Mubarak Al-Sabah Anglo-Kuwaiti Treaty with Great Britain on November 23, 1899, pledging himself and his successors not to receive foreign agents or representatives or to cede or sell territory without the approval of the British government, with this agreement, and the guarantee it represented in Kuwait and the Al-Sabah family, he is regarded as the founder of modern-day Kuwait. German explorer, Hermann Burchardt, photographed Sheikh Mubarak in 1903, in what is now an iconic photograph. Mubarak was born into Kuwaiti's powerful al-Sabah family in 1837 son of Sheikh Sabah II Al-Sabah (r. 1859-1866). Once he was older Mubarak served primarily as the
Historiography of the fall of the Ottoman Empire the first writers in the 1960s to summarise the works on Ottoman socio-economic history. He suggested one of the reasons for Ottoman economic decline was the inability of the ruling class to make a clear choice between war and the more conventional types of capital formation. Berkes' work however focused on the confrontation of the Ottomans and the Europeans, and though important, had little detail on the commercial activities of the state. The Ottomans saw military expansion and fiscalism as the primary source of wealth, with agriculture seen as more important than manufacture and commerce. Berkes described the Ottoman economy