Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony

The World Order since 1500

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134157044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This timely book provides a general overview of Great Power politics and world order from 1500 to the present. Jeremy Black provides several historical case-studies, each of which throws light on both the power in question and the international system of the period, and how it had developed from the preceding period. The point of departure for this

1
Introduction

The Kennedy thesis considered

This chapter sets out to reconsider, from a global and cultural perspective, the ‘rise and fall of great powers’, especially Paul Kennedy’s formulation of that topic in 1987. The major and continuing impact of his book ensures that discussion of it is still relevant, while its connection with other general assumptions permeating Western scholarship is also significant. Kennedy’s emphasis was on the dependent relationship between economic strength and mobilization and great-power status, as well as on the changing nature of economic strength and its consequences for capability and success as a power. He also discussed the extent to which policy choices, specifically strategic overreach, can weaken the economic base of great powers.

My emphasis in this book, in contrast, is on the limits and problems of a materialist perspective on great powers, with its focus on the cost and affordability of greatness. There is also, in this book, discussion of the insights and benefits, instead, to be gained from bringing culture into the perspective. One conclusion such a perspective leads to is that a great power is perhaps best defined as a power (of some sort) that people at the time thought was great, that is, thought needed to be taken into account seriously in policy-making. From that perspective, it is hard, for example, not to call the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire a great power in 1550 and for a long time afterwards, no matter what our current view on how it fits in with materialist theories about great powers. In short, the relationship between ends and means is not seen here in the necessarily close and quasi-mechanical terms proposed and deployed by Kennedy. The perspective here is important because such a reconsideration leads to different historical interpretations, as well as views on policy and understandings of the modern world.

Presentism, or an overly strong focus on current issues, is a problem for all historical analysis, the more so in considering long-term developments. To argue now that an analysis of world power and a discussion of great powers, however defined, has to take more note of non-Western societies and states than was the case with Kennedy’s book, might seem to be particularly a matter of current concerns. Indeed, it could almost be seen as a product of the decline of the Western empires and of Europe, but also, in the shorter term, as a consequence of the crises that affected American power in the 2000s as the confidence brought by the end of the Cold War was tarnished. Thus, to call for attention to China, South Asia and the Islamic world could very much be located in terms of the issues and anxieties of the 2000s.

That might well be the case as far as the discussion of the present situation is concerned, but there is also a good case to be made for a re-examination of our discussion of past great powers. In particular, there is a tendency among some Western commentators to advance a definition of ‘great powers’ that restricts the subsequent list to Western states. This provides a good structure for a book, but is much less secure in its explanatory value. This is a problem with the Kennedy analysis, and one that is compounded by his linkage of power status with economic strength, with the latter seen in terms of modern industrial and financial power. As a consequence, non-Western states apparently only merit attention if they meet Western definitions in these terms. Moreover, for many, the international relations history of Western states is the history of international relations. Thus, traditional diplomatic history looked only at the functioning of the elements of a particular power system. Japan, and then China, in the twentieth century were considered, but their earlier history was ruled out.

This is problematic, both methodologically and empirically, and each point will be considered in the book. China from 1680 to the close of the eighteenth century is the most serious anomaly in the standard Western-centric approach. During that period, China, having been conquered in the mid-seventeenth century by the Manchu, not only made major territorial gains at the expense of non-Western states, especially Tibet and the Xinjiang-based Zunghar Confederation,¹ but also drove the Dutch from Taiwan and the Russians from the Amur valley. The large quantities of silver brought by Western traders to Canton in order to purchase Chinese goods was another sign of Chinese strength; although it also led to inflation.

In addition to China, it is apparent that there are problems with Paul Kennedy’s treatment of alleged conservatism in the Muslim world, specifically the early-modern Ottoman (Turkish) and Mughal (Indian) empires, and the supposed responsibility of this conservatism for a failure to keep up with Western military technology.² This then leads to their being treated as redundant and as not worthy of attention until they were subject to Western power. After dismissing the non-Western powers at the start of his book, Kennedy, moreover, failed to return to consider them until the late nineteenth century. There are no references to China between pages 28 and 191 and none to Japan between pages 28 and 265. Not only did Kennedy fail to consider these powers in their own right, but he also neglected them in a comparative context. So China was not discussed alongside Spain for the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and the subsequent recovery. The neglect of China is of a pattern with that of Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire) in most works on history between 500 and 1500, not least military history.

