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. |
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By the later decades of the eleventh century there existed an enormous iron
industry in north China , producing around ... figure was far larger than the British
iron output in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution , seven centuries later !
Born in 1500 , he became Duke of Burgundy at the age of fifteen and Charles I of
Spain a year later , and then - in 1519 — he succeeded his paternal grandfather
Maximilian I both as Holy Roman emperor and as ruler of the hereditary ...
... and as the British and American navies were to discover several decades later
as they wrestled with the logistical problems involved in the relief of the
Philippines , Hong Kong , and Malaya . Assuming a steady Japanese growth in
East Asia ...
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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.
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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