1453/1492

Originally posted by Maharbbal But overall, the Ottomans were neither free traders nor mercantilists. They simply did not care. Merchants were poorly regarded, the instutions were not well fitted to traders' needs (high cost for a commercial trial) and they never had the will to catch up with the European comptitors interms of maritime technology or infrastructure (so much so that the Europeans had to build their own port in Smyrna).

This is very wrong. During the period we're discussing, Ottoman land transport infrastructure was better than that of any European country and it's maritime infrastructure was perfectly respectable. Further, Ottoman military policy demonstrates an enormous appreciation for the importance of maritime trade. The hugely expensive invasions of Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, and the many island bases in between were carried out solely to secure the shipping routes in the Eastern Mediterranean. I think I agree with Beylerbeyi that you're confusing the Ottoman Empire of the 15th century with the chaotic mess that it would turn into in later centuries. I believe the following statement of yours confirms that:

Originally posted by Maharbbal Seems to me all they cared about was on land and mostly agrarian, their fiscal and military power bases were there, they did not care about the merchants, otherwise why so few Ottoman merchants around the Med and why most of them came from the peripheries (Greek islands, Maghrib) and were commonly Christians (cf Armenia traders in Aleppo)?

The Ottoman traders who traded most with Christian countries were often Christian Ottomans. This was just the smoothest way to do things, and shouldn't be at all surprising. If Christian merchants would later go on to dominate the entire empire's trade, this was largely because Europe had become so powerful that European trade came to dwarf that from other places. If the apparatus of state would later retract to a point where it was nothing more than a series of rural tax farms, this was largely because it had effectively lost the capacity to do anything else. In the 15th and 16th centuries, however, these developments were still a long way off.

Originally posted by Maharbbal I know Mohammmed was a merchant.. and so what? Jesus was a carpenter, it does make carpenters specials in Medieval Europe!

A small point, but actually many evangelist movements that emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus pair that with an emphasis on the inherent dignity of the honest tradesman. The "Jesus was a carpenter" tradition does serve a purpose in imparting moral values, as does the "Mohammed was a merchant" tradition. The bazaars and caravansarais were always important to Islamic societies, and always benefitted from the generous patronage of ambitious leaders - including Ottoman ones.

Originally posted by Maharbbal No, the Med never managed to create the likes of the Atlantic economy nor enjoyed the famous colonial wares that triggered the consumer revolution in the late 1600s. Under the Ottomans' watch the Mediterranean trade has grown nearly irrelevant for the Northern countries after 1670.

The original question in this thread was about a time when the Atlantic economy had yet to come into existence. Certainly that economy would eventually eclipse, many times over, the Mediterranean trade, but the point stands that this doesn't in any way indicate that the Mediterranean trade was shrinking in absolute terms. It's also a bit misleading to say that Mediterranean trade grew irrelevant for Northern European countries after 1670, since they (I assume you mean countries like England and the Netherlands) were not heavily invested in it to begin with. Certainly - to return to the original point of the thread - they never had important trading interests in Byzantium that were cut off when Mehmet took Constantinople.

Originally posted by Maharbbal As it happen I wrote a whole dissertation on the subject a couple of years ago so what the Brits did was 1. on their way to the Med sell stuff to the Portuguese and Spaniards for bullion 2. carry fret for about every one (the Maltese, the Barbaresque, the Italians) 3. bring cheap clothes and expensive products (clocks, books) to Constantinople and sell it for bullion and 4. exchange woolen cloth and metal for silk and other goods. There was a significant period during which England was not yet the sole ruler of the seas and still traded with the Levant (roughly from 1580 to 1680). Besides, the fact that England was the objective ally of the sultan against Spain doesn't mean much since nearly every one was the enemy of Spain at that time. A permission to trade with the Empire was even granted to ... the subjects of the Pope (from the port of Ancona mostly) and Genoa.

Originally posted by Maharbbal I’m glad they managed to rebuild a whole fleet in one year, but they proved utterly incapable of improving much on the design of the ships they had inherited.

Originally posted by Maharbbal So to sum up, the Ottoman Empire was flawed on a financial, economic and commercial point of view. The costs of trading there were huge, much higher than in most places of the world (getting capitulations and having them renewed was long, painful and took a lot of money). These costs more than anything else explain the inability of other Europeans to break Venice’s monopoly on trade with the Grand Signior for over a century.

I understand the argument you're making here, but I don't think any of this applies to the time period we're talking about. The process by which non-Mediterranean powers broke into the Mediterranean market in the 17th century isn't relevant to the original question, which was whether the Ottoman presence drove trade away from the Med. With the exception of Spain, all of the Atlantic powers built their maritime shipping industries in the Atlantic and Indian oceans (and even Spain's Atlantic initiatives had little connection to its Mediterranean ones), and this experience would end up creating the most efficient model for moving goods by sea up to that time. As a side benefit, the Atlantic powers found that they could out-compete traditional shippers in local markets everywhere, including the Mediterranean.

I also think you're being more than a little too harsh in your judgement of Ottoman trade practices. I don't agree at all that the Ottomans made trade especially difficult or expensive, and I'd be interested to know what parts of the world offered easier access to European traders - aside from those that were forced to. Of course you had to know how to operate in the Ottoman Empire to trade there, but that's how it is everywhere, even today (It's not like I'd be allowed to pull up to a dock on the coast of England and start unloading goods for immediate sale). Your argument that transaction costs were what prevented Northern European traders from competing with Venice doesn't really make sense, since Venice obviously had no problem absorbing those costs. I find it more likely that Northern European traders, having absolutely no expertise in trading with the Ottoman Empire, understandably didn't do a very good job of it at first. Successful trading relationships require large reserves of trust, and trust invariably takes time to build.

Your description of English trade practices in the Mediterranean also points to another reason why it would have taken so long for them to become successful - direct trade between Northern Europe and the Ottoman Empire wasn't profitable enough. The descripiton you give sounds a lot like what the English, Dutch and Portuguese were doing in East Asia and the Indian Ocean at that time: taking over the local freight business with their bigger, better ships and making much their money off commissions rather than off the sale of their own goods. They did this in most of the places where they encountered rich societies and high-value products, and it was highly profitable, but it necessitated setting up a complex network of contacts, factories, warehouses, bases, etc.

