In 1937, the Chinese historian Jiang Tingfu reflected on the differing pace of mod­ernization in various non-Western countries.

The problem that Turkey had had, Jiang claimed, was that its first attempts at reform under the Ottoman Empire had been half-hearted and, as a result, the empire was almost “extinguished.” Only when Kemal Ataturk, the republican modernizer, had used “harsh” actions, was Turkey at last given unifying political authority and “only then could Turkey re­ally revive.”^[2412]

Jiang's view of Turkey's politics was contentious even in the 1930s, and he himself became much more dedicated to liberal ideas within a decade.

For the nineteenth century saw profound changes to the great empires of the Eurasian landmass. Qing China and Ottoman Turkey shifted from being major powers to polities under siege, in danger of conquest or even elimination in their existing forms. By the early part of the twentieth century, neither would exist in the imperial formation that defined them a century earlier. This chapter traces the similarities, and differences, between the downfall of these two major land-based premodern empires over the long nineteenth century. It suggests that a range of issues make them worthy of comparison, among them the problems of partial po­litical reform, the burdens of foreign debt, and religious and ethnic conflict. Both empires found themselves challenged by the forces of a modernizing West (and in China's case, the rival state of Japan). In the end, the fall of these two empires marked the endpoint for two of the major non-European systems of government in global politics, and paved the way for a system much more explicitly based on norms defined and controlled by the West.