The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy

1. The Rise of the Western World

Population in the 15th century
China 100-130 million
Europe 50-55 million
Spain 5 million
England 2.5 million
Ottoman Turks 14million

Ming China
a key element in China's retreat was the sheer conservatism of the Confucian bureaucracy... all-important officialdom was concerned to preserve and recapture the past, not to create a brighter future based upon overseas expansion and commerce.

Mogul Empire
A conquering Muslim elite lay on top of a vast mass of poverty-stricken peasants chiefly adhering to Hinduism.

Europe
political fragmentation
geography-There were no enormous plains over which an empire of horsemen could impose its swift dominion; nor were there broad and fertile river zones like those around the Ganges, Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Yellow, and Yangtze, providing the food for masses of toiling and easily conquerable peasants. Europe's landscape was much more fractured, with mountains ranges and large forests separating the scattered  population centers in the valleys; and its climate altered considerably from north to south and west to east.

Regular long-distance exchanges of wares in turn encouraged the growth of bills of exchange, a credit system, and banking on an international scale. The very existence of mercantile credit, and then of bills of insurance, ...

there was no way in which such economic developments could be fully suppressed.

there existed no uniform authority in Europe which could effectively halt this or that commercial development; no central government whose changes in priorities could cause the rise and fall of a particular industry; no systematic and universal plundering of businessmen and entrepreneurs by tax gatherers..

"little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice. "

market economy ... at least to the extent that merchants and entrepreneurs would not be consistently deterred, obstructed , and preyed upon.

a plurality of power centers

lack of cultural and ideological orthodoxy-- that is, a freedom to inquire, to dispute, to experiment , a belief in the possibilities of improvement, a concern for the practical rather than the abstract, a rationalism which defied mandarin codes, religious dogma, and traditional folklore.

economic laissez faire, political and military pluralism, and intellectual liberty

2. The Habsburg Bid for Mastery, 1519-1659

Family Tree of the House of Habsburg

Maximilian I (1459-1519), +Australia
Mary (1457-1482), +Burgundy +Netherlands 1477
Philip I (1478-1506)

Ferdinand II (1452-1516), +Aragon +Naples and Sicily
Isabella I (1451-1504), +Castile
Joanna the mad (1479-1555)

Charles V (1500-1558),
+Hungary and Bohemia 1526

Charles V (1519-1555)
Ferdinand II (1619-1637)
Philip II (1556-1598)
 1566, Netherlands
 1588, Spanish Armada invade England

Philip IV (1621-1665)
 1659, Treaty of the Pyrenees