Which brings us to the "infrastructure" of trade, which in this case means ships and ports. While it's true that the Ottomans never developed the kind of capacity for bulk ocean trade that the Atlantic powers did, I hardly think you can fault them for that considering how far they were from any oceans. The ships they used were appropriate for what they had been doing, and investing in ocean fleets didn't make sense for the Ottomans for the same reasons that, in the 20th century, investing in ocean fleets didn't make sense for the Soviet Union. There wasn't any incentive for the Ottomans to build this type of ship or the port facilities to accomodate them, especially since most Mediterranean ports were already optimized for a particular class of vessel and most vessels were optimized for a particular class of port.

Sorry I’m replying late, I had a few things to do. So lets see.

First and foremost, lets not forget the initial question: without 1453 would 1492 had happen?

I’m saying that yes it would have maybe slightly differently of course but it would have.

For some reason, the subject matter drifted towards the qualities of the Ottoman Empire as a institution regulating and fostering trade and commerce.

I’m saying that the OE (as the Byzantines and the Mamlukes before them) were not trade-friendly and impeded the commercial development of the territories and populations under their rule (overall with a few brilliant exceptions).

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley This is very wrong. During the period we're discussing, Ottoman land transport infrastructure was better than that of any European country and it's maritime infrastructure was perfectly respectable.

First, lets not compare the land routes with maritime trade. For two reasons:
1. Although the value traded were sometimes similar, in terms of volume it is just not in the same league.
2. The growth in terms of productivity of the Oriental sea routes were minor over the Ottoman period and might even have decreased. On the other hand, transportation and transaction costs for the European maritime trade fell dramatically.

Granted I’m no specialist of the OE but it really seems to me that their maritime infrastructures were less than optimal by 15th-16th century’s standard.
We can for instance compare Portugal with any part of the OE and realize that the latter lacked:
1. The fantastic innovative abilities of the Portuguese shipbuilders of the time.
2. The type of institutions such as the navigation school of Sagres.
3. The involvement in the dense European network of map-makers, captains, ship-makers, craftsmen, etc. that quickly spread the best practices from Genoa to the Baltic.
4. The so-called seaports systems of Porto and Lisbon that knitted together these each one of these centers with tens of smaller ports providing food, men and material.

Many countries in Europe had the same type of infrastructures and institutions or were on the verge of acquiring it. On the other hand, the OE had nothing approaching neither in terms of technology nor the organization the European model.

True enough, the Ottoman navy enjoyed a complex system quite comparable with the European seaport systems, but precisely it was a military organization, not one oriented toward trade. The only organization looking a bit like the European model were the Greek merchant networks specially those of the former Venetian colonies which retained important links with Venice.

This commerce was important and some even got involved in partnerships with the English merchants to export dry fruits and dyes to London. But this trade was quite limited and many Greek sailors had no other options but to join other merchant navies or to become one of the dreaded Barbary pirates.

Yet this was clearly a second best option as shows the fact that, during the short extinction of the European trade between 1790 and 1815, all the Barbary corsairs suddenly became the most active traders of the Mediterranean. But they could not compete in peacetime and after 1815 they quickly had to resume their pirate activities.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Further, Ottoman military policy demonstrates an enormous appreciation for the importance of maritime trade. The hugely expensive invasions of Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, and the many island bases in between were carried out solely to secure the shipping routes in the Eastern Mediterranean.

I’m really not convinced. It may be true for Rhodes and to a lesser extend for Malta. But it is totally false for Cyprus and moreover for Crete. In Crete, the Venetians were doing their outmost to hunt down the Northern pirates and the Ottoman pretext to attack was really hypocritical. The point of the invasion was to gain territories and calm down the troops. They saw an opportunity, they seized it. Little to do with security. Regarding Malta, I think it was in line with the general Ottoman offense in the West; once more if they existed the security issues were really secondary.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley I think I agree with Beylerbeyi that you're confusing the Ottoman Empire of the 15th century with the chaotic mess that it would turn into in later centuries.

I would adopt a Braudelian approach to this question. In other words lets think long term: a recent article by Bosker, Buringh and van Zanden has shown that the relative decline of the Eastern Mediterranean compared to Europe had started c. 1250 and the Ottoman could not stop it although they managed to slow it down from 1450 to 1500. So basically, their inherited the Abbasids’, the Byzantines’ and the Mamlukes’ mess but they did not manage to reverse the tide at any point (I’m talking economically, not politically).  

Besides, if I am not mistaking the territorial bias of the Ottoman rulers did not start fater the death of Suleyman. The landed military class of the Sipahis and the system of the timars dates back way before.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley The Ottoman traders who traded most with Christian countries were often Christian Ottomans. This was just the smoothest way to do things, and shouldn't be at all surprising. If Christian merchants would later go on to dominate the entire empire's trade, this was largely because Europe had become so powerful that European trade came to dwarf that from other places. If the apparatus of state would later retract to a point where it was nothing more than a series of rural tax farms, this was largely because it had effectively lost the capacity to do anything else. In the 15th and 16th centuries, however, these developments were still a long way off.

I’m perfectly ready to admit that the situation got worse, but it was never great.

The most important advantage Ottoman Christian traders had was commercial contacts with Europe often predating the Ottoman conquest. But the Muslim traders were most often then not perfectly welcomed in Europe be it in Venice (Fundaco dei Turchi), in Ancona, in France, in Tuscany, in Savoy or even in England and the Netherlands. But no important Muslim trading community arise.

Actually, the Ottoman cities seldom develop along the sea, and following a long Mediterranean Muslim tradition tended to develop inland (Damascus, Cairo, Bursa, Bagdad). More importantly even urbanization did not increase under the Ottoman rule (showing little productivity increase) and big towns remained dominating (these being usually service and administrative hubs as opposed to industrial districts with export-oriented sectors).

This general situation was true during the Ottoman Golden Age as well as during the OE’s long decadence.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley The original question in this thread was about a time when the Atlantic economy had yet to come into existence. Certainly that economy would eventually eclipse, many times over, the Mediterranean trade, but the point stands that this doesn't in any way indicate that the Mediterranean trade was shrinking in absolute terms. It's also a bit misleading to say that Mediterranean trade grew irrelevant for Northern European countries after 1670, since they (I assume you mean countries like England and the Netherlands) were not heavily invested in it to begin with. Certainly - to return to the original point of the thread - they never had important trading interests in Byzantium that were cut off when Mehmet took Constantinople.

