Why the West has Won
An insightful commentary on modern warfare. Written before n1n3 313v3n. Link Here
An Excerpt from the review on that site:
In an interesting thesis, Hanson attributes this decline to the inability of the Ottoman system to develop financial instruments. The state-sanctioned capitalist economy of Venice allowed for liquidity and investment. There were private shipwrights and specialised production lines that allowed a galley to be "assembled, launched and outfitted" in the space of an hour! Hanson notes that 150,000 gold sequins were found in the captured flagship of Ali Pasha: "Without a system of banking, fearful of confiscation should he displease the sultan, and always careful to keep his assets hidden from the tax collectors, Ali Pasha toted his huge personal fortune to Lepanto. There it was plundered after the battle when the admiral was killed at sea and his ship sunk. If a member of the highest echelons of Ottoman society [^] he was brother[^]in-law to the sultan, and on a great jihad for his ruler [^] could neither safely invest nor hide his capital in Istanbul, then thousands of less fortunate subjects could scarcely hope to. Wealthy Ottoman traders and merchants often stealthily invested money in Europe and chose to import costly European luxury items; or they hid or buried their savings rather than risk seizure of their stored coined money in the future. There result was a chronic shortage of investment capital in the Ottoman Empire for education, public works and military expenditure".
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