The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

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Summary: A university degree in history would make this one easier...
Review: A book containing references to probably every major or minor political and economical event that occured between 1500 and 1990 would normally require its readers to have a degree in history so they could appreciate it, yet the author manages to make this one understandable by people who have a minimal knowledge in the field. Makes you see the world differently, more as a continuum of events rather than as isolated events happening at random through time. I would have given it five stars had it been easier to read and lighter, but then again, it's not the author's fault that I don't have his knowledge of history!

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Summary: A Singlularly Bad Book
Review: A singularly bad book. As a work of futurology Kennedy has been disproven: US has retained and will retain its primacy for the foreseeable future. His reasons for US's inevitable decline is also flawed; as Joseph Nye in BOUND TO LEAD convincingly shows, Kennedy is wrong to rely on the reduction from unnaturally inflated US strength in the 1950s and 60s to argue US's decline. Nye also is right to point to Kennedy's flawed analogy between the US and Great Britain in decline: US is a continental colossus with a vast internal market while Great Britain was a tiny island dependent on trade with its colonies. Overall, Kennedy seems to be totally ignorant of the fundamental trend in post-cold war politics: that proliferation of democracy (Kant) and commerce (Cobden) may have perhaps rendered realpoliik obsolete--at least for the advanced democracies.

I recommend either Fukuyama's END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN or Huntington's CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS as more thoughtful works on the contours of post-cold war world.

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Summary: Mandatory Reading
Review: Although some of Professor Kennedy's view's may have been proven false by recent history, this book is nevertheless mandatory reading for anyone who's attempting to get a good historical perspective about the role of the United States in the modern world.

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Summary: Great - Easy read...
Review: Amazing book! Wonderfully written. Surprisingly, only half-interpreted. As a few reviewers have pointed out, it is more properly used as a history book than an oracle. One more clearly understands previous global strategies in light of the overwhelming evidence presented.
Clearly Mr. Kennedy's central premise is correct ' economic power by-and-large mirrors relative military power ' which he distinctly points out in his historical study of the European powers from the 1600's forward.
While it is true he did not predict the fall of the USSR, he did point to its growing potential from the rising costs of military competition and internal economic stagnation. The case for Japan was additionally outlined, economically as well as socially. Finally, the 'failure' to appropriately predict the continuing rise of the US was no failure at all, as the continuing rise of the US can only be measured in the relative decline of its competitors.
In summary, the book is truly an eye-opener. Whether you endeavor to understand western politics or economic policy relative to world power, the book provides a solid foundation from which to expand ' and sufficient material for poignant questions about the future. Great job Prof. Kennedy.

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Summary: Top class history writing
Review: As an A-Level student studying Europe in the years of 1789-1914 this book not only gave me a wider knowledge of my course, but also an understanding of history's implications on the world as it is today and tomorrow.

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Summary: Very important information
Review: As the relative strengths of leading nations in world affairs never remains constant, there is an optimum balance between wealth creation and military strength over the long term. Time and again the leading power believed that it could neglect wealth production in favor of military adventures but others waiting in the wings closed the gap, the relative strength was eroded and a long, slow decline of the once-leading power followed. The rise of Europe was not obvious in 1500 considering Ming China, the Ottoman Empire, the Mogul Empire, Muscovy and Tokugawa Japan which were well organized, had centralized authority and insisted on uniformity of practice and belief. European knowledge of the Orient was fragmentary and often erroneous, although the image of fabulous wealth, and vast armies was reasonably accurate. Constantinople fell in 1453 and the Ottoman Turks were pressing towards Budapest and Vienna. Compared with the world of Islam, Europe was behind culturally, technologically and militarily. Few at that point would have predicted that Europe would soon be at the top of the pack.

