Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall Hardcover – October 30, 2007

Interesting thesis, good examples (what happened to the Mayans?!). However, final conclusion is just silly ("we all got to get along"). How does an author spend so many characters citing precedence and history, then ignores all that text in a completely fallacious conclusion. Admit it, Author: we haven't learned a friggin' thing and we're all going to die. That would be consistent with history. Sad, but consistent. Author may have lacked the courage of true conviction.

It was another book that I could not put down. I am a science and math nerd but have taken interest in history, economics and how cultures evolve and relate to each other. I have developed a great respect for good history analysis.

My take away from the book is that it is very difficult to predict what nation will be the next HYPER-power and how they will accomplish it based on history since every era has different advantages with technology and ideology. It is a book I could read again.

At the end of the book Amy shares her prediction about whether or not China can become a hyper-power.

Overall a great book. Her broad sweep of history and present state of the world makes it an irresistible read and gives politicians clues on what direction the policies of their countries should take to stay ahead of the competition. The book is loaded with a lot of historical facts, It gives you a great perspective on today's issues as well - That great powers rise and fall in direct relation to their tolerance or intolerance, i.e. the most tolerant power attracts the best and brightest from other cultures, religions, nations etc enabling them to join and contribute to the rise of the great power. Will China, the EU or India could be the next contestant for world hegemony, or if the US can alter itself enough to stay a superpower? On the downside, the author at times seem to be exaggerating the point. The book at times presents itself like a good undergrad senior thesis, and I fear at times she malleates history to fit nicely into her thesis.

I am not a history buff by any means and I often find history books hard to read because it's hard for me to connect all the complicated components together to understand or remember enough to really absorb the heart of some time or place. This book was surprisingly easy for me to read- I suspect Chua simplifies a lot of ideas and events to achieve this. She gallops through and recaps the histories of a variety of hyperpowers which I enjoyed mainly because I don't know anything about history, but I think her recaps would be boring to anyone who actually knows world history. Thus I would classify this book as a fun history overview that introduces you to a variety of civilizations rather than as a serious, in depth study. And obviously Chua is not an historian.

Nevertheless her book includes a variety of interesting ideas that she communicates clearly.

Ideas:

-The Mongols rose as a hyperpower despite their technological inferiority by allowing religious freedom and adopting the innovations of the peoples they conquered.

-The British became a hyperpower by being relatively religiously tolerant for the time and allowing the Dutch to come in to set up the London Stock Exchange and a Scot to set up the Bank of England.

-The USA rose as a hyperpower by actively recruiting immigrants, providing a relatively tolerant place and thus remaining a place of socioeconomic mobility that attracts the best of the best from other countries.

-She also analyzes the connection between intolerance and the fall of hyperpowers, like how England's inability to tolerate Catholics led to the loss of Ireland and how the Inquisition removed Spain from the world stage.

-Some ideological glue is necessary to keep an empire together, and she mainly goes through the fall of the Mongol empire and various others to show how they lacked glue. In the case of the USA, while US culture and products dominate the world, the McDonald's eating, Hollywood watching kid in Africa does not consider himself American no matter how much American culture invades his life, so despite wanting to go to America and wanting American things, the kid feels no loyalty to the US and even resents its power. This glue part especially could have been fleshed out more but I still found it fascinating and original.

I found her last section about the modern world to be the most interesting because she includes a lot of recent events that I find more relevant to my life and she has theories about various countries.

On China as a potential hyperpower:
Although China's ethnocentrism allows it to attract back Chinese who left for other countries, China doesn't succeed in attracting immigrants from other countries because it doesn't allow foreigners to assimilate- even after speaking Chinese for 40 years a non-Chinese is still considered a foreigner and generally does not gain citizenship.

On the European Union:
Although the EU attracts countries it only allows for increased tolerance within Europe and remains forbidding to non-European immigrants because of language barriers and a reputation of racism against non-Europeans.

On India:
Described as more bottom-up innovation compared to China's top-down style, India is improving rapidly but has a long way to go before it can attract the cream of the crop and seems to hope for equal partnership rather than world domination.

On the USA:
Is the USA past its zenith as a hyperpower? The USA embarked on traditional imperialism with Iraq with disastrous results, partly because traditional imperialism is incompatible with the USA's tenet of democracy and equality. She writes the USA had reached hyperpower status through innovation and commerce rather than military domination and so its recent activities have changed its reputation dramatically. Rather than pride, US citizens now often feel fear, anger, shame, sadness. At least the US is doing better than the EU at including our various ethnic groups- the US has less home-grown terrorism.

Africa and South America are only mentioned as colonies and apparently are not even underdogs as hyperpower candidates.

I loved this book as a superficial overview of the histories of various hyperpowers and for its original ideas that got me thinking and inspired me to learn more. I do not think this book is a serious history book. I think it's supposed to have more popular appeal and I repeat: Chua is not an historian so her book is not going to have that level of historical analysis or expertise that you might expect from an historian- she also includes various personal anecdotes that entertain me but which a history buff may find annoying.

What qualifies her to write on these topics then? I'd say sheer brazenness, interest, and creativity. She seems obsessed by ethnic studies and just went ahead and wrote about them despite a lack of expert knowledge, and I think she succeeded in writing a fascinating book for the lay person.

For school

This is an excellent book. It is an extraordinarily ambitious project to go through the entire human history--starting from the Persian Empire in 559BC to today's USA--looking at the rise and fall of hyperpowers that had/have attained global dominance. And the author has succeeded admirably in producing a piece of work that is academically rigorous yet gripping to the general reader.

The comprehensiveness and depth of the author's research over the entire span of recorded human history is impressive. She shows us how history has repeated itself time and again. More importantly, she offers excellent insight in identifying a thread--the most important single factor--that connects the rise and fall of all the hyperpowers throughout human history. With the eloquence of the Yale Professor that she is, the author presents a convincing case that tolerance has been a most important and necessary condition in the rise of a hyperpower in each and every case, and the lack of tolerance an evident contributing factor to decline.

I would recommend this book highly to anyone who is interested in learning from history. This is particularly true in today's context when the United States dominates the world militarily and economically. The lesson in history is too important to be ignored.

This is a great summer read for AP World History students. The first few chapters introduces them to many of the empires they will study in Period 2.

I really liked how she wrote an easily readable history book with a very clearly defined thesis. Interesting take on events I felt I already knew pretty well.