I'm reading After Tamerlane by John Darwin and ran across this sentence on page 76, '[t]he genius of the Ottomans lay in reinforcing this Islamic solidarity with several shrewd innovations'.

I agree with him on the 'genius' part, but not the 'shrewd' part. I believe 'the genius of an Empire' can be a free-standing state of being without attributing any person or particular group of people directly with its being. Darwin goes too far, in my opinion, in claiming that the Ottoman Empire's were 'shrewd'. He seems to say that their extra-ordinary lasting power was directly caused by their conscious decisions. This may be so, but like everyone we have discussed, he does not provide the detailed logic of how it worked for them, but not others or how their actions were received in the hinterlands differently than at home. He sounds like many of the British Empire's defenders. In other words, he links some innovations with a direct attribution to the success (or genius, we dare use the word). The grand complexity of the all of the local communities that fell under the Ottomans were rounded up into the three innovations of the timar system, the millet system and the devshirme. My point is that an Empire can be genius in its core, because of the fortuitous mixture of events, innovations, and culture. Not everything is luck, but neither is everything due to some Homo Sapien's choice of action. We don't need to attribute everything as either working for, against or neutral to Empire.

This is part of my larger view that history is a lot more like the natural sciences, than the physical sciences and that social science has lent far too much on the physical sciences for its techniques. In my view, the 'genius' of Empire is far more like a particular strand of evolution, than an enduring physical law. We can revel at the complexity of a particular shellfish's short-lived adaption to a particular environment or the simplicity of a crocodile in being able to endure for millenia virtually unchanged. Both are genius, but must we lock down all of the reasons for the genius and attribute them?