Jeremy Black: Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony - The World Order Since 1500Paperback: 273 pages
In his latest (of seventy books) Jeremy Black re-reads world history and offers a new narrative for changes in the world order. The picture Black constructs of international politics is deeper and more realistic than any monocausal or systemic fable we have learnt to appreciate in contemporary IR. Black uses and highlights the importance of perceptions and self-perceptions in achieving and sustaining great power status thus criticizing sole focus on military power or systemic imperatives for action.
"Why bother with Napoleon? He was a failure, not only in hindsight but also in his own lifetime. If there was no perverted Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods) equivalent to the Berlin bunker in which Adolf Hitler was to commit suicide in 1945, Napoleon discovered Hell in his own terms when imprisoned from 1815 by the British on St Helena, an isolated island in the storm-tossed South Atlantic. Furthermore, as a military figure, Napoleon failed totally." p. 93-94
"The impact of environmental pressures and changes invites the question whether the effects of humans' actions on the context in which they operate may not be more direct in the sense of activity in outer space. This opens up the prospect not simply of exploration but also of enhanced military capability, mineral extraction and possibly settlement. Whether that would offer a solution to problems on Earth possibly belongs t the field of science fiction, but consideration of the issue reflects not so much utopianism as a reaction to the grave problems of the human condition." p. 229
