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MOMENT Houthis SHOOT DOWN ‘Turkish-made Saudi drone’ Barefoot Yemenis POSE next to BURNING WRECKAGE of $20 MILLION+ drone

You cannot treat “empire” and “colonial empire” as synonyms. The Ottoman state expanded through conquest and surely maintained an unequal political order, but its structure was different from that of a European national metropole ruling overseas colonies whose inhabitants were kept outside the imperial center. The Ottoman ruling class itself was recruited from across the empire. Men of Albanian, Bosnian, Serbian, Greek, Georgian and Circassian background entered the palace, army and bureaucracy and could reach the highest offices. Ayas Pasha, taken through the devşirme system from an Albanian family, became grand vizier. Christian Phanariot Greeks served as chief interpreters of the imperial council and were appointed to govern Wallachia and Moldavia. In the nineteenth century, Alexander Karatheodori, a Greek Orthodox Ottoman, became foreign minister. Gabriel Noradounghian, an Armenian Ottoman, later held the same office. Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Balkan Muslims represented their provinces in the Ottoman parliament. As for geography, you can’t erase the distinctions between a province, a vassal state, a tributary principality and an autonomous dependency. For example, Ottoman Hungary was organized into provinces. Wallachia and Moldavia were tribute-paying principalities. Crimea was a vassal khanate. Dubrovnik retained its own institutions and paid tribute. Egypt moved from direct provincial administration to hereditary and largely autonomous government. Syria and Palestine belonged to the Ottoman provincial system. Calling every one of these territories a “colony” does not explain how Ottoman rule worked.