The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000

708 Pages·1987·12.51 MB·English

by  Paul Kennedy

ECONOMIC CHANGE AND
MILITARY CONFLICT
FROM 1500 TO 2000
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A N D E 4 LL
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^^^T A Y ls it that throughout history
/ some nations gain power while
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others lose it? This question is
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n ot onry °f historical interest,
but also important for under-
W W standing today's world as the
• • new century dawns, for just as
the great empires of the past flourished and fell,
will today's—and tomorrow's—empires rise and
fell as well.
In this wide-ranging analysis of global politics
over the past five centuries, Ydle historian Paul
Kennedy focuses on the critical relationship of
economic to military power as it affects the rise
and fell of empires. Nations project their military
power according to their economic resources and
in defense of their broad economic interests. But,
Kennedy argues, the cost of projecting that mili­
tary power is more than even the largest econo­
mies can afford indefinitely, especially when new
technologies and new centers of production shift
economic power away from established Great
Powers—hence the rise and fell of nations.
Professor Kennedy begins this story around the
year 1500, when a combination of economic and
military-technological breakthroughs so strength­
ened the nation-states of Europe that soon they
prevailed over the great empires of the East; but
European dynastic and religious rivalries, along
with new technologies, made it impossible for any
single power to dominate the continent. From the
campaigns of Emperor Charles V to the struggles
against Napoleonic France, victory repeatedly
went to the economically strong side, while states
that were militarily top heavy usually crashed
to eventual defeat. This is a pattern, Professor
Kennedy shows, that also applied in the two world
wars of the present century, where superior eco­
nomic and technological resources twice defeated
the German war machine.
In what will probably be the most widely dis­
cussed part of this book, Professor Kennedy
devotes his closing chapters to an analysis of Great
Power politics since 1945 through the year 2000.
Here, too, his focus is not only on the military
abilities and policies of the leading states, but also
(continued on back flap)
(continued from front flap)
on those profound shifts in the world's productive
balances that—as in the Renaissance—cause cer­
tain Great Powers to rise as others fall. Professor
Kennedy's discussion of the implications of these
changes for the United States, the Soviet Union,
the countries of western Europe, and the emerging
Asian powers of China and Japan makes this one
of the most important political studies of recent
time. Both for the policy maker and the general
public, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
transcends its historical scholarship.
Educated at the universities of Newcastle, Oxford,
and Bonn, PAUL KENNEDY is now Dilworth Pro­
fessor of History at Yale University, where he
teaches modern international and strategic history.
A former research assistant to Sir Basil Liddell
Hart, he has written and edited ten books on sub­
jects such as naval history, imperialism, Anglo-
German relations, strategy, and diplomacy. A
visiting fellow and guest lecturer at many universi­
ties, he reviews widely in daily and weekly jour­
nals as well as for professional magazines. Paul
Kennedy is married, has three children, and lives
in Hamden, Connecticut.
Jacket design: Bob Silverman
Jacket art: Van Howell
Random House, Inc., New York, NY. 10022
Printed in U.S.A. 1/88
© 1988 Random House, Inc.
From
T HE R I SE A ND F A LL
T & G R E A T P O W E RS
"Although the United States is at present still in a class of its
own economically and perhaps even militarily, it cannot avoid
confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of
every major power that occupies the 'number one' position in
world affairs: whether, in the military/strategical realm, it can
preserve a reasonable balance between the nation's perceived
defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain
those commitments; and whether, as an intimately related
point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases
of its power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shift­
ing patterns of global production. This test of American abili­
ties will be the greater because it, like imperial Spain around
1600 or the British Empire around 1900, is the inheritor of a
vast array of strategical commitments which had been made
decades earlier, when the nation's political, economic, and mili­
tary capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much
more assured. In consequence, the United States now runs the
risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous
Great Powers, of what might roughly be called imperial
overstretch': that is to say, decision makers in Washing­
ton must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum
total of the United States' global interests and obligations is
nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them
all simultaneously."
5 2 49 5
9n780394M546742
ISBN 0-3T4-5Mb7M-l
The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers
ALSO BY PAUL KENNEDY
Pacific Onslaught 1941-1943
Pacific Victory 1943-1945
The Samoan Tangle
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery
The Realities Behind Diplomacy
The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860-1914
Strategy and Diplomacy 1860-1945
THE
RISE A ND FALL
OF THE
G R E AT POWERS
Economic Change
and Military Conflict
from 1500 to 2 0 00
BY PAUL KENNEDY
Random House
New York
Copyright © 1987 by Paul Kennedy
All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, Inc.,
New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following
for permission to reprint previously published material:
Lexington Books, D. C. Heath and Company: An illustration from American
Defense Annual 1987-1988, edited by Joseph Kruzel. Copyright © 1987, D. C.
Heath and Company (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, D. C. Heath and
Company). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kennedy, Paul M., 1945-
The rise and fall of the great powers.
Includes index.
1. History, Modern. 2. Economic history.
3. Military history, Modern. 4. Armaments—Economic
aspects. 5. Balance of power. I. Title.
D210.K46 1988 909.82 87-9690
ISBN 0-394-54674-1
Book design by Charlotte Staub
Maps by Jean Paul Tremblay
Manufactured in the United States of America
89
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