Social Sciences and History / Unit 6 SSH 0507 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Comparing Three Gunpowder Empires
The idea
The exam compares the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, and the anchor gives four axes. Faith: the Ottomans Sunni, ruling diverse subjects through the millet system; the Safavids Shi'ite, forcibly converting Sunnis; the Mughals Muslim rulers of a Hindu majority, Akbar synthesizing, Aurangzeb reviving Islam. Military: all three took firearms from the trade routes; the Ottomans raised Janissaries by the devshirme, the Safavids replaced the Qizilbash with enslaved Caucasians, the Mughals fought the Marathas. Height: Suleiman the lawgiver; Abbas the First; Akbar. Decline: Lepanto in fifteen seventy-one and Russia for the Ottomans; Nader Shah in seventeen thirty-six for the Safavids; Marathas, Afghans and British alliances for the Mughals.
In practice
Given "an empire whose sultan let each religious community regulate itself", Ottoman. Given "an empire that made Shi'ite Islam the state faith by force", Safavid. Given "an empire whose ruler blended Persian and Indian, Hindu and Muslim", Mughal under Akbar. Given "the empire Europeans first exploited through local disputes", Mughal India. Given "the naval defeat that began a decline", Lepanto, Ottoman.
Where people slip
The trap is treating the three as one Islamic bloc; the anchor stresses that no caliphate held them and that the Safavid–Ottoman border was a Sunni–Shia front. The second trap is dating Mughal decline to the British; the anchor's sequence is Aurangzeb's intolerance, the Marathas, the Afghans, then British alliances.
Your place on the trail
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