Rating: 
Summary: Where shall wisdom be found?
Review: I read this book with the hope of understanding the direction in which History is moving. The historical analysis of the decline of the Hapsburgs or the travails of the Napoleonic era interested far less than did the last chapter devoted to giving some sense of the world at the time the book was written. 1987. At that time and even perhaps more so now there is endless talk and debate about the question of whether the world's only superpower is moving toward greater hegemony, or perhaps to decline and then disaster. One only needs to survey the attitudes of most nations to the United States today to see that it has never been more hated and demonized than today. Kennedy is more interested in analysis of economic, military and ultimately political relations. The implicit conclusion of his book made by most readers at the time it was first published was that he was really predicting an inevitable American decline. In other words all the historical chapters were really preparation for the speculative chapter on America's future. And this though Kennedy made certain to hedge and distinguish clearly between the historical analysis and the speculation.
Now as I write this in January 2005 a couple of days after President Bush's second inaugural calling for a new birth of liberty throughout the world I wonder what Kennedy surmises. The great US productivity boom that came in the nineties, the great prosperity, the total military dominance displayed by the US seemed to suggest that Kennedy's picture of US decline was mistaken. But today in a time of massive deficit budgets, with an economically revived and increasingly powerful Europe, with China growing at such a rapid rate there is the question of how long the superpower can hold on. The emeging great superpower China seems to be threatening US interests in many places, and perhaps will eventually replace it as leader of the world.
My own sense is that Kennedy aware of the place of surprise in history by no means expected his work to be taken as an argument for America's inevitable decline. However anyone who reads his book will have a strong sense of how the mighty have fallen in the past, and how their successors may fall in the future. And this raising the question of how American can be wise so as to not fall. And here Kennedy's suggestion seems to be the very opposite of what President Bush suggests. Kennedy warns against overextending oneself, and President Bush seems ready to extend and extend in a quest to defeat the terrorists who would topple the United States.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the Bargains at Amazon.com - 500 Yr Economics Summary
Review: I was going to write a longer review that covered some of the elements of the book but then I read the lengthy review by David Willis (see below). I concluded that my review would be a bit silly if I attempted to duplicate his existing customer review that summarizes much of the book. So I will make some slightly different comments. This book is one of the better buys at Amazon.com and I will probably look at some of the other books written by Paul Kennedy. I like the way the author presents reams of data and arguments. It is very well done and all quite interesting. This book is very detailed being 540 pages long with an incredible 120 page discussion of sources added to the 540 pages. So it is simply another excellent book that provides a lot of detail that connect economics, military history, world influence, etc. As a reader I like to read this type of book so I can interpret current events with a better understanding of the historical precedents. If I can make a slight bit of humor I am worried that some of our current politicians like Bush who received a C average at Yale and is not a reader has never heard of or read this book, or a similar book, or have many other politicians. They should. This book points out the obvious. History repeats itself and countries and economies run in cycles. This idea of the cycle and the tie in to military power is not unique, in fact it is the norm. The US is no different and we are not exempt from this concept of a cycle. There is a small problem in that the book was written in the late 1980's and so it does not have the "correction" in the growth of the Japanese economy, and in fact Japan's growth itself may have already peaked in a shorter time frame after two upward cycles 1853-1939, and 1945-1992. In any case, this is a book that makes one think. Following the many of the comments in the book along with our own dependence of foreign oil plus (now) a lot of manufacturing outsourcing, one can conclude that will be more difficult for the US to maintain a pre-dominant uni-polar economic dominance and perhaps later a military dominance. But it is hard to predict a time scale. A lack of oil could alter everyone's growth including China, while an energy breakthrough in the USA could keep the US in a dominant position longer. I buy a lot of books and I was very pleased with this book. Highly recommend. Jack in Toronto
Rating:
Summary: Very Good !!!! Not only useful but also readable :)
Review: In this book, published in 1987, Kennedy's aim is to explain us the relationship among different forms of power: economic, political and military power. According to him, the economic power is the source of the other two. He warns, however, that the relationship among them is quite fragile and never easy. For example, if a country spends too much money in order to increase his its military power (renforcing its political power), it will surely undermine its economic power (the original source of the other two).He believes that the great powers are those states who can reach the best balance of military and economic strength, and he also thinks that as soon as they lose that ability they lose their place to another great power. Kennedy shows us how this relationship has worked throughout time, and how much it has influenced on the balance of power between countries. He specifically studies the period from 1500 to the mid - 1980's, and even though he might concentrate too much on Europe (as he warns beforehand), he gets his point across quite well. Some of Kennedy's predictions weren't accurate: he predicted the fall of USA as a great power, and believed that Japan would take its place. What is more, he wasn't able to foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, a few years after his book was published. However, his ideas and his theory are quite good, and still valid, as it is his warning regarding the danger of "Imperial overestretch" to the great powers (specifically USA). I would recommend this book to those who want to understand what is happening today. Even if it is somehow dated, many of its premises are still valid, and the historical perspective is nearly flawless.
Rating:
Summary: Five centuries, one narrative
Review: It is unfortunate that this book's claim to fame has rested largely on its diagnosis of America's "imperial overstretch" and its prognosis of American decline, for the author writes repeatedly that this is not an exercise in political science, but in history. Instead, Paul Kennedy has tried to put together a sweeping history of the Great Powers from 1500 to 2000, and, only secondarily, to speculate on how the continuation of some broad historical trends might play out in the future.
The narrative takes off with the Habsburg bid for European hegemony, then traces the European balance of power that was ultimately upset by Napoleon's similar bid in the early nineteenth century, through the Congress of Vienna and the relative peace leading up to the unification of Germany, all the way to the two world wars and the cold war, only to end with a chapter on what the future might hold.
