224 DESTINY DISRUPTED
to jack up prices, because the state imposed limits on how much they
could charge. The state protected the public and the guilds protected their
members; everything balanced, everything worked.
Then westerners came into the system. They didn't compete with the
guilds by trying to sell soap or shoes-the state wouldn't let them. No,
they came looking for stuff to buy, raw materials mainly, such as wool,
meat, leather, wood, oil, metals, and the like-whatever they could get
their hands on. Suppliers were happy to sell to them, and even the state
smiled on this trade, because it brought gold into the empire, and how
could that be a bad thing? Unfortunately, the Europeans were after the
same materials the guilds needed to make their products. And the Euro-
peans could outbid the guilds because they had the gold of the Americas
in their satchels, while the guilds had only their profits, which were lim-
ited by government price controls. They could not make up the difference
with volume-by producing and selling more goods, that is-because
they just couldn't get enough raw materials to increase production. With
foreigners sucking those out of Ottoman territories and shipping them to
Europe, artisans in the Ottoman world felt the pinch: domestic produc-
tion began to fall.
Ottoman officials saw the problem and dealt with it by banning the ex-
port of strategic raw materials needed by domestic industries. But laws of
this type only opened up contraband opportunities: when exporting wool
is a crime, only criminals will export wool. A black market economy began
to thrive; a whole class of nouveau riche black-market entrepreneurs
emerged; and since they were breaking the law to make money, they had
to bribe various officials to look the other way, which opened up opportu-
nities for corruption, which spawned another class of nouveau riche "en-
trepreneurs": bribe-battened bureaucrats.
So now a lot of folks had illegal cash to spend that didn't come out of
any increased productivity. It was cash funneled into the Ottoman econ-
omy by free-spending Europeans drawing down on the gold of the Amer-
icas. But what could the newly rich Ottoman citizens spend their money
on? Investing in aboveboard industries was out: it would attract unwel-
come attention from the state. So they did what drug dealers do in mod-
ern American society. They spent freely on extravagant luxury items. In the
Ottoman world, these included consumer goods from the West, which