Just as the Mongols were a great power in the thirteenth century (see pp. 30–2), so there can be no doubt that by any absolute measure of power, China, Mughal India and Ottoman Turkey were great powers for all or most of the period 1500–1750, and Safavid Persia can be seen as nearly as strong. Indeed, the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and Uzbek empires can be seen as a key development of the sixteenth century that filled the void in much of the Islamic world left by Mongol failure and collapse.³ Kennedy, however, is concerned with the competition among great powers. It can be argued that this offers a relative dimension that justified a focus on Western powers, as in Europe the great powers faced potential or real existential threats from one another, and so the means by which they responded to those threats had true salience. In comparison, it can be argued that China had no power worthy of the name with which to measure or compare itself, much less compete, and that a power is great in some senses only by comparison and in competition with other powers, something that European powers had and non-European powers lacked. Eurocentrism may thus be the result if we wish to compare how great powers responded to great-power challenges.

This, however, is misleading. Aside from the questionable relegation of the Manchu and, even more, Zhungar assailants of China, the conflicts of Mughals with Safavids, Safavids with Ottomans and Ottomans with Habsburgs suggest that a competitive states system was far from restricted to Christian Europe. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, indeed, is not only Eurocentric, but in need, like much other scholarship, of fundamental revision in terms of recent work on the East—West divide.⁴ It could be argued in response that the Chinese were strong as an agrarian empire in an age in which that type of strength was becoming passé, as the nineteenth century was to demonstrate; but such a teleological argument is a questionable way to address earlier periods. To a degree, moreover, China had fitted the navalist mode in the Southern Sung period, just prior to the coming of the Mongols, although it failed fully to recover this initial lead.

If the neglect of China in particular raises questions relating to the role of ‘Orientalist’ assumptions about the superiority of the West in the discussion of the great powers by Kennedy and others, any concern with China conversely punctures the idea of the rise and fall of such powers in some unitary sequence set by Western power; while China also offers the possibility that any theory of ‘great power’ status should allow for rise, fall and rise again. This unitary sequence is commonly employed not only as a way to give narrative shape to the past, with designations of periods in terms, for example, of the rise of British power or the age of American hegemony, but is also used as an analytical method. This is particularly so with the concept of a paradigm power which allegedly serves both as a source of example and emulation for contemporaries and as a key for scholarly examination.⁵

Instead of the usual suspects, however, it is necessary to move beyond Western concern with maritime range and naval strength. This concern was very much that of Kennedy. His important early study on The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) encouraged him to adopt a navalist approach to power and also reflected his identification of military with economic strength. This identification is particularly apparent with naval power, as fleets require an infrastructure that is a product and cause of economic strength. It is no accident, therefore, that navalists tend to emphasize economic strength⁶ and technological proficiency. This reflects the extent to which they adopt an industrial approach to maritime power, stressing the value of battle fleets and the industrial capability that underpinned them. In doing so, however, there is a tendency to offer a questionable reading from naval to military history and also to devote insufficient attention to other types of naval strength and the accompanying infrastructure, for example to privateering. Privateering may be a relatively weak strategy pursued when one does not possess a strong ‘blue water’ fleet or is unprepared to risk losing such a fleet, and a focus on privateering may be a strategy that makes a serious dent in enemy commerce but that cannot serve as a winning method, but that does not mean, in contrast, that battle fleets are necessarily an essentialist, primary form of naval policy. Moreover, there is a marked tendency in navalist work to neglect Chinese and Islamic naval activity.

The sea, particularly the deep sea, also, in marked contrast to the land, apparently provides a perfect example of a military environment in which Western analytic models can be readily applied. The conventional Western approach assumes a clear paradigm of military excellence, as well as an obvious means by which capability is to be ranked: in terms of the quality and quantity of resources applied in accordance with an effective doctrine and organization. In short, a culturally denuded world is seen as an isotropic surface with unvarying characteristics, an account, however misleading, that may seem plausible to navalists and air-power enthusiasts, but one that is unsuited to power on land.

A concern with maritime strength can be regarded not as navalism but rather as an appreciation for the growing significance of naval power in global politics over the last millennium. However, too much emphasis on such power may obscure what does go on on land. A navalist approach overtly underpinned The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, helping to ensure an emphasis on the accustomed list of great powers, particularly Britain and the USA. Indeed, reprising the late nineteenth-century discussion of naval history by Alfred Thayer Mahan, especially his The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), the whole edifice essentially rested on an analysis of Britain and its application to the USA. In turn, this, and, more generally, the familiar cast, encouraged the extensive and very positive reception Kennedy’s book received, a reception that also reflected American concern about decline⁷ and the presentation and predictions of the concluding section, predictions taken forward in his Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (1993). George Orwell’s comment about the work of the military theorist Basil Liddell Hart, that a theory does not gain ground unless material conditions favour it,⁸ seems relevant for the response to Kennedy’s Rise and Fall, at least given the strength of American anxiety about decline. Rise and Fall was also influential in a number of important collections, for example, The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oxford, 1994) edited by Geir Lundestad, the Norwegian Nobel Institute director, based on a colloquium he had convened the previous year.

