International Comparisons Yet this Habsburg failure, it is
Citations (1)
- The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers whole source · open book
Increase in Military Manpower, 1470–166052 Omitted from this brief survey is one of the most persistent and threatening foes of the Habsburgs, the Ottoman Empire, chiefly because its strengths and weaknesses were discussed in the previous chapter; but it is worth recalling that many of the problems and deficiencies with which Turkish administrators had to contend—strategical overextension, failure to tap resources efficiently, the crushing of commercial entrepreneurship in the cause of religious orthodoxy or military prestige—appear similar to those which troubled Philip II and his successors. Also omitted will be Russia and Prussia, as nations whose period as great powers in European politics had not yet arrived; and, further, Poland-Lithuania, which despite its territorial extent was too hampered by ethnic diversity and the fetters of feudalism (serfdom, a backward economy, an elective monarchy, “an aristocratic anarchy which was to make it a byword for political ineptitude”53) to commence its own takeoff to becoming a modern nation-state. Instead, the countries to be examined are the “new monarchies” of France, England, and Sweden and the “bourgeois republic” of the United Provinces.
chapter: International Comparisons