I’m sorry but you underestimate the significance of the Ottoman market for the European wares in the early modern period. The OE remained France’s, England’s and the Netherland’s main extra-European export market until c. 1680-90 (even later for France). But as the quick decline of the regional industries linked to the OE shows (Langedoc, Leyden, Yorkshire), its significance quickly decrease in the last quarter of the 17th century. For several centuries it had been Europe’s main export and import market. Its quick demise is too dramatic not to be considered. Basically the OE totally missed its European integration and became a backwater while the rest of Europe turned to Asia and the Americas.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley I also think you're being more than a little too harsh in your judgement of Ottoman trade practices. I don't agree at all that the Ottomans made trade especially difficult or expensive, and I'd be interested to know what parts of the world offered easier access to European traders - aside from those that were forced to. Of course you had to know how to operate in the Ottoman Empire to trade there, but that's how it is everywhere, even today (It's not like I'd be allowed to pull up to a dock on the coast of England and start unloading goods for immediate sale). Your argument that transaction costs were what prevented Northern European traders from competing with Venice doesn't really make sense, since Venice obviously had no problem absorbing those costs. I find it more likely that Northern European traders, having absolutely no expertise in trading with the Ottoman Empire, understandably didn't do a very good job of it at first. Successful trading relationships require large reserves of trust, and trust invariably takes time to build.

I agree with you, entering any market was very difficult and costly. That being say, I think entering the Ottoman one was particularly difficult and costly.

Here are a few reasons:
1. Unlike any other early modern example I know of, you had to obtain and renew the right to trade in the OE. This treaty had to be purchased every five years and was tellingly called a Capitulation (similar to the Byzantine Chrysobules).
2. The bureaucratic system was very costly, any procedure took time and a lot of money.
3. Piracy, rebellions and bandits officials created costs that had to be faced with armed ships and convoys.
4. The corrupt officials managed to regularly obtain ‘avanias’ (i.e. undue fines and taxes), the fact that the word used is Italian testifies that the habits was in place before the 17th century.
5. Unlike any example I know, the merchants were forced to build infrastructures by themselves (bridges, khans and entire harbours).
6. Finally some peculiar and endogenous issues increased the cost of doing trade in the OE: buying back your friends held as slaves by Ottoman subjects, facing various diseases (malaria in Scanderone, plague elsewhere in Syria and Palestine).

All these costs forced the traders to pull their resources into companies and factories. Consuls existed in every ports, but why would the merchants accept such costs and limit their own freedom (and pay so much for the European monarchs’ protection)? And why would such companies arise in the OE and not Italy, Spain, the Baltic, etc? Trading with the OE was particularly difficult, one way to overcome this difficulty was to gather under the umbrellas of the Levant companies.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Your description of English trade practices in the Mediterranean also points to another reason why it would have taken so long for them to become successful - direct trade between Northern Europe and the Ottoman Empire wasn't profitable enough. The descripiton you give sounds a lot like what the English, Dutch and Portuguese were doing in East Asia and the Indian Ocean at that time: taking over the local freight business with their bigger, better ships and making much their money off commissions rather than off the sale of their own goods. They did this in most of the places where they encountered rich societies and high-value products, and it was highly profitable, but it necessitated setting up a complex network of contacts, factories, warehouses, bases, etc.

The situations were highly varied, the English had a positive commercial balance with the OE while the French and particularly the Dutch did not. They needed the extra trafficking to acquire the bullion necessary to buy the Asian exotic wares. This trade was quite profitable during the 17th century and before.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Which brings us to the "infrastructure" of trade, which in this case means ships and ports. While it's true that the Ottomans never developed the kind of capacity for bulk ocean trade that the Atlantic powers did, I hardly think you can fault them for that considering how far they were from any oceans. The ships they used were appropriate for what they had been doing, and investing in ocean fleets didn't make sense for the Ottomans for the same reasons that, in the 20th century, investing in ocean fleets didn't make sense for the Soviet Union. There wasn't any incentive for the Ottomans to build this type of ship or the port facilities to accomodate them, especially since most Mediterranean ports were already optimized for a particular class of vessel and most vessels were optimized for a particular class of port.

Once more I don’t agree. True the Ottomans were not in a position that required massive ocean-going equipment. Yet , the necessity they faced in the 1660s to build ships on the European model shows that up to a point, the European model was relevant for them. Up to a point they should have developed modern infrastructures because they were commercially and strategically relevant.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi First of all GOLD did not flow East, SILVER did, gold went the other way. Well, yes, the West did not have much gold to send East. Ottomans and Memluks had it, as it came from Sudan. But the flow was not only in one direction.

Wrong. After the Ming’s 15th century financial crisis, a massive arbitrage appeared between East Asian gold and European gold. Basically, the Chinese were buying silver at a 1/1 ratio with gold while in Europe you had a 2/1 or even 3/1 ratio. Even before Columbus Europe was a very important producer of silver.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi 1. Trading with the Turks was VERY expensive and VERY risky. Without some good connections with the major civil servants in Constantinople which were difficult and once more expensive to create you'd be robbed to you last pair of panties by the local corrupt officials. You couldn't just jump in the first port and trade, you needed the sultan to accept you. This is just racist stereotyping. Ottomans had no more corruption than Westerners until about 1550s. In fact they had much less corruption.

As far as I know, the English traders in Portugal did not have to collect found to offer to the Portuguese prime minister to ask something to the king. Nor did the French in Sweden, nor the Venetians in the Low Countries, etc.
I know no equivalent to the avanias so dreaded by European merchants in the Levant nor anything like the capitulations (once more note the name of the trade treaty) asked by the Sultan and that had to be repeated every five years.

Don’t call it corruption if you don’t want to call it like that. Indeed it is more complicated. But lets say they had an odd and heavy tax system, an a quite humiliating one as well.

I don’t see what is racist about that.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi Yes, but this is not because of Ottoman corruption. It is because Italians had special advantages granted to them by the Ottomans (which were revoked during times of war, but re-granted afterwards). Later in the 16th century (that means 1500s) first the French and later the British were given these permissions as well. The Dutch, for instance, were trading with British flags until they got their permissions. The French used their early permissions to weaken Venetian trade. The British did too, but it took them longer.

My point is: setting up a company was an expensive endeavour but a necessary one in the context of the European trade with the OE. Why would the Brits and the Dutch had gone through the hassle to create such heavy institutions that made them so easily taxable by their home states?

