Punch cards. Is it the best no but no one is going to bother to steal my data. Encryption through inconvenience

Wealth extraction is not a nice process and can be very oppressive, but it is more effective if you let the local population keep some identity. A rebel or dead local makes no money for the empire. I guess a good example of the top of my head would be the the Great Hedge of Inda. So in India over all there was limited effort to make the Indians conform with British religion or customs. But there was great effort put into collecting taxes. Now a lot of this in the British was not because they were tolerant for the sake of tolerance, but because they genuinely thought the locals were unable to understand the “Superior Ways of the British.” So definitely not a nice or inclusive point of view, but accidentally tolerant.

As for the Ottoman Empire they empire all the way to 1920ish. Yeah they weren’t European and they existed long before the age of discovery. But they were still contemporary to the British, Spanish, Dutch Empires. I think it would be fair to say that the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese Empires were well in decline long before the Ottomans.

Though honestly the nuance of all this could be argued forever. My broad point is that if you look at an empire vs a nation state, each with autocratic control. The nation states are much more likely to require conformity from their population not just wealth.

The European navel empires were mixed on this. As far as I know the ones that made it a religious thing were less tolerant. Believe it or not the British empire was fairly tolerant. Yeah I know it sounds crazy doesn’t it. (This is not a defense of the British Empire before someone says otherwise) This holds true to the Ottoman Empire too. Despite being a theocracy for most of its existence they were fairly tolerant to other religions being practiced in their borders.

It is only as they fall apart so they tend to become more oppressive as they attempt to hold power.

Here is the crazy thing about empires vs nation states. In general because empires hold vast swaths of territory. It is very common for them to be somewhat tolerant of the various groups under their control. The goal is wealth extraction not conformity. So if you let the locals keep most of their culture then they are generally more productive and less likely to get uppity.

Nation states are smaller and tend to lean on a cohesive identity to maintain power. So it is much more important for everyone to be the same. Otherwise it could lead to balkanization.