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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... and with Napoleon himself unable to achieve victory in the Levant , France
appeared to be in serious trouble . Yet the second coalition , like the first , rested
upon shaky political and strategical foundations . 77 Prussia was noticeably
absent ...
Compared with these epic events , the Anglo - American war of 1812 – 1814 was
a strategical sideshow . 94 Economically , it might have been far more serious to
British interests had it not coincided with the collapse of the Continental System ...
This test of American abilities 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
...
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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