Volume 35, Number 1 · February 4, 1988
The Cost of Bigness
By James Joll
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
by Paul Kennedy
Random House, 677 pp., $24.95
In 1833 the young German historian Leopold Ranke published an essay on the great powers that traced the pattern according to which the European powers had risen and fallen between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries; he suggested the factors that explained their success and failure—the size of armies, financial resources, a common feeling for the state and its moral power, especially with the rise of a sense of nationality. 'The history of the world,' he wrote,
Review, 3709 words
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