Customer Reviews

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

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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.

The problem with this book (and maybe why reviews are so divergent) is that it tries to be two different things. It succeeds as a historical narrative about the development of various western powers. The Hapsburgs, Napoleonic France, Czarist Russia, Prussia, Germany, and the British Empire are all covered. The Soviet Union, Japan and the U.S. come in for later treatment. The book traces the influence of finance, geography, politics and innovations and shows how advantages in each were strategically applied. It excells in describing the emergence of the western world from Empires and rising and falling 'Great' and 'Middle' powers involved in various alliances and coalition wars, through to the post Vietnam era of a bipolar world ruled by two Superpowers. Where the book fails is in economic forecasting specifically as it relates to the U.S. today.

Four fifths of the book is good, as it is devoted to the development of Kennedys' theory, which is - economic wealth and military power is relative. Relative in terms of its distribution among nations and relative within a nation over time. Indeed, the U.K. of the 1980's and today,(a second rank power in comparison with the U.S and Japan) is wealthier in absolute terms than the huge British Empire of the late 19th century. The idea that that there is a strong relationship between economic power and military might, which seems obvious, is also illustrated with historical examples. What is less obvious (until shown by the author) are the variations on this theme. For example, an economic power may not also be a military power at the same time (Japan in the 1980's). There is also a tendency for declining economic powers to spend very heavily on the military, as their sense of security decreases (Soviet Union and U.S in the 1980's). It is this tendency the author states, that is a symptom of what is called 'imperial overstretch' and is a characteristic of ALL declining great powers. It is this argument and it's development in the last chapter, 'To the Twenty-first Century', where the book shows how outdated it is.

To be fair, Kennedy is very clear in that he knows that writing about trends and projecting how they will play out in the future is NOT history. He states that "many a final chapter in works dealing with contemporary affairs has to be changed, only a few years later, in the wisdom of hindsight; it will be surprising if this present chapter survives unscathed". That was the most accurate statement in the last chapter. It is ironic that a history book has been treated so badly by history, but when you stop and think about all the events that have happened since the book was originally published in 1987, it's not so surprising.

Obviously there is no analysis of the impact of the end of the Cold War, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany and most significantly from an economic point of view, the use of the 'peace dividend' to reinvigorate formerly heavily militarized economies. In general it is mostly a good book that suffers at the end from a brave but badly off target projection of what the 1990's had in store for the only remaining 'Great Power'.

Kennedy's "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" is a classic that should rank with the great books and great ideas of the 20th century. Anyone who wants to understand what has happened in history, and what will most likely happen, should read this book.

Great theories and great books are often so because they state, in a convincing way obvious facts that we want to ignore because they are inconvenient or unflattering. Sigmund Freud's Psychopathology of everyday life and "Interpretation of Dreams" shocked the Victorian world by pointing out that a lot of human behavior is about sex. Darwin's "Origin of Species" and "Descent of Man" was a shocker because it pointed out that we are animals, descended from animals. Karl Marx's contribution, shorn of polemics, was to point out the importance of economics in history and ideology.

Kennedy amasses considerable evidence for the unattractive theory that wars are won by economic might (and not because providence is on the side of the "good guys"), that all empires are mortal, and that empires can kill themselves by economic over-extension.

He correctly predicted the economic problems of the Soviet Union, before it was obvious to all, and he predicted the over extension and deficit spending that would could the lot of the US in the future - and are the lot of the US in Iraq. This is not a popular thesis.

Every historian from Thucydides, and Polybius to Gibbon, Toynbee and Spengler has understood that empires are "mortal." Yet every empire and every citizen of every empire insisted that their empire was the "exception" that could never be challenged and never fail. That is what makes many uncomfortable about this book, but it cannot be ignored.

It is really beside the point to say that it was written nearly two decades ago and is therefore "out of date." "The Origin of Species" was written nearly 150 years ago and is certainly "out of date" and "mistaken" in many details, but it is absurd to claim it should not be read for that reason. When Kennedy describes the dilemma faced by Spain in maintaining its costly presence in Flanders, he is describing essentially the same problems and considerations that face the USA in deciding whether to continue the war in Iraq.

Even if you think the US is exempt from the laws of history for some reason, you cannot ignore this book.

"The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" generated quite a bit of heat when Paul Kennedy published it in 1987, mostly because in the naive euphoria of Reaganism it seemed to foretell the diminution of America -- even if Kennedy himself said he was agnostic about whether the United States would necessarily repeat the decline of China, Venice, Holland, France, the Ottomans and Britain. Well, and who was to say that a nation that could (although just barely) defeat 600 construction workers in Grenada wasn't the master of the globe?

