a more or less unannounced hiatus for the past few weeks due to impending deadlines for two of our papers. For the History of the Ottoman Empire seminar that our class took last semester, I'm currently writing about the British relationship with the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th Century until the eve of the First World War.

It is with great candor that I admit the excruciating tedium with which this paper is being written. Of all the issues or topics that one could study in the Middle East, I personally find the Ottoman Empire to be quite dull. They were around for nearly six hundred years but had very little impact on the world. The Greeks left us great philosophers and early incarnations of our own political system that remain relevant some two thousand years later. The Romans gave the world the common derivative language of Latin which forms the basis of dozens of languages still in use today--ours chief among them.

The Ottomans gave us fez caps.

Truly, the only thing of great importance that I have been able to ascertain from the legacy of the Ottoman Empire is the composition of the modern Middle East following the Empire's collapse. The British and the French were able to carve the former Ottoman provinces up into mandates which then metastasized into nation states.

In essence, the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, unlike other truly great empires, is its death.

In time, perhaps the gifts of the Ottomans to the world will become more perceptible.

In the interim, their gift to me comes in the form of being required to write about them--a remarkably vapid gift that promises to continue draining valuable hours from my life.