Paul Kennedy on Great Powers, Past and Present

About this episode

Paul Kennedy discusses his influential works on global power transitions and military history.

What a profound honor to have Paul Kennedy on the ChinaTalk podcast. Kennedy is my favorite living historian and the writer who’s most shaped my intellectual development. His analysis underpins what you hear on this show every week. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is an epochal work that traces global power transitions from 1500 to the present. It’s gripping, forest-and-trees scholarship at its finest. Equally impressive in different ways is his book, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914. Not only is it god-tier diplomatic history, it also gives you a feel for the era through its explorations of social, economic, domestic, political, and cultural dimensions of Anglo-German relations. There are fascinating US/China analogies that we’ll get into at some point in this podcast. His two most recent works directly inform the military coverage on China Talk. Engineers of Victory looks at how people and the systems they worked within solved engineering challenges that turned the tide for entire theaters in World War II. His latest, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II, is a sweeping history of a radical transformation in…

People in this episode

Host: Jordan Schneider

Guest: Paul Kennedy

Topics covered

• history
• military power
• international relations
• diplomatic history
• US-China relations

Keywords

• great powers
• diplomatic history
• World War II
• US-China analogies
• international organizations

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914, Engineers of Victory, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II, The Parliament of Man: A History of the United Nations

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