The rise & fall of great powers
by Tom Rachman · first published 2014
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2008–2020first – last mentioned
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Tooly Zylberberg, the American owner of an isolated bookshop in the Welsh countryside, conducts a life full of reading, but with few human beings. Books are safer than people, who might ask awkward questions about her life. She prefers never to mention the strange events of her youth, which mystify and worry her still. Taken from home as a girl, Tooly found herself spirited away by a group of seductive outsiders, implicated in capers from Asia to Europe to the United States.
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A good time to plug "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy. I'm some of the way through this and it's a superb book.
on “How the neo-medieval 21st century will be more like the 12th century” ↗You might be interested in this [1] 'Rise and Fall of Great Powers' - they go through the industrial output numbers in great detail from 1500-1950 and articulate Russia's constant problems at length. And yes, Japan and China were 'way behind' as well in most of the…
on “Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine” ↗This all reminds me of a book by historian Paul Kennedy. "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers." Y'all should read it.
on “Lehman going bankrupt. Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch” ↗…would have emerged. Basically that there is a kind of political thermodynamics that destroys all nations, no matter how great. Peter Turchin has developed an interesting family of theories about the rise and fall of great powers. He wrote a popular account, War and Peace and War, which I reviewed here: http://chester.id.au/2012/05/14/review-war-and-peace-and-war... As a footnote, I found why he used the term 'Asabiya'. It comes…
on “Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism” ↗