Surely they would not have done it and settled for the usual independent traders system hadn’t trade with the OE been so expensive. In other words: the costs were so huge the traders had to gather to foot the bill. By their own admission the most important reason the English merchants created the English Levant Company was to face collectively the avanias and other costs so as to reduce the risks for a single individual.

Other problems were also for instance collective responsibility of the foreign merchants. In other words, if a Dutch merchant had debts and could not pay, the whole Dutch merchant community was held responsible and had to repay the one merchant’s creditors. The same was true for acts of piracy, crimes, etc. Regularly for instance European ships and merchandizes were seized to cover the losses of Ottoman merchants due to European acts of piracy.

This type of collective liability had disappeared in Europe since the 14th-15th century and sometimes earlier. This was a very expensive system for the merchants held liable for all and any of their countrymen. It was ineffective and backwardish. It is not racist, I am not saying all Turks were idiots, I’m saying their trade laws were not as effective as the European standard of the time.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi No, the Med never managed to create the likes of the Atlantic economy nor enjoyed the famous colonial wares that triggered the consumer revolution in the late 1600s. Under the Ottomans' watch the Mediterranean trade has grown nearly irrelevant for the Northern countries after 1670. ? Of course, other trade routes became more important. How can you blame the Ottomans for that? What are they supposed to do, FFS, de-colonise America? Capture South Africa and found a base in Antarctica and patrol the sea between?

No but had their economy grown and stayed open, they could have remained a major market for European wares and a provider as well. I mean Egyptian cotton and sugar could have retained their 15th century predominance. And then who knows?

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi I think you are taking some blind bets here, inspired by what Mortaza has written. Ottomans state involvement in trade to 'boost import' was to reduce tariffs. That is free trade. You are also wrong about the Ottoman state before 1560, that it was 'smaller', 'leaner', whatever. What it was was 'more centralised'. Which was not smaller. Also you have an blind ideological position (market fundamentalism), so you will refuse to accept the fact that the Ottomans were free traders compared to the mercantalist Westerners, because it undermines your dogmas that free trade leads to development. No matter how many sources I bring to you, you will always say, 'that is not real free trade'. Your types are also saying that the current finance crisis is caused by government intervention. If they left the banks alone, the market would have fixed itself, right?

I’m sorry but you seem a bit confused about the terms here.

1.    The Ottomans were not free traders. For instance the conscious decision to cripple the Salonica textile industry (after a short Golden Age in the early 1500s) testifies of a major state involvement. The state intervened to shape the country’s production and the location of its industries that makes it an interventionist state. It is not because they favoured import, while most state interventionists tend to favour export that they were free traders.
2.    On the other hand, the OE had very little ability to intervene on the economy, nor did any of the governments of the time. Up to a point they were all free traders since they had limited potential impact on the market.
3.    The English government hardly ever got involved with production even though they sometimes tried to favour trade. Besides, the real first mercantilist legislations in England (the Navigation Act of 1651) intervened 70 years AFTER the Brits entered the Ottoman market so surely it doesn’t explain it.
4.    The French mercantilist policies were… a total failure. The production of cloths for the Levant fell dramatically during Louis XIV reign. On the other hand, the little regulated protestant industries managed to thrive after the partial liberalization following Louis XIV’s death.
5.    The European states involvement in the Levant trade proved successful in only one case: they managed to organize the trade itself (i.e. transport plus management of the agents in the Levant factories) better than independent merchants would have done. And that is because the government was best equipped to cope with the pirates and interact with the Sultan. But as the case of the thriving American colonies and the dynamic intra-European trade shows was an atypical case, forced upon the merchants by the specially high costs and risks of trading in the Levant.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi Majority of the traders in the Black Sea and also between Egypt and Anatolia were Muslims.

And they were so successful that the Ottoman urbanization (a proxy of productivity) stayed at rather low level by early modern standard, no significant industrial towns developed, etc.

Most Ottoman cities were “consumer” urban centers (as opposed to “producer” ones as was common in many parts of Europe. The Ottoman economy was locked in a medieval high equilibrium trap and did not manage to escape it before the 1800s.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi Well, maybe you don't know much about the Ottomans, then. Christians later dominated the domestic trade, but it was not in the 15th and 16th centuries.

I must have missed the successful Muslim merchant communities spread all over Europe in the 15th century. I see the Greeks in the Netherlands and London and Italy and Portugal in the 16th century but the Muslim ones were really scarce.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi Not just wheat trade, all domestic trade. And in the Ottoman Empire, 'domestic trade' means from Budapest to Basra.

Come on what wares were traded between Budapest and Basra. The Ottoman trade was ultra centralized around a few urban consuming centers, and that was pretty much it. I might be mistaking but nothing compared to the continental division of labour reached as early as the 13th century in Europe for instance by the textile industries.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi More racist stereotyping, rather than true knowledge of the historical facts, I am afraid.

Frankly if I wanted to grace my ears with the craft of pundit I’d watch O’Reily.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi As to the poor 'Europeans' 'having to' ask not to be judged by horrible Ottoman courts, well, today the poor Americans in Iraq also 'have to' ask not to be judged by the corrupt Iraqi courts. It has nothing to do with imperialism, oh no! Never. 'Europeans' never do such things. All they want is free trade...

What does it have to do with anything? Foreign merchants never set up their own courts if they can avoid to do so, it is way too expensive and constraining. They only did so in the OE. Why? Because it was way too dangerous to have the Ottoman bureaucrats involved in  their trade. Once more it was too expensive.

That being said it has nothing to do with what is going on in Iraq nowadays since if an Ottoman subject was involved the case would automatically be handled by an Ottoman court. In the same way, a European unhappy with the consul’s ruling could appeal to the Ottoman jurisdiction.

Regarding Imperialism, well the English were fully aware they were barely welcomed in the Levant and had to behave respectfully. One English consul in Aleppo was even thrown in jail as soon as he arrived in Syria because he had not respected the protocole. In the same way, what kind of imperialist is forbidden to sleep with local women and commonly have to pay taxes invented by local officials???

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi In reality, until pretty late, Christians and Jews in the Empire regularly applied to the Muslim courts, in domestic matters, because they had better rights in them. And local landlords were not allowed to punish anyone without a judge's decision to their guilt. And the judges answered directly to the high judge in Constantinople. They this system in place and working in 1400 or so. I am not sure how many centuries that is ahead of France. Two? Three?

