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"Our fathers have sinned, and are not: and we have borne their iniquities. Servants have ruled over us: there was none to redeem us out of their hand. We fetched our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the desert. Our skin was burnt as an oven, by reason of the violence of the famine." - Lamentations 5:7-10

Over the summer, I read Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order. He describes the mamluk system as one way of overcoming the natural human propensity for using government to empower one's relatives. He then briefly noted its demise and reflected that the Ottoman Empire's "survival into the twentieth century was explained by the adoption of Western institutions... This was ultimately not sufficient to preserve the regime, and the Turkish Republic that succeeded it was based on entirely different institutional principles." This set in motion a dreadful chain of thought in my mind: What if it was the other way around? What if a system of regularly kidnapping the children of vassal peoples and raising them as officers and bureaucrats had become the dominant way of attempting to combat corruption? I imagined a world where a state that offered its citizens a chance at merit-based testing into the government was seen as a rogue state, founded on principles alien to modernity as it existed elsewhere in the world.

I do not think this is a particularly realistic scenario, both because plagues can't just arbitrarily be deadlier (I tried to at least take this into account more than a certain novel), but also because the mamluk system is not an equally good way of rooting out corruption. The states that practiced it fell behind politically and economically. And this is good. We are far better off for resembling the Rogue Empire.

Description
"Our fathers have sinned, and are not: and we have borne their iniquities. Servants have ruled over us: there was none to redeem us out of their hand. We fetched our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the desert. Our skin was burnt as an oven, by reason of the violence of the famine." - Lamentations 5:7-10

Over the summer, I read Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order. He describes the mamluk system as one way of overcoming the natural human propensity for using government to empower one's relatives. He then briefly noted its demise and reflected that the Ottoman Empire's "survival into the twentieth century was explained by the adoption of Western institutions... This was ultimately not sufficient to preserve the regime, and the Turkish Republic that succeeded it was based on entirely different institutional principles." This set in motion a dreadful chain of thought in my mind: What if it was the other way around? What if a system of regularly kidnapping the children of vassal peoples and raising them as officers and bureaucrats had become the dominant way of attempting to combat corruption? I imagined a world where a state that offered its citizens a chance at merit-based testing into the government was seen as a rogue state, founded on principles alien to modernity as it existed elsewhere in the world.

I do not think this is a particularly realistic scenario, both because plagues can't just arbitrarily be deadlier (I tried to at least take this into account more than a certain novel), but also because the mamluk system is not an equally good way of rooting out corruption. The states that practiced it fell behind politically and economically. And this is good. We are far better off for resembling the Rogue Empire.