Brining all these historical events together is one of the book's prime assets, as is its ability to separate fact from analysis (though, it is written for people with definite knowledge of history). Devoting equal attention to politics, economics, geography, and technology is another, though the later chapters (on contemporary affairs) might suffer a bit on the economics side, especially on treating financial strength in a somewhat outdated form.
What stands out in the work, however, is its broader themes-how growth rates affect the pattern of international politics; Kennedy spends enough time to deal with countries specifically and analyze how they have coped with the various developments, internal and external, that have come their way. His general theory of overstretch-of a gap between a country's grand strategy and the resources it commits to bring it about-is particularly interesting to read (even if overstretch is easier to identify in hindsight than to specify when occurring).
Overall, there are few books there that can master an equal command of historical fact, global trends, and penetrating insight into such a wide range of human history and historiography. For that alone, "The Rise and Falls of the Great Powers," deserves to be read, and read.
Rating:
Summary: Learning from History
Review: Kennedy chronicles the rise of the Great Powers starting with the Ming Dynasty in China and taking us all the way to the contemporary times of the 1980s. By analyzing world history through the prisms of economical, political, and military status of each great rising power, Kennedy fuses a theory of why certain countries throughout history (1500-present) rose to be regional or world powers and why they later collapsed. As the other reviewers noted, Kennedy's book falls short of accurately predicting the changes that were to follow the publication date of his book (fall of Russia, Asian market crises). Nevertheless this book is a valuable historical resource.
Rating: 
Summary: Rotten British Empire hit rock bottom
Review: Kennedy got it wrong again. Britain lost its empire not because of any overstrech, but from its moral depravity and naval decline since the World War.
Britian bulit its empire on ther cheap, with naval mastery came cheap imports, slaves et al. With the major European Powers engaged in competitive politics, rivalries and wars in the Continent, the Royal Navy enabled her to loot and pillage, with minimum costs, outside of Europe. Her naval decline (witness the drubbing she got from the Imperial German Navy in the Jutlands) means that she can on longer defend her colonies nor ransack at will (the rise of US power effectively put the Americas off limits for her brigandage), and with her enforced pullback came economic deline, and relegation to the third ranks.
Rating: 
Summary: "Great Powers" rests on a flawed foundation
Review: Kennedy's book chronicles the decline of the British empire, and argues that the American empire is next. This is because, he says, both empires suffered or currently suffer from "imperial overstretch," that unhappy state where military and defense obligations outweigh the benefits accrued from the subject territories. This is a seriously flawed premise which, at best, fits the British empire only loosely, and the United States not at all. Case in point: the British empire did spend heavily in the years leading up to WW I (which Kennedy argues led to its decline) but Britain actually spent less on defense, as a percentage of GDP, than the other great powers. The "overstretch" thesis is even less apposite in the context of the United States. First, the U.S. is not an "empire" as Kennedy defines it; second, U.S. military obligations have not risen in proportion to its GDP since the height of the Vietnam War (and a minor uptick in the mid-1980s); and third, Kennedy fails to explain a logical link between military expenditures and economic decline. He does attempt to explain the link in purely economic terms, i.e., the massive amounts spent to sustain a military force--but does not explain how military spending, which has declined relative to GDP in the U.S., is somehow different than social welfare spending, which has taken an increasingly large share of the U.S.' GDP. What appears to suffer most from "overstretch" is Kennedy's thesis itself.
Rating:
Summary: "Great Powers" rests on a flawed foundation
Review: Kennedy's book chronicles the decline of the British empire, and argues that the American empire is next. This is because, he says, both empires suffered or currently suffer from "imperial overstretch," that unhappy state where military and defense obligations outweigh the benefits accrued from the subject territories. This is a seriously flawed premise which, at best, fits the British empire only loosely, and the United States not at all. The British empire *did* spend heavily in the years leading up to WW I (which Kennedy argues led to its decline) but Britain actually spent less on defense, as a percentage of GDP, than the other great powers. The "overstretch" thesis is even less apposite in the conext of the United States. First, the U.S. is not an "empire" as Kennedy defines it; second, U.S. military obligations have not risen in proportion to its GDP since the height of the Vietnam War; and third, Kennedy fails to explain a logical link between military expenditures and economic decline (he attempts to explain the link in purely economic terms, i.e., the massive amounts spent to sustain a military force--but does not explain how military spending, which declined relative to GDP, is somehow different than social welfare spending, which has taken an increasingly large share of GDP). In this book, what appears to suffer most from "overstretch" is the Kennedy's thesis itself.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent, in-depth study of contemporary world politics
Review: Kennedy's book examines the fandamental truths to contemporary international relations theory by addressing Realist and Neo-realist theory through a historical lens. He does an excellent job at demonstrating the great power system since the 1500's through a realist perspective. His writing style is informative and interesting so you won't be able to put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but missing something...
Review: Kennedy's book has many flaws, which the author himself concededs in the opening chapter. One of them is that the book is very Eurocentric, his analysis of Asia is both weak and often times, somewhat inaccurate. He lumps together so many events at times that the reader is given a false image of what the actual events were. Also, the idea that the world is just a clash between great powers loses the fact that many different individual leaders have shaped what goes on in many of these conflicts. As a survey of history, Kennedy does a good job covering a large period, but in dealing with such a huge length of time, he loses out some of the importance and only shows what is obvious, not touching on smaller, below the surface things and marginalizing the majority of the world, those that aren't "great powers".
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