We’re talking commercial law here. Domestic matters are not treated in the merchants’ courts.

That being said I perfectly agree with you the French legal system in the 17th-18th century was a total mess which crippled the economy and ruined the economy.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi More bollocks, I am sorry to say.

No you’re not.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi Ottomans had large international trade ports in Antalya and Alanya as well as in Greece. And above all, Dubrovnik, the vassal. Ottoman land trade went there and then to Ancona. Ragusa became filthy rich thanks to that. Not to mention the large ports in the Black Sea, such as Kefe. And this is all before they expanded into the Levant and North Africa.

If you say so… source?

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi Ottomans only copied or inherited designs form the superior white race and they were 'incapable of improving much'. In reality Ottomans produced the largest vessels the Med has ever seen up to that date in 1490s. And they had better cannons.

Ok lets not get carried away. I’ve just said that the Ottoman had a poor record when it comes to maritime innovation. It is not racist, supremacist or whatever else. They had great cannons and were able to build guns of a size the French vainly tried to reproduce for years before simply giving up. But when it comes to ships, yes they copied Europe models and they did so rather poorly.

You really think Kemal Reis’ Göke was the biggest ship ever to grace the Mediterranean? Come on, the Genoese had sailing ships three times the size! The French at the same time had La Cordelière patrolling the costs of Provence which was easily twice the size of the Göke (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cordeli%C3%A8re).
More importantly, these ships I am talking about were sailing ship will the Göke was a galley, i.e. the proud yet ill-fated descendant of the medieval ships perfected  in Italy after having been used all over the Mediterranean by Muslims and Christians alike.

I’m sorry to hurt your national pride but the Ottoman did not have good ships and their only real advantage (the massive arsenals around Istanbul) were solely devoted to military stuff. This gave them a significant superiority as they could build more galleys faster than any one else, but it also impeded their capacity to innovate (very little modifications in ship design from 1450 to 1650 (same thing in Venice) while Northern European and Western Mediterranean shipbuilders were gaining a significant advance in basically all the fields that mattered.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi So it was functioning well, but was not used by 'Europeans'? What bollocks. Do you think Bursa or Aleppo or Damascus are coastal cities? Please look at a map. Btw, I thought you were arguing above that there were no Ottoman traders? So who was using them? In fact, they were used by 'European' traders as well as by Ottomans and Iranians and whomever, and provided a vastly superior land-based trading network to the contemporary Western ones. And they are extremely relevant, because a lot of the goods which arrived at the ports actually came by land, carried by vast caravans which stayed in caravanserais.

cf what I’ve said about caravans in my previous post.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi No Iskanderun it’s 1600 and Smyrna it’s 1650-60. Not the 19th century. I doubt it. Even if some traders may have built facilities for themselves in the 17th century, that does not mean that Ottoman infrastructure was bad in the 15th and 16th centuries, nor does it mean that the Ottomans did not have other ports. They did.

See Goffman’s Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642-1660 and the same’s The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi Well, wrong. You ignore Ottoman domestic trade, which was far more than just wheat. Venetians mention 50 ship convoys leaving Istanbul for Alexandria and meeting with 12 military escorts in Gallipoli to protect them. That's a typical convoy- 62 ships. Doesn't seem like Alexandria lost its importance to me. Not to mention that excess budget of Egypt was sent yearly to Constantinople (500000 gold ducats, count the zeros) from there in early 16th century. What was the total budget of England at that time?

Source? Besides, if trade was so important and varied were is the urban growth than so to speak always accompanies division of labour and productivity rise? No smoke means certainly no fire.

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi I agree, they were free-traders. They had no tariffs on silver and gold imports either, which destroyed their economy.

Why would they have tariffs on silver and gold imports? Besides, the Dutch had no restriction on bullion exports while the Spanish did, guess which one had a thriving economy?

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi The costs of trading there were huge, much higher than in most places of the world (getting capitulations and having them renewed was long, painful and took a lot of money). Wrong.

Source? Where are your data? What are you basing your opinion on?

Lets take the example of interest rates. While some Turkish territories allowed loans after the mid 16th century, they were basically forbidden in most places within the Empire which crippled the Ottoman industries which could not access credit easily and whose property rights could not be enforced. As a result, loans were extremely expensive and interest rates reached 15% (i.e. 3 to 5 times what it was in Europe at the time). So much so that the European banned their merchants from borrowing from Ottoman subjects since it was identified with usury rates. How do you explain that if not through the ill-functioning of the Ottoman commercial institutions?

Let me give you another example of the ill-managed interventions of the Ottoman state in the economy. In the 1660s, Aleppo managed to grow a dynamic textile industry exporting all over the Empire. But this also meant that the state was deprived from the juicy taxes it collected from entering European wares (on average 5%). To compensate the government taxed them so heavily that the Ottoman producers were quickly forced out of business. So much for “free” trade and the lack of taxes collected on foreign merchants.

So I can only renew my conclusions: the Ottoman institutions were less effective than their European counterparts which destroyed any chance for the Muslim Ottoman traders and producers to compete with the Europeans while they had both the ability and the ambition to do so.

I’m sorry if I sound ‘Orientalist’ or whatever else, but one has to admit that the Ottoman experience after 1500 was overall a failure on the economic point of view, it faced massive problems that came from somewhere. I believe that this somewhere was mostly the government (be it central or local).

I realize I may have overstated my point. I'm not saying there were no Ottoman merchants nor Muslim Ottoman merchants, there were many and some very important ones. I'm not saying either that the European commercial institutions were the panacea and the Ottoman ones were totally dreadful.

I'm speaking relatively. The Ottoman and chiefly the Muslim Ottoman traders were not as mighty as their European counterparts.

In the same way, the Ottoman commercial institution were not as efficient as the European ones (even though the latter were far from optimal).

Regarding the support of the Ottoman government for their merchants, it ought to be signaled that the Red and Black seas were off limit for the European traders and shipowners at least until the 1700s. (source: Molly Greene, "Beyond the Northern invasion, the Mediterranean in the 17th century").

One good example of the poor functioning of the Ottoman institutions: in 1623, to please the creditors of a French merchant in Aleppo, the cadi had the whole French community arrested.

wow- this thread is still growing- oh my god I created a monster-

I would have to do some serious research to really add anything to this but it is good to see the different views. My focus has been on the native American cultures of my area for the museum work; Mogollon, Hohokham and Anasazi.


