THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS
ECONOMIC CHANGE AND MILITARY CONFLICT FROM 1500 TO 2000
PAUL KENNEDY
RANDOM HOUSE 1987
PART 1
Back cover
“Although the United States is at present still in a class of its own economically and perhaps even militarily, it cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the ‘number one’ position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategical realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain those commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the ever-shifting patterns of global production. 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’s political, economic, and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured. In consequence, the United States now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called ‘imperial overstretch’: that is to say, decision makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.”
Front cover
Why is it that throughout history some nations gain power while others lose it? This question is not only of historical interest, but also important for understanding today’s world as the new century dawns, for just as the great empires of the past flourished and fell, will today’s – and tomorrow’s – empires rise and fall as well.
In this wide-ranging analysis of global politics over the past five centuries, Yale historian Paul Kennedy focuses on the critical relationship of economic to military power as it affects the rise and fall of empires. Nations project their military power according to their economic resources and in defense of their broad economic interests. But, Kennedy argues, the cost of projecting that military power is more than even the largest economies can afford indefinitely, especially when new technologies and new centers of production shift economic power away from established Great Powers – hence the rise and fall of nations.
Professor Kennedy begins this story around the year 1500, when a combination of economic and military-technological breakthroughs so strengthened the nation-states of Europe that soon they prevailed over the great empires of the East; but European dynastic and religious rivalries, along with new technologies, made it impossible for any single power to dominate the continent. From the campaigns of Emperor Charles V to the struggles against Napoleonic France, victory repeatedly went to the economically strong side, while states that were militarily top heavy usually crashed to eventual defeat. This is a pattern, Professor Kennedy shows, that also applied in the two world wars of the present century, where superior economic and technological resources twice defeated the German war machine.
In what will probably be the most widely discussed part of this book, Professor Kennedy devotes his closing chapters to an analysis of Great Power politics since 1945 through the year 2000. Here, too, his focus is not only on the military abilities and policies of the leading states, but also on those profound shifts in the world’s productive balances that – as in the Renaissance – cause certain Great Powers to rise as others fall. Professor Kennedy’s discussion of the implications of these changes for the United States, the Soviet Union, the countries of western Europe, and the emerging Asian powers of China and Japan makes this one of the most important political studies of recent times. Both for the policy maker and the general public, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers transcends its historical scholarship.
Introduction
This is a book about national and international power in the “modern” – that is, post-Renaissance – period. It seeks to trace and explain how the various Great Powers have risen and fallen, relative to each other, over the five centuries since the formation of the “new monarchies” of western Europe and the beginning of the transoceanic, global system of states. Inevitably, it concerns itself a great deal with wars, especially those major, drawn-out conflicts fought by coalitions of Great Powers which had such an impact upon the international order; but it is not strictly a book about military history. It also concerns itself with tracing the changes which have occurred in the global economic balances since 1500; and yet it is not, at least directly, a work of economic history. What it concentrates upon is the interaction between economics and strategy, as each of the leading states in the international system strove to enhance its wealth and its power, to become (or to remain) both rich and strong.
The “military conflict” referred to in the book’s subtitle is therefore always examined in the context of “economic change.” The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequence of the more or less efficient utilization of the state’s productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state’s economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason, how a Great Power’s position steadily alters in peacetime is as important to this study as how it fights in wartime.
The argument being offered here will receive much more elaborate analysis in the text itself, but can be summarized very briefly:
The relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another. For example, the coming of the long-range gunned sailing ship and the rise of the Atlantic trades after 1500 was not uniformly beneficial to all the states of Europe – it boosted some much more than others. In the same way, the later development of steam power and of coal and metal resources upon which it relied massively increased the relative power of certain nations, and thereby decreased the relative power of others. Once their productive capacity was enhanced, countries would normally find it easier to sustain the burdens of paying for large-scale armaments in peacetime and of maintaining and supplying large armies and fleets in wartime. It sounds crudely mercantilistic to express it this way, but wealth is usually needed to underpin military power, and military power is usually needed to acquire and protect wealth. If, however, too large a proportion of the state’s resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is likely to lead to a weakening of national power over the long term. In the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically – by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars – it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all – a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline. The history of the rise and later fall of the leading countries in the Great Power system since the advance of western Europe in the 16th century – that is, of nations such a Spain, the Netherlands, France, the British Empire, and currently the United States – shows a very significant correlation over the longer term between productive and revenue-raising capacities on the one hand and military strength on the other.
The story of “the rise and fall of the Great Powers” which is presented in these chapters may be briefly summarized here. The first chapter sets the scene for all that follows by examining the world around 1500 and by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each of the “power centers” of that time – Ming China; the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim offshoots in India, the Mogul Empire; Muscovy; Tokugawa Japan; and the cluster of states in west-central Europe. At the beginning of the 16th century it was by no means apparent that the last-named region was destined to rise above all the rest. But however imposing and organized some of those oriental empires appeared by comparison with Europe, they all suffered from the consequences of having a centralized authority which insisted upon a uniformity of belief and practice, not only in official state religion but also in such areas as commercial activities and weapons development. The lack of any such supreme authority in Europe and the warlike rivalries among its various kingdoms and city-states stimulated a constant search for military improvements, which interacted fruitfully with the newer technologies and commercial advances that were also being thrown up in this competitive, entrepreneurial environment. Possessing fewer obstacles to change, European societies entered into a constantly upward spiral of economic growth and enhanced military effectiveness which, over time, was to carry them ahead of all other regions of the globe.
While this dynamic of technological change and military competitiveness drove Europe forward in its usual jostling, pluralistic way, there still remained the possibility that one of the contending states might acquire sufficient resources to surpass the others, and then to dominate the continent. For about 150 years after 1500, a dynastic-religious bloc under the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs seemed to threaten to do just that, and the efforts of the other major European states to check this “Habsburg bid for mastery” occupy the whole of Chapter 2. As is done throughout the book, the strengths and weaknesses of each of the leading Powers are analyzed relatively, and in the light of the broader economic and technological changes affecting western society as a whole, in order that the reader can understand better the outcome of the many wars of this period. The chief theme of this chapter is that despite the great resources possessed by the Habsburg monarchs, they steadily overextended themselves in the course of repeated conflicts and became militarily top-heavy for their weakening economic base. If the other European Great Powers also suffered immensely in these prolonged wars, they managed – though narrowly – to maintain the balance between their material resources and their military power better than their Habsburg enemies.
The Great Power struggles which took place between 1660 and 1815, and are covered in Chapter 3, cannot be so easily summarized as a contest between one large bloc and its many rivals. (to be continued)