The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000

Random House 1987

This book is about national and international power in the modern or Post Renaissance period. It explains how the various powers have risen and fallen over the five centuries since the formation of the new monarchies in Western Europe. Like Imperial Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900, the US 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 US now runs t he risk, so familiar to historians of t he rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called `imperial overstretch...'