Rise and fall of the great powers : economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000

Table of Contents: 1. Strategy and economics in the preindustrial world. 2. The rise of the Western world 3. The Habsburg bid for mastery, 1519-1659 4. Finance, geography, and the winning of wars, 1660-1815 5. Strategy and economics in the industrial era. 6. Industrialization and the shifting global balances, 1815-1885 7. The coming of a bipolar world and the crisis of the "middle powers" : Part one, 1885-1918 8. The coming of a bipolar world and the crisis of the "middle powers" : Part two, 1919-1942 9. Strategy and economics today and tomorrow. 10. Stability and change in a bipolar world, 1943-1980 11. To the twenty-first century

This book is about national and international power in the "modern" that is, Post Renaissance period. It seeks to trace and to explain how the various great powers have risen and fallen, relative to each other, over the five centuries since the formation of the "new monarchies" in Wester Europe and the beginnings of the transoceanic, global system of states.