ABSTRACT
Professor Paul Kennedy, a British scholar translated to New Haven, has written a massive book around a grand theme: the relation between the rise and fall of major powers and the shifts in their relative economic strength and technological virtuosity. The most obvious generalization from Kennedy's saga is political rather than economic: the pursuit of hegemony strengthens nationalist resistance, renders the expansionist effort increasingly costly, and out of its own dynamics may drive a state to extend its exertions to a point where failure is inevitable, as the hegemonic power reaches beyond its relative economic capacity. Interpreting the larger tendencies and broader patterns of world history is, by its very nature, an intellectually risky business. The mere fact of generalizing across centuries and continents disturbs the orthodox professionals, whose own focus upon a single decade or region probably represents over 99 percent of all historical studies.
