The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers - Plot & Excerpts
Alterations had always occurred in the power balances to produce instability and often war. “What made war inevitable,” Thucydides wrote in The Peleponnesian War, “was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”15 But by the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the changes affecting the Great Power system were more widespread, and usually swifter, than ever before. The global trading and communications network—telegraphs, steamships, railways, modern printing presses—meant that breakthroughs in science and technology, or new advances in manufacturing production, could be transmitted and transferred from one continent to another within a matter of years. Within five years of Gilcrist and Thomas’s 1879 invention of a way to turn cheap phosphoric ores into basic steel, there were eighty-four basic converters in operation in western and central Europe,16 and the process had also crossed the Atlantic. The result was more than a shift in the respective national shares of steel output; it also implied a significant shift in military potential.
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