Great Britain and the Iraqi oil industry war, but for production in the civilian economy. Britain had to turn elsewhere to address its growing oil needs. As Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Ottoman sultan struggled to reassert Ottoman dominion over the Sheikhdom of Kuwait, the British viceroy of the colonial government in India entered into an agreement with Sheikh Mubarak Al-Sabah which created a British protectorate in Kuwait. Britain needed a supply of petroleum which was not controlled by contemporary rivals such as Russia, Germany, or the Netherlands. British Admiral John Fisher wanted to replace Britain's coal-burning naval vessels with fuel-burning ships. This shift was crucial for
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