As for fighting like tigers, I would need to see a lot more supporting detail for that claim. Not saying it’s not true, just that it’s not apparent to me from what I’ve read. Ground lost tended to not be regained.

Here is Richard Blake, a couple of days ago:

Above all, Byzantine history is a record of survival and even prosperity in the face of terrible odds. Between about 640 and 720, the Byzantines were hit by wave after wave of catastrophe. First, there was the Great Plague of the 640s, that killed around a third of the population. Then, in the first decades of the seventh century, they were attacked on every frontier by the Persians and the Barbarians. They saw off these challenges, but had no time to recover before the first eruption of Islam from the deserts. In almost a single bite, the Arabs swallowed up the remains of the Persian Empire. They conquered vast areas of the East, and, within less than a century, pushing into Southern France. But, if they took Syria and Egypt and North Africa, they never conquered the core territories of the Byzantine Empire.

The reason for this is that the Byzantine State was ruled by creative pragmatists. The Roman Empire was a ghastly place for most of the people who lived in it. The Emperors at the top were often vicious incompetents. They ruled through an immense and parasitic bureaucracy. They were supreme governors of an army too large to be controlled. They protected a landed aristocracy that was a repository of culture, but that was ruthless in its exaction of rent. Most ordinary people were disarmed tax-slaves, where not chattel slaves or serfs.

During the seventh century, the Byzantines scrapped almost the entirety of the Roman heritage. Much of the bureaucracy was shut down. Taxes were cut. The silver coinage was stabilised. Above all, the landed estates were broken up and given to those who worked on them, in return for service in local militias. Though never abolished, chattel slavery became far less pervasive. The civil law was simplified, and the criminal law humanised – after the seventh century, the death penalty was rarely used.

The Byzantine Empire survived because of a revolutionary transformation in which ordinary people became armed stakeholders. The inhabitants of Roman Gaul and Italy and Spain barely looked up from their ploughs as the Barbarians swirled round them. The citizens of Byzantium fought like tigers in defence of their country. Now, this was a transformation pushed through in a century and a half of recurrent crises during which Constantinople was repeatedly under siege. Alone among the ancient empires in its path, Byzantium faced down the Arabs, and kept Islam at bay for nearly five centuries.

Glub disqualifies the Roman empire after the 3rd century because it is wracked by civil war and chaos, so I figure same standard should apply here. In the case of the Qing, that means starting at the end of the Three Feudatory revolts and ending with the Taiping Rebellion. Same story with the Ming — cut off the periods of chaos at the beginning and the end.

Ming Dynasty – 1370-1630 (260y)
Qing Dynasty – 1681-1850 (169y)

Why did you pick those end dates? Usually I’ve seen:

Ming – 13?? – 1644
Qing – 1644 – ~1910

Turchin makes the point in above that we really should not talk of the ‘rise and fall’ of the Roman empire, but the ‘rises and falls’ of the Roman empire. The empire was structurally different enough after each one of these ‘falls’ and ‘rises’ to justify splitting them up for historical analysis (a comparison could be made with Chinese transition from the Qin to the Han, starkly divided in our minds, but really less different from each other than the Romans of Antonius and the Romans of the Tetrarchy).

Taking his same standards to the east:

Kingdom/Dynasty of Qin – 340 BC-206 BC (134y)
W. Han Dynasty – 206 BC-9 AD (215y)
E. Han Dynasty – 22AD-189 AD (167y)
Tang Dynasty, mark I – 618-755 (137y)
Tang Dynasty, mark II – 763-884 (121y)
N. Song Dynasty – 960-1127 (167y)
S. Song Dynasty – 1128-1276 (148y)
Jin Dynasty – 1115-1234 (106y)
Ming Dynasty – 1370-1630 (260y)
Qing Dynasty – 1681-1850 (169y)

The average for these Chinese empires is about 60-80 years less than the European/Middle Eastern ones he lists.

Not familiar with India’s empires to do the same calculations off my head.

There is the risk of excessively cherry-picking data and making it fit the conclusions one is seeking. But I don’t see a rigorous way to measure that. You just have to look at it and decide if it is a real pattern or a Rorschach effect.

Not to say there’s no pattern here. I just think we could learn at least as much from the outlier.

One could argue whether distinguishing the Ottomans from the Seljuks is appropriate in world-historical terms. It was the Turks in general who reduced the Eastern Empire to a shadow of its former self; by the time the Ottomans got started most of the work had been done. (Reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, the overall pattern that presented itself to me for the Eastern Empire was: 300 years of losing ground to the Arabs, 300 years of moderate recovery under Basil and his successors, then 300 years of final collapse to the Turks.)

If one does treat the Ottomans as separate it would be more appropriate to start their ascension at around 1400, and the final decline in the 1800s, which gives them 400-500 years of imperial behavior.

Similarly the Roman period is indeed arbitrarily split, and cut short; Aurelian and Diocletian were masters of a unified imperial world which a subject of Augustus would have found largely familiar, and a contemporary of Marius would not have found incomprehensible. The civilization-ending crises didn’t really reach fruition until Valens and Valentinian, late in the 300s.

All that said, the basic pattern of behavior and of the temper and character of the peoples of the various empires that he describes is worth considering and retains applicability, even if the timescales aren’t consistent.

The Ottoman Empire lasted up until the 20th century.

The British Empire started way back in the Medieval period when the various Anglo-Norman monarchs tried to colonise Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Ireland was continually treated like a colony from the time of the plantations onwards.