Warlike rivalries between European states stimulated advances, economic growth and military effectiveness. The Habsburg bid for power was ultimately unsuccessful because other European states worked together, the Habsburgs overextended in repeated conflicts during which they became militarily top heavy upon a weakening economic base. The other European states managed a better balance between wealth creation and military power. The power struggles between 1600 and 1815 were more complicated as Spain and the Netherlands declined while France, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia rose to dominate diplomacy, and warfare. Britain gained an advantage by creating an advanced banking and credit system and, together with Russia had the capacity to intervene while being geographically sheltered from the center of conflict. Britain also started the industrial revolution before the others, providing a great wealth creation advantage. For a century after 1815 no single nation was able to make a bid for domination, allowing Britain to rise to its zenith in naval, colonial and commercial terms based on its virtual monopoly of steam-driven industrial production. Industrialization spread in the second half of the 19th century tilting the balance of power but also introduced more complicated and expensive weaponry that transformed the nature of war and made the world less stable and more complex. The European Great Powers declined while the US and Russia moved to the forefront. Germany was the only European country to stay with the future world powers; Japan was intent only on domination in East Asia and Britain, with its declining relative position, found it more difficult to defend its global interests. World War I was an exhausting struggle that left Europe and Russia weakened, Japan better off and the US indisputably the strongest power in the world. However, US and Russian isolationism allowed France and Britain to remain center-stage diplomatically - a position they did not justify in power terms - but by the 1930s Italy, Japan and Germany became challengers while Russia was becoming an industrial superpower. World War II eclipsed France, irretrievably weakened Britain, brought defeat to the Axis nations and left a bipolar world with military and economic resources roughly in balance.

Most of the book is devoted to tracing these events but the really interesting part of the book lies in the last two chapters where nuclear weapons, long-distance delivery systems and the arms race between the US and Russia changed the strategic and diplomatic landscape. But the global productive balances changed faster than ever before with the EU now the world's largest trading unit, China leaping forward, and Japan experiencing phenomenal economic growth. The US and Russian growth rates have been sluggish and their share of global production and wealth have shrunk dramatically since 1960. In economic terms we are in a multipolar world once again with five large power centers - China, Japan, the EU, the Soviet Union and the US - grappling with the age-old task of relating national means to national ends. Although the US appears to be supreme, the history of the rise and fall of great powers has in no way come to a full stop. Great powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on security and thereby divert potential investment resources, compounding their long-term dilemma. Human kind makes its own history but within certain natural laws which become clear as the reader travels through this absorbing narrative.

In Chapter 8 Kennedy says: "What follows is speculation rather than history, therefore it is based upon the plausible assumption that these broad trends of the past five centuries are likely to continue." But certain trends are firmly in place. In 1951 Japan's GNP was 1/3 of Britain and 1/20 of the US; three decades later it was three times Britain and half the US. Japan has grown to be the world's biggest creditor nation while the US has changed from being the world's biggest creditor nation to the world's biggest debtor nation. This book was written before the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism so the projection is outdated. Nevertheless the grand sweep of history presented lends support to Kupchan's argument in 'The End of the American Era' that the defining element of the global system is the distribution of power, not democracy, culture, globalization, or anything else. Add to that more recent projects that by 2020 China will be the largest world economy and that seven of the ten biggest economies will lie in Asia and the picture of the future becomes clearer. If you have the gut feeling that the US has over extended itself militarily compared to its economic base and its position in relation to its competitors, this book will make clear your worst fears.

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Summary: Worthwhile Read
Review: At the beginning of the book, Kennedy indicates that his inspiration for the book was a book by Leopold von Ranke which traced the economic with the political aspect of empire. There have been histories of the politics of empire, and histories of economics, but nothing which comprehensively plotted the economic, political, and technological aspects of empire against each other. I don't know if that is true--it is hard to imagine that Kennedy was the first, or that there isn't a large literature on the topic--but Kennedy succeeds at presenting a very persuasive story of the basis of political power in what was once called "economic substructure." For someone not very well versed in history like myself, Kennedy provides history the way I can understand it, not in terms of names and treaties and battles but on the basis of economic growth, openness to trade, and access to cheap and accessible energy and resources. He connects the grand strategies produced by England, France, the Hapsburg Empire, etc. with their economic systems. His account of the Prussian general staff, for instance, and their adoption of the new technology of rail transportation is a small but fascinating detail that had very large implications for the balance of power in middle Europe. That is the kind of detail that would probably be left out of most economic or political histories, but Kennedy plugs it into his account, together with a comparative overview of the GDP's of France, England, and Russia, to make clear the strategic position of Prussia in 1870. As an overview of the forces that drive histories and empire, Kennedy's book is the best that I have found.

