The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
El eminente historiador Paul Kennedy analiza y describe el auge y la caída de las grandes potencias a lo largo de los últimos cinco siglos. La nación proyecta su poder militar según sus recursos económicos, pero el alto coste de mantener la supremacía militar la precipita a la decadencia. las grandes potencias en crisis reaccionan gastando más en defensa y se debilitan desviando recursos productivos. A lo largo de la historia ha existido una significativa correlación entre las capacidades productivas y la fuerza militar. Una obra esencial para comprender la actual encrucijada mundial.
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What Hacker News says
- Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.
Two things are important to think about.
1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.
Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.
- Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to monopolize and defend the chokepoints of those technologies. When a new more efficient technology comes along, they are doomed to irrelevance as they fail to capitalize on those technologies, and new players swoop in for dominance.
He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...
- On the flip side, Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" is a fascinating read on the benefits of decentralization.
The premise is that in the 1500s, no one thought Europe was going to be the next great power. The dominant civilizations at the time were the Chinese and the Ottomans.
Why did Europe win? Because no one could unify Europe. It was basically a collection of states.
Whereas China and the Ottoman Empire were centralized. The problem with centralization is that if the guy at the top says to do something, everyone must fall in line, even if it's a bad idea.
China used to have the most dominant navel fleet in the world. Then in the early 1500s, their government decided to stop building ships. Which ultimately led to them falling behind in the world order.
In Europe however, even if one country received a decree to stop building ships, it wouldn't stop the others from doing so. This created a hotbed of innovation and competition that allowed them to develop rapidly. And establish dominance.
The trade offs between centralization and decentralization are fascinating.
- I second this recommendation. A real eye-opener for me was learning that France and England were at it on India's east coast (the Carnatic wars) at pretty much the same time they were messing about the Hudson drainage basin in North America.
And that India was fabulously, spectacularly wealthy… like all of the gold and silver (taken and squandered in China by the Spanish) from the Americas plus some to spare.
"The Anarchy" and Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" make for great reading for the armchair historian.
- I've read Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers too (good book). However it's hard to see how the Great Powers "model" applies when everyone has nuclear weapons or can acquire them relatively easily.
- Highly recommended: Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Paul Kennedy) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_...
You're absolutely right about the Spanish, but it would be more appropriate to say the Hapsburgs, because what we're really talking about here is Spain, Austria-Hungry, the Balkans, The Holy Roman Empire... a huge portion of Europe all controlled centrally.
The French followed them, and for a period, the state of power was essentially France vs everyone else. England took off later, and that's the history most of us (Americans) are more familiar with.
BUT... this is a very Eurocentric view of history. There was a tremendous amount of other stuff going on leading up to and during this period in China, India, and what was once the Ottoman empire. In hindsight there are many reasons why our planet eventually became Eurocentric, but in 1500 that was not at all apparent - if things in China had gone differently; if they had not closed out new, outside, innovative ideas, we could very well have a very Chinese world today.
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