When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Over the past few weeks we’ve been on a meandering journey along the outskirts of Europe, looking at the border between the Near and Middle Easts as well as the evolving Orientalness of Spain. I wasn’t planning to have a point at the beginning of this, but now I’m delighted to discover there might be one. Not surprisingly, it’s about the Ottoman Empire. I’m not sure the geographic categories into which we mentally divide the world always matter as much as we think. But one place where they really do is in trying to explain the rise of the West. If nothing else, you have to define the region whose rise you’re explaining. And the answer differs depending on the definition. In books like Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers or David Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the Ottoman Empire always features as the Middle Eastern power that almost made it. For centuries the Middle East was the center of civilization, while Europe lagged behind in wealth and military might. Then, with the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, Europe pulled ahead. The Ottoman Empire kept trying to modernize and hold their own. It did better than the Mughals or the Safavids. But eventually it fell behind. And then it just fell. When you view the Ottoman Empire as the last and most promising of history’s great Islamic or Middle Eastern empires, there is a natural tendency to seek religious or civilizational explanations for its demise. And indeed, the Ottoman Empire has long been portrayed