Conclusion
The last three chapters have integrated two canonical non-Western cases in order to further refine the plausibility of the central contention in this book, namely that what truly distinguishes the English case as the most effective parliament-builder was stronger control especially over the most powerful actors.
They have shown how these cases differed less in practice than commonly believed from Western ones, at least at the micro level, raising the bar in identifying the factors that truly account for differences. The non-Western cases did not lack demands for rights, limits to arbitrariness, or a concern with equality. To the contrary, they were distinguished often by being fair and institutionalizing practices the West did not adopt for centuries, like partible inheritance as opposed to primogeniture.[1497] We observed bureaucratic principles where England applied patrimonialism. The Ottomans even prevented a nobility from forming, stemming the sharp social divisions this generated.The culture of resistance to unjust authority was so engrained in “the Near Eastern concept of state” that some historians have seen it as a cause
Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Representative Practice 301 for the “decline” of the Ottoman Empire:[1498] as Darling has argued, it “legitimized... the possibility of resistance to rulers and their policies.”[1499] Tax resistance shows, Darling noted, that commitment to the state was based “on the government’s performance: no rewards for the elite and no justice for the populace meant no loyalty, no military support, and no taxes.”[1500] “Seditious” Ottoman coffee houses even preceded English ones.[1501] When Janissaries assassinated sultans, they were acting in the name of the people and against sultanic arbitrariness, as Ottomanist Cemal Kafadar observed.[1502] These traits help explain how the empire lasted so long.[1503]
Yet beheading the English king in 1649 is considered a defense of liberty but executing Osman II in 1622 is deemed emblematic of a nonlaw-governed regime. Once again, this discrepancy reflects the impact of observing state-society interaction in England through a central Parliament.[1504] Same action, different framework, different label.
Obligation was present in the non-Western cases; it elicited their despotic labeling after all. But it was mobilized mostly at the local level and often based on traditional social axes, such as kinship or village groups. English centralization was more pervasive and it integrated communities at the local level within a central structure. The more incentives for centralization were left to the pressures of war, which were intermittent and top-down, the more inadequate they were. England diverged not through greater individualism, but by more effectively deploying power to force individuals to act in common with others, from whom they would normally be divided, often at the expense of fairness - in short, by compellence, even violence - not by granting more rights. The demand for the latter was simply the response.
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