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Summary: Excellent Until The End
Review: Even though this work is 540 pages long and covers 500 years of world history, Kennedy's thesis is simple: the "Great Power" politics of the last 500 years has been dominated by a relative and interconnected relationship between a nation's economic base and its military strength. The more capable a nation (or coalition of nations, as was usually the case) is of sustaining, or even increasing, their economy before, and especially during, a war, the more likely that nation will be victorious. Kennedy shows (sometimes with exhaustive data, in both senses of that word) that in every period of international affairs since roughly 1500, the power which dominates does so because of vast economic resources.

The most important thing that needs to be said concerning the usefulness of this work is its "big picture" quality. It is useful, especially for a novice historian like myself, to view a period of history in such an interconnected way. To view the last 500 years of world history under the light of an economic struggle between Great Powers gives a linear quality to history, a cause-and-effect picture that one can insert dates, names, wars, treaties, and revolutions into at a later time. The power bids of the Habsburg, French, British, German, and American nations during this 500 years of history offers an interesting perspective, and one of Kennedy's secondary themes:
the five nations mentioned above were the most powerful economically and militarily during their bids, and what occurred (whether successful or not) was a coalition against them. It could be argued that the American-Soviet grapple was the ultimate expression of this trend of action-reaction seen since 1500, consuming not just Europe and its colonies, but an increasing proportion of the planet.

Unfortunately, I was very disappointed by the last 120 pages of this book. To be fair to Mr. Kennedy, he gave an adequate disclaimer that his future speculation was based on measurable and reliable economic trends and common-sense extrapolations, but that one can never predict the assassination of an archduke or the freak destruction of an overwhelming invading armada. That being said, it was still not very useful to me to read a hundred-plus pages concerning the future trends of economics and geopolitics with the knowledge that two years after the publication of this book, the one main assumption made by Kennedy-the continued existence of the Soviet Union and the further escalation of the Cold War-was incorrect. The fates of the five powers leading into the 21st Century (US, USSR, China, Japan, and the European Economic Union) as Kennedy describes them, hinged on the Soviet regime's participation, making this chapter ludicrously quaint in hindsight. For instance, if Japan had hit an economic slump (which it did), or China turned capitalist (which it hasn't yet, but it certainly isn't as Marxist as it once was), or if Europe continued to evolve into one massive trading block (which it did), none of these events, even taken together, would have made this last chapter irrelevant. But the one thing that does, the collapse of the Soviet Union (and its subsequent consequences for so many trends, like the arms race) did occur and shatters this wonderful work at its end. My advice to Mr. Kennedy is that he must remove the final chapter from this work, or update it
accordingly.

But perhaps he cannot; perhaps his thesis, in the era of terrorism and the Internet, is no longer valid in the new multi-faceted and quickening pace of modern politics. The 500-year military struggle between the Great Powers may very well be over, in favor of fringe-group attacks on a singular global trade network brought culturally closer everyday by communication technology. But then again, with religious fundamentalism increasing, not only in the Middle East but in America as well, maybe we will see a rebirth of that monumentally ridiculous mechanism for war. In other words, don't count out humanity. We will always find ways to make war on one another, even if we have to dust off some old classics.

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Summary: Remembering the past, seeing the future
Review: History is a wonderful study, a professor of mine once commented, of the interlocking circles of influence, whereby one can find often that an obscure arranged marriage in the Dark Ages could be responsible for a thermonuclear exchange or a hostile corporate takeover today.

