The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000With 200,000 hardcover copies in print, this book has received worldwide attention. Kennedy explains how the various world powers have risen and fallen over the five centuries since the formation of the "new monarchies" in Western Europe. |
From inside the book
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80 percent of the population derived its livelihood from agriculture , and a good
part of the remainder continued to have ... In consequence , while agricultural
output did steadily increase over these decades ( at about 2 percent annually ) ,
its ...
The first was the catastrophic decline in Soviet agricultural production , as kulaks
( and others ) resisted the forced collectivization and then were eliminated . The
horrific preemptive slaughter of farm animals — " the number of horses fell from ...
respect , and so embarrassed the government that it stopped giving details of
agricultural output ( although its average import of 35 million tons of grain each
year provided a clue ! ) . Even the " good " year of 1983 did not make the USSR
self ...
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The rise and fall of the great powers: economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000
User Review - Not Available - Book VerdictYale historian Kennedy surveys the ebb and flow of power among the major states of Europe from the 16th centurywhen Europe's preeminence first took shapethrough and beyond the present erawhen great ... Read full review
Learning from History, July 19, 2003
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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.
<P>
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.
Contents
The Rise of the Western World | 3 |
World Power Centers in the Sixteenth Century | 5 |
2 | 18 |
Copyright | |
32 other sections not shown