The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 - Paul Kennedy [epub]

As a doctoral candidate at Oxford University, Paul Kennedy studied great-power strategy under one of Britain's most distinguished military scholars, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. But he still felt that something was missing.

"It seemed to me that a large number of things couldn't be explained by what happened on the battlefield alone," Mr. Kennedy said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he was attending a conference. "The importance of economics seemed to me to have been much undervalued by military and diplomatic historians."

In this book, Mr. Kennedy, who is the Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University, explores the connections between economic and military strength across 500 years of world history. His thesis carries him even beyond the boundaries of history itself, into what he admits is an 'experimental' application of historical analysis to current events.

"What I was finding in my historical researches," he said, "was that, by looking at various economic indices, you could detect the rise and fall of different powers in the system. When they started losing their economic competitiveness, there was an earnest debate about how to restore it - how to make yourself strong and productive as you were two or three decades earlier. There were distinct echoes of the arguments that were occurring in the United States in the late 1970's and 1980's.

There were also distinct echoes in the political responses," he noted. "There is a very characteristic right-wing, patriotic response which says we aren't really declining, we've just lost our will. Or that we have to get back to old standards, to reassert the virtues which made us great."