Reading it at this distance, the book seems slighter, nothing much more than an extended footnote on Marshal Turenne's observation that God (or Providence, as Turenne said) always favored the big battalions. The jest is usually attributed to Napoleon, but Kennedy, bizarrely, gives it to Stalin.

In fact, Kennedy completely missed the real threat in the modern era to hegemonic states, a threat that did not face earlier empires. He was fixated on Great Power clashes, and for the 1980s, on the standoff between Russia and America. Unluckily for him, Russia collapsed not long after, an event that could have been (and was) predicted long before and had nothing to do with the inability of the USSR to compete with Star Wars, since Star Wars turned out to be a Potemkin Village of militarism; and the Russians never spent any meaningful amounts of money trying to catch up.

But before getting to the real threat, Kennedy's main argument needs to be summarized. It is not incorrect. The supremacy of a power was due not to its absolute power but to its relative power relations to its enemies -- not a single enemy, since during the 500 years surveyed by Kennedy all defining conflicts were coalition wars. Why anybody thought it necessary to write 550 pages about this is obscure, and how anybody could write 550 pages about coalition warfare without mentioning Clausewitz is impossible to determine, but here it is: 550 pages and one reference to Clausewitz, but that not to his observations on coalitions, about which he was expert.

Coalition wars turn into wars of attrition, and therefore the side with the most resources prevails. The resources must be men -- to fight and work and grow food -- and factories and access to raw materials; and favorable borders help. States, however great, that have to fight or defend two, three or four fronts generally lose. (Except, a point missed by Kennedy, that Germany prevailed over Britain by stripping her of her financial assets in two grinding campaigns, out of which Germany, with bigger battalions, emerged more powerful, although by that time the Europeans had [apparently] learned to stop fighting over provinces, just as, in 1648, they learned at long last to stop fighting over religious superstitions.)

The key point here is not coalition, as Kennedy would have it, but attrition. If a small power can cheaply force a large power to defend itself expensively, the small power may prevail.

This was the winning strategy of the Vikings and the Mongols, who did not have big battalions.

In gunpowder warfare, for a long time it was usually impossible for small powers to pull off that trick. If nothing else, the large power, able to go where it wanted within the range of its muskets, could exterminate the small, less well-armed power's members. This is how the English colonists destroyed the southern Indians in Georgia and Tennessee, even if they could seldom catch them in a stand-up fight.

Given a certain level of technology and organization, a small power can bleed a large one to death. This was neatly demonstrated in the Boer War. The English had no trouble dealing with the backward Mahdists in Sudan, wiping them out in a single morning at Omdurman with a small force. But against the Boers, who had repeating rifles and knew how to use them, half a million British troops could not prevail by military means and only finally put down the Boers by killing their women and children in concentration camps.

Mesmerized as he is by clashes of great armies, Kennedy ignores the Boer War. I do not mean he treats it as a minor episode. I mean he ignores it. Only half a sentence in 550 pages even mentions the Boers.

Had he noticed the Boers, Kennedy's passages on the American adventure in Vietnam would not have been as silly as they are. In particular, since the force the Americans opposed to the Vietnamese was no larger than the British army deployed against the Boers, while there were over 50 million Vietnamese as against a few hundred thousand Boers, the inadequacy of the American effort should have been manifest, not only to Kennedy in hindsight but to American commanders -- civilian and military -- at the time.

A few people did notice it. One was I.F. Stone, who observed in 1969 that the reason the North Vietnamese were not going to exchange prisoners was that most of their prisoners were pilots, each of whom had cost the Americans $600,000 to train. More generally, while the United States was rich and Vietnam was poor, even the United States could not afford to swap helicopters for bicycles, which is how the exchange worked out.

The terms of trade are much more unfavorable now than they were in 1970. Today, Somali teenagers who cannot afford a whole pair of pants have Kalashnikovs. The only possible way to prevail against insurgents is either to wean the masses away from them -- not generally a workable strategy in Muslim societies -- or to lay waste to the whole society, no longer acceptable by western standards, although it was as recently as 1945.

The United States spends trillions against an enemy that spends millions. This thousand-to-one attrition rate is unsupportable. As long as the Muslims do not waver, they win under the present terms of exchange and engagement.

