Mubarak Al-Sabah that neither the Ottomans nor the British could place troops within Kuwait and that the Ottomans still had jurisdiction over Kuwait. The agreement averted the crisis, but Ottoman control was only nominal with Mubarak to freely pursue his own agendas in the years after. Mubarak carried on different activities that helped Kuwait gain more power and sovereignty apart from the Ottomans. Mubarak allowed exclusive rights for Britain to set up a post office in Kuwait in 1904 and in 1905-06 it was being considered that Kuwait should fly its own flag instead of the Ottoman standard. However, neither the post
Transformation of the Ottoman Empire in particular suffered from heavy competition, and its commercial presence declined significantly, particularly after 1645, when the Ottomans and Venetians went to war over Crete. The English were by far the most successful European merchants in the empire during the seventeenth century, and they benefited from friendly relations between the two states. The Ottomans exported raw silk and imported cheap woolen cloth, as well as tin necessary for the production of military armaments. While in 1550 the Ottoman Empire was a patrimonial state in which all power was held exclusively by the sultan, by 1700 it had experienced a political