Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Introduction and Chapter 1
Hello friends and readers! I have had the premise of starting my own “Medium blog” for some time, but I’m only now getting around to it. I had completely forgotten that I previously written here before, years ago! I have no idea if I’d still stand by anything I wrote back then. It’s probably all rubbish. But brilliant rubbish, doubtless.
In any event, this “space” will be overhauled soon, but I wanted to get the ball rolling with the following. I’ve been reading Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, so you don’t have to! I will herein sum it up for you, one chapter at a time. Except for right now, when I’ll do the Introduction and Chapter 1.
Kennedy neatly states his premise in the Introduction: great nations rise when they have the economic capacity to support a large military, a large military that is then used to go conquer things, but then, since a large military is expensive to maintain, it becomes a drag on the economy of the great power, which leads to the power’s decline, allowing some other power to engage in this process, displacing the first great power.
Easy peasy, huh? I can’t really say I disagree with the chap so far. It’s pretty simplistic but it ain’t wrong, as far as I can tell.
Kennedy starts out with a little rundown on Ming China, the Ottoman Empire and the Mogul Dynasty in India around c. 1500. He points out that all these empires, especially Ming China, absolutely smoked Europe in terms of technology, economy and population, but that all three empires were highly centralized, a condition that tends to produce complacency and stifle innovation-via-competition.
I guess this story is basically right. As a white American I’m a little specious of a British author waxing ill on “Oriental despotism”, but then again, you can pick any society that’s experienced a decline out of a hat and almost always stultifying groupthink is to blame, at least in large part.
China had one of the most kick-ass fleets of all time (read this book yet? It’s fun! Unfortunately, most of it has been discredited), but the mandarins sure didn’t care for the fleet, which was expensive to maintain and didn’t seem to pay for itself. After all, the fleet never conquered anything! Just traded amicably with those it encountered! Can you imagine that?
So the fleet was arguably a “waste of money” in the short-term, and furthermore, it was sort of an affront to the standard way of thinking. The mandarins, by this point in time, were classic navel-gazers, uninterested in new ideas in general, just enjoying their cushy gigs. British prejudices notwithstanding, I don’t think this is a very contentious point. It’s a shame it ended up that way, because the list of Chinese inventions is truly bonkers. But even great countries like China get stodgy and old, intermittently, and that’s what happened to the Ming.
The Ottomans were a similarly dynamic-at-first but then cursed-by-centralization empire. The first batch of Sultans was real good, but after that, total stinkers ’til the bitter end. They had a lot going for them c. 1500, but man, they should’ve modernized their fleet too. They refused to, and that cost them. It’s been many years since I read about the Ottomans. I read this book, which was fun. Anyway, the Ottomans started out well, but inevitably, when you have an absolute monarchy, you’re going to get some piss-poor absolute monarchs, and that’ll cost ya.
Meanwhile, I don’t know much about the Moguls. Kennedy paints them in a negative light, being opulent and oppressive and so forth. Maybe that’s the case. They built the damn Taj Mahal though! That notwithstanding, apparently they weren’t great. I withhold my judgment for now.
Kennedy then moves on to Europe, which was mired in poverty compared to the Ming, the Ottomans and the Moguls, but possessed the right ingredients for a spectacular rise. First, no one authority controlled Europe. Kennedy makes the point that Europe’s geography makes controlling the whole thing difficult, which I don’t completely buy — think about how long Rome lasted with unified control of the tricky-seeming Mediterranean, in addition to much of France and Britain. In any event, lack of central authority in c. 1500 Europe meant that a bunch of small states were constantly at each other’s throats, which was the impetus for a lot of innovation in military technology. Military technology, of course, often spills over eventually into civilian technology, fostering economic growth, etc. Since the Ming, the Ottomans and the Moguls had central authority, this competitive dynamic was absent, and ergo they began to lag behind, badly, when it came to military technology (notably the lightweight cannon and the heavy seafaring craft).
I’d sort of like to travel back in time and warn the Chinese not to ditch the fleet, because man, those Europeans sure turned out to be pricks, didn’t they? But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyhow, that’s basically what Kennedy gets at in the Introduction and Chapter 1. He gives short shrift to the Aztecs and Incas which jerks my chain a little. He briefly touches on Russia and Japan, and I’m sure we’ll see more two of those two in this book, eh?
Chapter 2 covers the Hapsburgs! Can’t wait.