One thing that fascinated me was a small 4-5 inch stone statue, at the museum, which looke almost exactly like a Cycladic figurine. It was made out of a green colored stone and was more crude but it looks so much like these figurines found on the Cycladic islands of Greece.

You are all welcome to join me in the Americas thread.

Well, this discussion seems to have passed me by somewhat. I'll respond to some of the posts addressed to me, though.

Originally posted by Maharbbal First, lets not compare the land routes with maritime trade. For two reasons: 1. Although the value traded were sometimes similar, in terms of volume it is just not in the same league.

Value is how trade is measured, not volume. I consider the land trade important because, if the Atlantic countries had been posessed of a land trade infrastructure equivalent to the Ottomans, or if they had equivalently valuable products to trade, they may not have been driven to develop seaborne bulk trade at all.

Originally posted by Maharbbal 2. The growth in terms of productivity of the Oriental sea routes were minor over the Ottoman period and might even have decreased. On the other hand, transportation and transaction costs for the European maritime trade fell dramatically.

I agree that transportation and transaction costs were beginning to drop in some Atlantic countries at this time. However, this was localized and was driven by developments that only a few countries were in a position to benefit from.

For instance, it was pretty much only the Portuguese, Basques, French and English who were able to exploit the Atlantic cod fishery, but for them it was a stable industry that helped drive both technological innovation and investment expertise. Compare that to the fishing industry in Turkey, which called for little in the way of technological innovation, and you have part of the explanation for why the Ottomans weren't at the forefront in the development of bulk ocean transport. There was absolutely no reason why they would need to.

Originally posted by Maharbbal We can for instance compare Portugal with any part of the OE and realize that the latter lacked: 1. The fantastic innovative abilities of the Portuguese shipbuilders of the time. 2. The type of institutions such as the navigation school of Sagres. 3. The involvement in the dense European network of map-makers, captains, ship-makers, craftsmen, etc. that quickly spread the best practices from Genoa to the Baltic. 4. The so-called seaports systems of Porto and Lisbon that knitted together these each one of these centers with tens of smaller ports providing food, men and material.

We can compare Portugal with any other part of the world at this time, and see that their maritime transport system was better. Those that were in most direct competition with Portugal were the first to catch up, and everybody else lagged behind. It certainly was not a generally "European" model, juxtaposed against an "Ottoman" model. This doesn't really say much about the Ottomans in particular at all.

I consider it important to ask, when we're talking about a new technological development (which is what the revolution in seaborne trade was at heart), whether all can benefit equally from jumping onto the new field, or whether some just aren't in a position to compete. I tend to think the latter is the case.

Originally posted by Maharbbal Iâ?Tm really not convinced. It may be true for Rhodes and to a lesser extend for Malta. But it is totally false for Cyprus and moreover for Crete. In Crete, the Venetians were doing their outmost to hunt down the Northern pirates and the Ottoman pretext to attack was really hypocritical. The point of the invasion was to gain territories and calm down the troops. They saw an opportunity, they seized it. Little to do with security. Regarding Malta, I think it was in line with the general Ottoman offense in the West; once more if they existed the security issues were really secondary.

The Venetians were obliged under treaties with the Ottomans to reduce piracy. As is so often the case, however, they were not always able to control violent groups and were also sometimes hesitant to punish Christian pirates for crimes against Muslims. I don't disagree that the Ottomans were hypocritical to demand that the Venetians crack down on pirates, since they also condoned piracy in the western Mediterranean, but in eliminating Venetian bases they were certainly responding to domestic pressure to protect shipping from attack - which was especially strong when it came to pirate attacks on pilgrim convoys. The invasion of Cyprus came after a spat of attacks on shipping, and a number of retaliatory flayings. Cyprus and Crete were both taken - at least partly - because the Ottomans decided they couldn't farm out security in the Mediterranean anymore. If they had just been looking for opportunities to annex land, there were easier pickings available.

Originally posted by Maharbbal I would adopt a Braudelian approach to this question. In other words lets think long term: a recent article by Bosker, Buringh and van Zanden has shown that the relative decline of the Eastern Mediterranean compared to Europe had started c. 1250 and the Ottoman could not stop it although they managed to slow it down from 1450 to 1500. So basically, their inherited the Abbasidsâ?T, the Byzantinesâ?T and the Mamlukesâ?T mess but they did not manage to reverse the tide at any point (Iâ?Tm talking economically, not politically).

The relative rise of Northern Europe does not equate to the decline of the Eastern Mediterranean, any more than the relative rise of some developing economies today implies the decline of the developed economies. The standard of living in Northern Europe in 1250 really had nowhere to go but up, and around that time they were finally starting to gain access to the means of joining the rest of the world.

Residents of the Eastern Mediterranean, on the other hand, were already living at about as high a standard of living as was possible at the time. So it would be expected that their development would remain fairly flat until something (like the appearance of a couple of new continents) changed the paradigm. I'm not in any way certain, but I wouldn't be surprised if the standard of living in the Ottoman Empire remained higher than in most of Europe until the colonial period.

The following:

Originally posted by Maharbbal In 800, the urban population represented some 10% of the 19 million inhabitants of North Africa and SW Asia and about 25 towns had more than 10,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile in Europe (minus the Balkans) only 3% of the 22 million inhabitants lived in cities and there were roughly speaking 25 towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1800, the figures for N Africa and SW Asia had hardly changed while in Europe there were 10% of urbanites for 130 million inhabitants and 522 cities. In other words the Ottoman empire lacked these lesser towns that drive the industry and thus trade and division of labour.

looks, to me, more like Europe catching up than the OE falling behind.

Originally posted by Maharbbal Besides, if I am not mistaking the territorial bias of the Ottoman rulers did not start fater the death of Suleyman. The landed military class of the Sipahis and the system of the timars dates back way before.

The Sipahis were not the entire Ottoman ruling class. Other power brokers included the kapikullu, the religious establishment, the guilds and the minorities. In fact, the landed aristocracy often found itself frozen out by urban interests, regularly losing out to those who had more regular access to the Porte.

Originally posted by Maharbbal Actually, the Ottoman cities seldom develop along the sea, and following a long Mediterranean Muslim tradition tended to develop inland (Damascus, Cairo, Bursa, Bagdad). More importantly even urbanization did not increase under the Ottoman rule (showing little productivity increase) and big towns remained dominating (these being usually service and administrative hubs as opposed to industrial districts with export-oriented sectors).