This book is a bit dated by riding the 1980s fad of American declinism but not in the way most critics suggest. Kennedy did not help himself by his 1987 cover which showed Uncle Sam stepping down to make room for a rising Japan. However, many critical reviews apparently resulted from pontificators looking at the cover art and neglecting to read that stuff between the covers carefully. Although Nye (1990) later argued that US declinism was exaggerated by an unwarranted expectation that the US should retain its unnatural post-WWII apex, Kennedy himself suggested this 3 years earlier. Kennedy's "rise and fall" is not only boom and bust but also tidal ebbs and flows in relative power over time. Long before Nye, Kennedy described recent US "decline" as a return to its "natural" level and emphatically stated, "this reference to historical patterns does not imply that the United States is destined to shrink to the relative obscurity of former leading powers such as Spain or the Netherlands, or to disintegrate like the Roman and Austro-Hungarian empires" (1987 p.533, Kennedy's italics). Kennedy merely stated that the US could wane if it didn't mind itself.

Theoretically, Kennedy took a systemic view over the "long cycle" to argue that broad patterns of financial and economic development (the primary independent variables, in academic jargon) determine the ebbs and flows of relative power (p.xv-xvi). For instance, he argued that although a US defeat at Midway in 1942 certainly would have altered the next year of the war, it would not have affected the final result (p.353). This is a systemic explanation which downplays the roles of individuals in the long-term. Fans of individual level analysis can take solace in a greater role for individuals in the short-term, and of individuals' ability to navigate within systemic constraints (p.540). Nonetheless, theory is not the strong point of the book. For instance, his attempt to explain the "constantly upward spiral" of the West as due to the innovation caused by competitive quarrels among small, European kingdoms and city-states, in contrast to the expansive unitary states of Asia (p.xvi-xvii), is troubled. Not only could one dispute the monolithic Asia characterization, but his reason does not explain why the warring American city-states did not result in Mayans, Aztecs and Incans as permanent members of the UN Security Council. His Europe-Asia dichotomy appears to be a difference misconstrued as a causal explanation.

Instead of theory, the strength of this book is as a history. For instance, it shows that the majority of the world's manufacturing output was produced by the "Third World" as late as 1830, at which time per capita industrialization in continental Europe was closer to India's level than to Britain's level (p.149). Remember the other day when you couldn't quite recollect the exact figure for the Dutch military budget in 1622? This book would have saved you (it was 13.4 million Florins (p.69)). Even if many of the measures are estimates, I feel compelled to like a book which tells me the energy consumption of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1890 (19.7 million metric tons of coal equivalent (p.201)) or the per capita income of Bukovina in 1910 (310 Crowns (p.216)).

Now is a good time to "audit" Kennedy's books.

His Pollyannaish faith in Japan (which he emphasized even more in his other book) now seems totally misplaced.

He completely failed to see the coming collapse of the Soviet Union - happening merely three years after publication! (He thought nothing short of war could cause it.)

Still on the debit side, but far less important, is his lack of confidence in Europe's prospect for unity. The jury is still out on this, but I tend to be less jeremian than Kennedy. (I think a United States of Europe is within sight in anyone's lifetime.)

On the credit side, his prophetic vision of China's rise has been fulfilled beyond expectations. (He did himself discredit by casting doubts on this in his other book.....perhaps as a result of Tiananmen Square.)

Above all, his Cassandra's warning for the United States remains, in my opinion, valid, despite winning the Cold War. With terrorism, skyrocketing defense spending, and another war impending, America is still at great risk of "imperial overstretch".

The bottom line seems to be that Kennedy's main thesis is correct, although his fortune-telling powers seem just average for such a gifted historian. This book deserves a B-. (But this is a much better grade than I would deign to give Huntington for his "Clash of Civilizations", or Bobbitt for his "Shield of Achilles".)

So much has happened in the 15 years since publication, that there ought to be a substantial revision of the last chapter at least. We eagerly await it.

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.

Kennedy 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).

In his opinion, 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 is his warning regarding the danger of *Imperial overestretch* to the great powers (specifically USA).

I 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 almost flawless.

Belen Alcat

Professor Kennedy's book provides an very good account of the rise of Western military, economic, and political supremacy since the early 1500s, and shows how the all the "Great Powers" have, in some form or another, suffered from the same fate. He clearly illustrates how 'imperial overstretch' has historically affected a nation's or an empire's capacity to maintain its control over large territories and overseas possession, and his book shows how economic and industrial might are positively correlated with military strenght and political influence. His comparison between Britain's imperial decline and the subsequent gradual decline experienced by the United States in both the military and economic arenas, should serve as a clear warning to our leaders and policymakers in Washington and Corporate America. As American economic and military supremacy becomes increasingly challenged in various regions of the world, and its manufacturing base continues to erode, thus limiting its capacity to wage a massive war in an industrial scale (as in WWII) to defend its vital interests; Prof. Kennedy's revelations in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" become more and more relevant.