Rise and Fall continues to be favourably regarded, remains a key text on a large number of courses and also influences work on other periods.⁹ Although written during the Cold War, the problems facing the USA in the mid-2000s made Kennedy’s predictions appear particularly pertinent to some commentators, one writer suggesting in 2006 that his ‘1987 predictions are becoming better substantiated with each passing year and administration’,¹⁰ a reference to the book’s argument about American overstretch. Overstretch as a consequence of overreach apparently provided a way to give historical background to America’s position. Paul Kennedy indeed has suggested that the reissue, in early 2007, by the Chinese Foreign Ministry of a new edition of the Chinese version, combined with the screening, on Chinese public television, of a popular twelve-part series on the ‘Rise and Fall of Great Powers’ stressing the role of navies in the rise of great nations, is linked to current Chinese naval expansion plans.¹¹

Overstretch is, however, a problematic concept in that it presupposes a correct measure of reach (see pp. 37–8), sidesteps the point that every empire can be seen as suffering from overreach and is also not easy to apply in particular cases. For example, alongside the thesis that the Roman Empire fell because of such overstretch, it can be argued that the key issue, instead, was a dramatically worsening set of challenges or threat environment. The rise of Sassanid Persia in the mid-third century AD put pressure on the eastern Roman Empire, the basis of what became Byzantium, while the increased size of German tribal groupings on the Rhine and the Danube after AD 200, in part caused by agricultural advances and increased wealth in the Germanic aristocracy, ensured more serious challenges from the north, a situation made more acute after 370 by the Huns.¹² The extent to which it was not possible to accommodate the new threats through acculturation was also serious. Such points about the complex relationship between overstretch and threat environment can be transposed to more recent cases, although it is necessary not to underplay the specificity of particular historical episodes.

There is also the question, profitably addressed by Kennedy, of the impact of economic development and, more specifically, oceanic trade and large-scale industrialization, on relative political and military power. A literary parallel is interesting, as, in science fiction, long-distance interplanetary or interstellar trade is frequently a key indicator of power status. Although, on Earth, there were indeed major advantages in being the prime oceanic power, an emphasis on such an economic basis for military power risks both underrating other definitions of relative strength and also treating the signs of a global maritime economy as if they are an indication that prominence within this economy clearly established relative power. While an emphasis on oceanic trade is attractive for analytical purposes, it exaggerates the extent to which long-range trade was the crucial enabler of relative power, certainly prior to the nineteenth century, and thus that maritime strength was a key yardstick of an ability to derive economic benefit from trade.

Trade has been definitely a crucial source of liquidity that could otherwise only be readily obtained for economic development by means of government action and control. The latter, in contrast, has been less efficient in economic terms and also led to more authoritarian governments, but this alternative was not incompatible with power. Indeed, the determination and efficiency of their military—fiscal extraction system could make up for limited resources.¹³ An emphasis on navalism had little application to antiquity, albeit with the prominent exception of fifth-century BC Athens. The great powers of antiquity were predominantly land-based, and, after the Iron Age, ancient empires did not really depend on technological progress. Maritime empires were to be the creation of states with Atlantic seaboards and not a necessary ingredient of great-power status. Until the nineteenth century, the European maritime empires in Asia, for example, were primarily institutions for the import of luxury goods, such as spices, into Europe. Only in the nineteenth century did they become large-scale territorial empires. There is a geopolitical duality of land and sea powers, with the latter having an advantage operating in global politics over long distances,...

Table of contents

• War, History and Politics
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Bids for mastery, 1500–90
• 3 Seventeenth-century crises, 1590–1680
• 4 The rise of the great powers, 1680–1774
• 5 A reshaped world, 1775–1860
• 6 Accelerated change, 1860–1913
• 7 Bids for power, 1914–42
• 8 The fall of empires, 1943–91
• 9 American hegemony, 1991–2007?
• 10 Into the future
• 11 Conclusions
• Notes
• Selected further reading
• Index