Beylerbeyi has answered this, but I have to add that I really find this statement unjustifiably determinative. Cairo and Baghdad are inland, but both have fairly easy access to the sea. I fail to see what this has to do with Muslim tradition, seeing as that London, Paris and Madrid - to name a few capitals of ocean-friendly European countries - are also located inland.

Originally posted by Maharbbal Iâ?Tm sorry but you underestimate the significance of the Ottoman market for the European wares in the early modern period. The OE remained Franceâ?Ts, Englandâ?Ts and the Netherlandâ?Ts main extra-European export market until c. 1680-90 (even later for France). But as the quick decline of the regional industries linked to the OE shows (Langedoc, Leyden, Yorkshire), its significance quickly decrease in the last quarter of the 17th century. For several centuries it had been Europeâ?Ts main export and import market. Its quick demise is too dramatic not to be considered. Basically the OE totally missed its European integration and became a backwater while the rest of Europe turned to Asia and the Americas.

I was not aware that exports to the Ottoman Empire were so important to the Atlantic powers in the 17th century. I'm happy to be learning.

Still, I fail to see what the Ottomans could have done to take advantage of developments in parts of the world they had no access to. For one thing, it wouldn't initially have been obvious to anyone that the Atlantic economy would hit paydirt (so to speak), so it would have been hard to justify investing in it at the necessary time. For another, even if the Ottoman economy was not best practice, it wasn't disfunctional, either. If people are more or less able to get what they want (and the OE was a common enough destination for European emigres to suggest that it held at least some promise of economic gain), then how do you justify change?

Today, many of the most competitive export economies depend on low labour costs. That's not an argument for developed countries to re-order their economies so that they're optimized for $0.50/hour labour.

Originally posted by Maharbbal I agree with you, entering any market was very difficult and costly. That being say, I think entering the Ottoman one was particularly difficult and costly. Here are a few reasons: 1. Unlike any other early modern example I know of, you had to obtain and renew the right to trade in the OE. This treaty had to be purchased every five years and was tellingly called a Capitulation (similar to the Byzantine Chrysobules). 2. The bureaucratic system was very costly, any procedure took time and a lot of money. 3. Piracy, rebellions and bandits officials created costs that had to be faced with armed ships and convoys. 4. The corrupt officials managed to regularly obtain â?~avaniasâ?T (i.e. undue fines and taxes), the fact that the word used is Italian testifies that the habits was in place before the 17th century. 5. Unlike any example I know, the merchants were forced to build infrastructures by themselves (bridges, khans and entire harbours). 6. Finally some peculiar and endogenous issues increased the cost of doing trade in the OE: buying back your friends held as slaves by Ottoman subjects, facing various diseases (malaria in Scanderone, plague elsewhere in Syria and Palestine).

1. This was hardly an unusual practice, at least among those states that had valuable goods and/or consumer markets to offer. Western traders were obviously eager to get into their markets, and (to paraphrasre), they had got this thing and it was ------- golden, they were just not giving it up for ------- nothing!

2. As it was just about everywhere that an effective bureaucracy actually existed. Gaining Access to the Ottoman Empire wasn't nearly as difficult or costly as gaining trade rights in China or Japan.

3. The Ottomans went to great lengths to mitigate piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean, and frankly I find the claim that banditry and rebellion were a bigger problem in the Ottoman Empire than in Europe highly questionable.

4. From Friends and Rivals in the East, Alastair Hamilton, Alexander H. de Groot, Maurits H. van den Boogert, 2000:

"The portrayal of avanias as sudden, unprovoked and unjust demands by an arbitrary Ottoman administration should not be accepted at face value, and should at least in part be attributed to the self-interests of those reporting them. It seems likely that merchants, consuls, ambassadors, and administrators of trade at home intentionally omitted their own contribution to the origins of an avania in their reports to higher authorities."

Avanias often arose when Ottoman officials applied laws that traders were either unfamiliar with, or actively flouted. This is one of the problems with your argument that Ottoman trade was unusually expensive. If you mean that there were other jurisdictions where Western traders could get away with ignoring local laws, you would be correct - but that isn't an indication that those places had better trade practices. Often it just meant that they were not capable of enforcing their laws on the traders. I simply do not see the fact that the Ottomans were able and willing to enforce the rule of law as a poor trading practice. To use an example cited in the above book, when ELC merchant Samuel Pentlow died in 1678 and was survived by his Ottoman wife and children, his inheritance was subject to Ottoman law and could not simply be spirited out to England as he had apparently instructed his executors to do.

There is also some evidence that company men and consuls exaggerrated the impact of avanias in order to promote their own importance to their governments and to the merchant community.

It should also be mentioned that the capitulation system was not the only way for traders to gain access to the Ottoman market. Plenty of adventurous merchants became Ottoman citizens, and many became very successful working under Ottoman laws.

Incidentally, I don't think the word "avanias" is of Italian origin.

5. You're not looking very far for your examples. States built facilities to attract traders when the traders would not otherwise come - as with St. Petersburg. States that had traders crawling over each other to get in - like the Ottomans and the Chinese - didn't need to. The traders built their own harbours in Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Japan and Indonesia, among other places.

6. Traders were at far less risk from any of these dangers in the Ottoman Empire then they were in many other parts of the world.

I'll only horn in on a couple of other points:

Originally posted by Maharbbal Lets take the example of interest rates. While some Turkish territories allowed loans after the mid 16th century, they were basically forbidden in most places within the Empire which crippled the Ottoman industries which could not access credit easily and whose property rights could not be enforced. As a result, loans were extremely expensive and interest rates reached 15% (i.e. 3 to 5 times what it was in Europe at the time). So much so that the European banned their merchants from borrowing from Ottoman subjects since it was identified with usury rates. How do you explain that if not through the ill-functioning of the Ottoman commercial institutions?

The Ottomans faced a number of inflationary crises in the 16th and 17th centuries. I suspect that had a lot to do with high interest rates. This wasn't even a policy issue - the Ottoman currency was based on silver, and the global price of silver was dropping.

I live in Canada, and there's little we can do about the fact that the value of our currency is tied to the price of oil.

Originally posted by Maharbbal I’m sorry if I sound ‘Orientalist’ or whatever else, but one has to admit that the Ottoman experience after 1500 was overall a failure on the economic point of view, it faced massive problems that came from somewhere. I believe that this somewhere was mostly the government (be it central or local).

