The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Kennedy’s thesis is that great-power standing tracks relative economic and productive strength over the long run, and that military position follows the economy with a lag. Running from the Habsburgs through the Napoleonic wars, the two world wars and the Cold War, he shows powers acquiring strategic commitments during their productive ascendancy and then holding those commitments after the productive base that paid for them has shifted elsewhere — his “imperial overstretch”, where defence spending crowds out the investment that would have sustained it. The 1987 conclusion applied the pattern to the United States and the Soviet Union and became the book’s controversy; the Soviet half aged well, and the American half has been argued over ever since.

Why it’s on the list: The Western-civilization section moves from the founding texts to the record of what actually happened to states that held power, and this is the standard account of why the ranking changes — relative productive capacity, not intentions.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography — 137 entries across six numbered sections. Kyle saved it as two X posts that between them photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came from the source PDF. Li Lu lists it as Random House, 1987.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Geopolitics — the frame: economics first, strategy second.
• World War II — one of the book’s turning points in the relative-strength ledger.