El Surgimiento y Caida De Las Grandes Potencias

Review of Paul Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
Juan Pablo Acevedo 胡安

The Paul Kennedys Best Seller, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, makes an historical analysis about the causes, facts and consequences that brought great powers to their rising, by making a systemically and detailed comparison about what happened during different periods of time from 1500 to 2000 year,describing also the events which brought those big powers to their fall.

1. Strategy and economics in the preindustrial world

In this part of the book is related how Europe (The Western World) rose as the new world order, by making a parallel between the big empires during the XV century: Chinese Ming, Muslim empire, Japan, Russia, and how these empires fell because of different reasons.Kennedy mainly focuses on conservative governors during the end of this century such as Chinese, which aborted the exploration of new lands, The Ottoman Empire which became also conservative and religious, and Russian was governing under a feudal system.

Subsequently its explained how a very diverse land like Europe, struggled to leader the commerce, technology and military power. Europe wasn’tpioneer in publishing books, creating weapons and war techniques. Most of them were acquired under the Muslim and Chinese Empires influence.

As realistic, Kennedy describes how European diversity brought conflicts and needs for each empire to defend themselves against foreign threats, and how the wealthier country controls the weaker. In this struggle, those European empires made alliances,which in some cases were strategically correct, but also dangerous.

Alliances between the former Spanish empire (Castille and Aragon) and subsequently with the Austrian Hadsburgs (which possessed Holland, Austria and German territories), plus the conquering of America, built the biggest empire known on that time. It has to be pointed out that the rise of the Spanish Empire was a matter of luck(the alliance with the Hadsburgs and Americas discovery brought by Colombus)

However, such big empire was a threat for Europe’s stability; this is why Spanish empire finally declined. As a Catholic crown, they decided to attack Protestants in Europe and defend themselves from The Ottoman Empire, The French, Anti Austrians in Holland and naval attacks from Britain.

The Spanish finances werehighly affected by such big army expenditures; the incomes from colonial America weren’t enough to handle it, all the riches from America finished in bankers and military traders hands. Then Spanish crown charged high taxes to commerce, weakening it and provoking an economical recession.

Kennedy underlines that to overcome as a big power is necessary to persist. Hadsburgs Spain wasn’t enoughwealthy to persist and get Europe’s control. However, if Hadsburgs would have succeeded, Europe’s plurality would disappear.

After 1600, Europe became multipolar; the Nation State concept was more mature, the wars among states were more related to national interests rather than religious or international causes.

Russia, Britain, France, Prussia, Hadsburg Austria-Hungary emerged thanks to newmilitary technology; Russia could defeat its Asian neighbors with the gunpowder guns, while those countries were still using rudimentary arms.

The Habsburg failure segues into the thesis of Chapter 3, that financial power reigned between 1660 and 1815, using Britain, France, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia to contrast between powers that could finance their wars (Britain and France) andpowers that needed financial patronage to mobilize and maintain a major military force on the field. Kennedy presents a table (page 81, Table 2) of "British Wartime Expenditures and Revenue"; between 1688 and 1815 is especially illustrative, showing that Britain was able to maintain loans at around one-third of British wartime expenditures throughout that period

• Total Wartime Expenditures,...