Review of Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989)

Rarely do 500-year overviews make serious scholarly interventions, but Paul Kennedy has accomplished that with this macro-history. A sweeping work describing the relative nature of national and international power between 1500 and 2000, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers concentrates on the interaction between economics and strategy. Throughout, he examines Great Power competition in the context of economic change and describes a pattern of expansion and retraction that is directly relevant to modernity. Kennedy is a distinguished diplomatic historian at Yale University who focuses on international relations, economic power, and grand strategy in a generally European context. He is the author of 16 other works, and received the Wolfson History Prize for this title in 1988. 

Kennedy’s thesis is that economic potential determines military capability and that focusing one’s economy on military power diverts resources from vital domestic issues. Further, he argues that economic strength and military power have been highly correlated in major nations’ rise and fall since 1500. Strengths of leading nations, he argues, never remain constant, and are relative to each other in time and space, which makes comparison across the centuries difficult.

Nevertheless, the key to his argument is military overextension. Kennedy states that “wealth is usually needed to underpin military power, and military power is usually needed to acquire and protect wealth,” creating a reciprocal relationship between power and expansion. (xvi) As states grow and their power increases, so does the proportion of their resources needed to maintain said power. When the balance skews too far in favor of military power and resources, domestic investment drops, weakening overall national power. He also demonstrates that Great Powers in relative decline—when they recognize their decline—instinctively respond by spending more on defense and security, thus diverting resources from any investment or wealth creation. 

In addition, there is a strong correlation between the outcome of great power coalition wars and the number of productive resources mobilized by each side. Great Britain, for example, created a loop between its finances and the Royal Navy as it rose to naval supremacy. The British Empire’s robust colonial trading system allowed it to create a system of credit that in turn helped finance a large navy to protect its holdings and expand the empire.

Kennedy sees World War I as a critical power transition point between Great Britain and the United States, arguing that the Americans’ vast economic potential and mobilization ensured victory for the entente and launched a reluctant United States onto the world stage. Two decades later, World War II drained old European powers both economically and physically, allowing the United States and the Soviet Union to assume their hegemonic roles in the new bipolar world that emerged. At the end of the day, how a nation manages its resources and sustains economic development, according to Kennedy, determines its rise, or fall, on the world stage.

While Kennedy is making a sweeping generalization about the relationship between economics and great power competition, he explicitly cautions that he is not falling into the trap of economic determinism. Regardless, the book often reads as a monocausal relationship between economics and power that eschews the nuanced reality of human relationships. Nevertheless, Kennedy does allow that other factors—geography, military organizations, national morale, and the alliance system—also contribute to the rise and decline of powerful states in the international system. 

Kennedy organizes his book chronologically into three sections. The first covers the preindustrial world until 1815. The second section describes the shifting balances of power between 1815 and World War II. The final section explains the second half of the twentieth century and includes a chapter on his prognostications for the future. Kennedy’s research is wide-ranging and detailed, but the nature of a project this large means he is reliant on secondary scholarship to advance his argument. Quibbling aside, its organization and entertaining prose make it immensely readable for those unfamiliar with the overall narrative of great power relations—one could pick this book up and have an excellent understanding of the last 500 years of euro-centric history.

When describing the Great Powers’ relative power in competition with each other, his general theoretical framework is sound. However, human history is littered with examples of lesser economic powers successfully outlasting or outright defeating more powerful adversaries—the American experience in Vietnam comes to mind. Nevertheless, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers has had a monumental impact on the scholarship surrounding economics’ role in great power competition and has generated great debate on causality in great power decline. The book was well-received when it was published and its relevance to modernity makes it a clear choice for policy professionals who need to understand economics and power relationships. This book is also an excellent choice for academics and would make excellent reading in an undergraduate course on top of its status as a standard text in graduate seminars. 

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