Book Review of the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

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CITATION: Kennedy, Paul M, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economy Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York, Random House, 1988, 143-193 SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS The summary of this chapter is that some of the Great Powers are beneficial from the Industrial Revolution leading to major shifts of the global economic balance. Britain is the prime beneficiary. Under the industrial and technological development, the productive and the manufacturing outputs of its own country are substantially boosted. Germany and North America are undergoing the industrial reform which will rise in the future. Those reformers are easy to gain the victory because of the acquisition of new military weapons and it challenges the places of the European Great Powers such as Russia and the Habsburg Empire as the same time. Those economic changes of the Great Powers may affect their military, political and external policies. In my opinion, the advantages are several as below. First, the author took advantage of plenty of statistics and facts when explaining and supporting his opinion, which is more convincible to the readers. What is more, I find that the writer cautiously and carefully adopted the information since he clearly explained the meaning of statistics related the matters. In addition, I reckon that the writer tried to explain his ideas with positive and negative view so that it can provide a comprehensive understanding of the matters related to the global economic balance. Moreover, I find it easy to catch up the main theme because the structure is very clear. It includes headings, sub-headings and conclusion. Overall, I think it is recommendable since it is an organized general history book and definitely gives out a whole picture from his unique point of view to examine the rise the fall of the Great Powers for 500 years. The book is written concisely
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