Of course, he was exaggerating, but only by a matter of degrees. History is the study of the interconnexions of human beings in their actions over time, and to that end, the more we understand of the past, the better chance we have of surviving and flourishing into the future.

Paul Kennedy's book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is an insightful, sweeping examination of the centuries of the growth and dominance and, lately, relative decline of the European powers over the rest of the globe. To a lesser extent (because they were lesser players) he draws in Asian, and finally, American players, although as will be seen, they began to play the game according to the European rules.

He pays particular attention to the economic and military aspects of the motivations of national and ethnic decision-making; so often history (or at least popular history) has portrayed such as purely political, religious (at least until the last few centuries), or royal-family intrigues. Kennedy explores the forgotten aspects in a popular format; hence the question (as the Gulf War is almost universally recognised as, in reality, a war of economic necessity rather than for political or moral purpose, which tended to be added later)--were the Hapsburgs responsible? Rather, that is a way of asking, are the same motivations that were at play with Great Power relationships in 1500 still at play today? Have we learned anything?

At the beginning of 1500, it was by no means certain that Europe would become the dominant region of powers in the world. China was in decline but still perhaps the greatest power. Empires in India, Japan, and around Muscovy were also contenders. To their detriment, however, each of these powers tended to be isolated and introspective, more concerned with internal consistency and preservation of 'a way of life', whereas the smaller European powers had to compete with each other, and adapt and improve to survive. 'This dynamic of technological change and military competitiveness drove Europe forward in its usual jostling, pluralistic way.'

Occasionally, Europe tended toward the Asian models, particularly with the dominance of the Hapsburgs who, at their height, controlled much of Europe and began to insist on the same kinds of religious, historical, mercantile and cultural conformity that cost the other empires their vitality.

Great power struggles that occurred between 1660 and 1815 are difficult to characterise briefly, but chiefly is marked by the emergence of a cluster of powerful states which came to dominate diplomacy and militarily. After the Napoleonic era, there was a lull in Great Power warfare, until this century, when even the flank powers of Britain and Russia were a bit too central to the conflicts to survive with both military and economic strength intact.

'Given this book's concern with the interaction between strategy and economics, it seemed appropriate to offer a final (if necessarily speculative) chapter to explore the present disjuncture between the military balances and the productive balances among the Great Powers; and to point to the problems and opportunities facing today's five large politico-economic power centres...as they grapple with the age-old task of relating national means to national ends. The history of the rise and fall of the Great Powers has in no way come to a full stop.'

These Kennedy identifies as The United States, Japan, the EEC, the Russian States, and China. Of course, this has the possibility of shifting, too, as countries such as India and Brazil acquire more military and economic strength; countries such as Indonesia that are resource- and population-rich could also achieve Great Power status before long (historically speaking).

Kennedy pays homage to the Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke, who wrote about die grossen Mächte in 1833, following since the fall of Spain. von Ranke also produces speculative chapters; perhaps it is natural for historians to want to chart the course of the future as well as mapping out the past.

This book reads like an epic, but is generally accessible (though somewhat intricate) and gives interesting insights, and is significant for what is does not address (many political scientists and historians will find some major theories ignored) as well as for the fresh approaches it does employ. Best read with other history books.

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Summary: Great fact gathering, but...
Review: I know it's picking nits, but there was one statement that the author made on page 504 saying that "Stars Wars" technology would not alter the MAD equation if it were developed. Fact is that the mere threat of Star Wars was the straw that literally broke the Soviet's back. Twelve years later, we still don't have this counter-weapon deployed, but it is perhaps the most powerful political tool since the atom bomb. No one foresaw the end of the "Evil Empire," so you can't take the author to task for that. But he missed the significance of "Star Wars" big-time.I wonder if Prof. Kennedy had stretched his towering historical overview back a few more centuries to include the Islamic conquest of much of the West, he would have seen the cyclic rise of religeous fundamentalism as the greatest threat to modern civilization that we are now facing. That's probably more in Paul Johnson's arena...