This review is, perhaps, best characterized as a response to Won Joon Choe's review. Choe makes several good points about two of the weaknesses in Kennedy's argument. His central thesis that imperial overreach leads to the decline of an empire, and he sees the U.S. in state of relative decline. Choe points out that Kennedy should not rely so heavily on his analogy between the U.S.' current position and Britian's former position in the world. Choe also points out that the U.S. has not relinquished and will not relinquish its global primacy for the foreseeable future. These two criticisms of Kennedy's book are valid, in my opinion. However, this is not to say that Kennedy is entirely wrong. I think it is more useful to construe Kennedy's work as attempt to work through the fine details of why empires arise in the first place and some of the possible reasons why they may tumble. In fact, to assert that imperial overreach is "the" reason why empires fall is also an oversimplification of Kennedy's argument. It is possible that the U.S. is in a state of relative decline and may lose its global preeminence-in an hundred years or more. Only time will be able to confirm or disprove Kennedy's work. And Choe should be wary about quickly jumping on the Fukuyama bandwagon. Fukuyama's conception of the triumph of liberalism is far too premature to even begin asserting, though it is an evocative thought. The central thesis to his book is far more difficult to hold than Kennedy's.

Having reread Kennedy's book after 20 years, I'll have to agree with many of the reviewers here regarding bulk of the work - it's an exceptional tour of world-power history over the last 500 years, not an introductory text by any reckoning - and disagree with them on the last chapters - they should be read, in context, for what they were at the time of the writing which is to say, exceptionally perceptive. To say that it needs updating is akin to saying that a fine 1987 automobile would have to be updated to reflect the latest in that technology in today's economy - well duh? This is a book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the current state of affairs today.

While others fault him for not seeing the fall of the USSR, he shares that fault with almost every other analyst of that period including the best in our CIA. In fact, Kennedy does a superlative job of laying out the dozen-odd obstacles faced by the USSR in the late '80s - probably better than anyone else at the time - and paints a dire picture of it's difficulties to come in the next decades. He all but predicts it's downfall and only overestimates a single factor - the will of Moscow, under Gorbachev, to maintain that union by force which Kennedy presumed, from all evidence of Russian history, to be a given - it wasn't. He clearly saw and spells out why the USSR could not continue on the path it was on without suffering severe declines in economic, social and military terms given the perceived threats around it, its congenital paranoia about such things, and increasing difficulties with the ethnic minorities within the union. It is interesting today to review the lack of EU resolve in Bosnia and reasons for that hesitancy and, currently, Putin's maneuvering to preserve what remains and restore Russia's prestige while dealing fretfully with the same demons that Kennedy artfully describes (China and east-Asia, India, Muslim cultures to the south, Germany and the EU to the west, Japan, and the U.S. global military power).

On another point, he overestimated Japan's ability to deal with its prosperity and the financial world it was entering, for the first time, unaware of the pitfalls that attend the uncoupling of currency from goods and services - which P.K. incisively pointed out. Sound familiar? We were still ignoring the consequences of that decoupling only two years ago and, I'd venture to guess, a majority of educated Americans still don't understand it, its consequences, and its remediation.

Also of note was Kennedy's warning about continuing to provide military cover, with American taxpayers bearing the cost, for nations (Japan, So. Korea and Taiwan) and trading blocks (the EEC - EU) that had already equaled or exceeded the U.S. in per-capita income and productivity at the time without, at least, cost sharing. The effects of diverting investment capital at home to military while allowing those others to invest their capital in trade industries has all but destroyed the American industrial base and turned us into an even worse debtor nation than we were then. Today, 20 years later, we continue to bankrupt ourselves with non-productive military expenditures in order to maintain hundreds of overseas basis, a dozen carrier strike groups, and a two-war Army and Air-force while our "allies" reap the rewards and, at most, render courteous smiles.

Some feel this can go on indefinitely and that, somehow, American exceptionalism will prevail. It is to those that a sober consideration of Kennedy's larger themes, in our current day, would be most instructive for, if his basic arguments against such rosy thinking cannot be answered, they should reconsider their positions and base their plan for the future on something more than military might and "change", unspecified, that we can only try to believe in. Kennedy was then and is now, relevant.