Research Catalog

Title

The great powers and global struggle 1490-1990 / Karen A. Rasler & William R. Thompson.

Author

Rasler, Karen A., 1952-

Publication

Lexington, Ky. : University Press of Kentucky, c1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Thompson, William R.

Description

xx, 275 p. : ill.; 25 cm.

Summary

• Arguments about global structural change and its implications abound, but rarely is the abstract translated into concrete historical terms with emphases on specific actors and empirical documentation. Rasler and Thompson reinterpret the past five hundred years of major-power warfare and provide extensive tests of the eighteen generalizations critical to their argument.
• In The Great Powers and Global Struggle Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson focus on two themes. They explore the rise and fall as well as the relative decline of major world powers over the past five hundred years, and they examine how these processes have set the stage for the outbreak of global war. Their interdisciplinary approach encompasses political science, economics, sociology, geography, and history.
• The most significant wars occur when regional leaders - historically in Western Europe - challenge global leaders. By studying the wars of Napoleon, Louis XIV, Philip II and the Italian/Indian Ocean wars of the sixteenth century through World Wars I and II to the present, the authors challenge the long-held idea that prosperity leads to over-consumption and underinvestment and thus decline - a theory, traceable to ancient times, that remains the principal explanation for global decline today.
• They conclude that those who argue that global war and repositioning are no longer a concern among the major powers lack critical understanding of the behavior that contributes to such conflict.

Uniform Title

Project Muse UPCC books

Subject

• Geopolitics
• World politics > 1945-
• World politics > 1945-1989
• World politics

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-268) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

An overview of the argument: ascent, decline, transition, and war -- Tracing the rise and fall of regional and global powers -- Global and regional transitions -- Concentration and transitional warfare -- Innovation, decline, and war -- Perspectives on overconsumption and territorial traps -- The model recapitulated -- The future of transitional warfare.

ISBN

0813118891 (acid-free) :

LCCN

^^^94031406^

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library