I actually question this claim. Although the Ottomans definitely faded as a world power from the 17th century on, I'm less convinced that the quality of life for Ottoman citizens was deteriorating significantly until much later.

Originally posted by Maharbbal I'm speaking relatively. The Ottoman and chiefly the Muslim Ottoman traders were not as mighty as their European counterparts. In the same way, the Ottoman commercial institution were not as efficient as the European ones (even though the latter were far from optimal).

On this I agree.

Just for the hell of it - 1485?

By 1420, the Doge estimated the Venetian import of Lombard cloths (wool, fustian and linen) at 900,000 ducats.

If you're interested, following this thread I have started a Ottoman week on my blog: premodeconhist.wordpress.com

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Granted that the sea transport system that would develop in Western Europe had much more development potential than caravans (which is why the Ottomans made use of it by chartering western ships) but I maintain that not all nations were equally positioned to take advantage of that potential. But that's just it, under normal circumstances they weren't competitive. In order to be competitive they would have had to build ships and shipyards to rival those in Western Europe, which wouldn't have been cost-effective for entities with fewer overseas trading interests and, it should be noted, a much higher premium on quality wood.

I of course would not deny that endowment helps a lot. That being said, Greek and Maghribi commercial dynamism shows that it wasn’t impossible, besides the Genoese for instance did not enjoy much better conditions than most of the Ottoman empire. The sultans found enough wood to build hundreds of galleys, they had millions of trees available in Romania, they had trade, they had the example of the great navies of the past… The sultan of Morocco did manage to buy ships directly in Amsterdam, so did the Genoese, and even the English, why not the Turks? Finally, lets not forget that hundreds of Ottoman-built ships existed at the time in Greece and on the Alexandria-Constantinople route. Why was there enough timber for domestic trade but not for international trade???

All that to say, I don’t think the endowment type of explanation is sufficient.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Fair enough, but surely you agree that the opening of the Americas provided a rare opportunity for increased economic growth and a massive advantage to the colonial powers. Besides the mineral wealth and other commodities, two continents' worth of new agricultural products - some quite valuable - were suddenly thrust onto the market.

Certainly not!

Well of course it did not hurt. But it wasn’t either that silver bullet many people think it was. Consider this:

1.    Portugal and Spain – the first-movers – did not last long.
2.    With the exception of fairly trivial stuff (falling price of sugar) the majority of Europeans hardly saw the difference… oh and lets not forget fur hats.
3.    The impact of the famous precious metals influx has been hotly debated, but once more, no silver bullet.
4.    The real “colonization” of the Americas did not start before the 1650s and actually did not have any significant impact before 1750.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley   Originally posted by Maharbbal You'd be mistaking. Although Istanbul real wages were comparable to those in Rome, Venice and Valencia from 1400 to 1700, they also were 15 to 25% lower to those of Northern Europe. I'm interested to know what that number is based on, and if so why so many luxury products continued to come from the Ottoman Empire throughout this period.

See the article of S. Pamuk summarized on my blog. Do you really think the average Istanbul dweller could indulge in luxury products? I suppose the best they could get is some coffee and some sugar.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Large numbers of smaller industrial centres seem to be a characteristic of newer, growing polities more than anything else. As time goes on, though, economies consolidate and people get drawn to the central cities - be that Istanbul, London, New York or Shanghai. I fail to see how anyone could prevent that from happening. If you're implying that Ottoman policies caused their cities to grow too large, you'll have to explain how government policies were responsible for their peoples' settlement patterns. As far as I know, most attempts by governments to control migration (which happen to include Ottoman attempts to make people from smaller towns stop moving to Istanbul) failed. The large cities of the Ottoman Empire were magnets for migrants, and they tended to soak up excess population from the surrounding provinces. Successful cities with lots of jobs and opportunities for advancement have always done that, and I would think to associate that with a successful economy, not a failing one.

Lets get (slightly) technical for a sec. There is something called an “open window of locational opportunity” (see my blog). Basically a new industry is as likely to settle in one place as in the other, regardless of previous industrial location. This happen in old and new polities (see the IT or plane industries in the US and in Europe). This happened in Europe all the time: Toulouse’s traditional cloth industry is overtaken by Montpellier’s, Milan’s by Nuremberg, Bruges’ by Antwerp, etc. The result is a diversification of locations.

To a very limited extent this happened in the OE (Bursa replaced by Aleppo, Aleppo by Smyrna). Overall oversize growth of cities happens usually if 1. Some particularly stable services move in (finance in particular tend to be sticky), 2. If the government moves in. In the OE, little in terms of services, except maybe in Alexandria, Aleppo and Smyrna. The rest has to be explained by the presence of the government.

Hence unlike most of Europe before 1600, the bulk of urbanization in the OE was not driven by industrialization but political factors. It is not voluntary, it is a sort of feedback effect. Basically, put a king in a place, courtiers will arrive, they’ll require luxuries and palaces which will bring merchants and artisans, etc… That’s how a government brings people into town not through regulations.

Besides, the increasing size of industrial hubs usually goes along massive falls in transport costs! I can’t see them in the OE. Hence once more the quick growth of Istanbul and other Ottoman towns has little to do with increased productivity and economies of scale, unlike London for instance whose growth was tightly correlated with decreasing transaction costs.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley The difference being that many of the luxury products being traded in the Ottoman Empire were far more valuable. Hence the English desire to access those products, and the Ottoman disinterest in seeking out English products. In the long-term, European competitors became able to replicate Ottoman goods and produce/move them more cheaply, pushing Ottoman producers out of business. But in the 1500s this was still a long way off.

Sorry not sure to see your point.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley Sorry to make another analogy, but many businesses in developing nations today take risks that no Western entity would be willing, or permitted, to take. They're willing to accept low margins and high risks that, quite simpy, people in developed nations don't need to take to succeed.

Not sure I agree with you, see the interest rates in say Africa and Europe and guess which one of the two has more incentive to go crazy.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley The West no longer enjoys a meaningful technological advantage over many of the new export economies, either.

When was the last time you checked productivity in China? (although admittedly parts come from education)

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley I would also point out that both China and Japan were doing alright until the 19th century, when they were finally overwhelmed by advancing technology and ideas.

Make it the 18th century and we agree.

I may not be very clear, but it is so hot here I can't wait moving out... hope I was clear enough though, my brain's melting.