Seems like something I would have written half-drunk the night before it was due in undergrad.
“Recovery from significant long-term national decline is rare and difficult to detect in the historical record,” the authors note. Think of Rome, or Habsburg Spain, or the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, or the Soviet Union. “When great powers have slid from a position of preeminence or leadership because of domestic factors, they seldom reversed this trend.”
This screams "Wiki-level analysis of history." First, no fucking way did they do any real digging into late-17th century Spain, to say nothing of the USSR, which may be the only relevant comparison anyway. This is starting with your thesis and arguing how historical facts fit it, not starting with the facts and developing a thesis from there.
The first example is Britain in the mid-1800s... But Britain rallied with a wave of reform that swept British life and transformed politics.
I'd love for someone with better knowledge of British history to chime in, but pretty much every part of this seems suspect. Britain was in decline in the mid-1800s? When it was winning the Crimean War, taking Crown control of India (after putting down the Indian Mutiny) and expanding all over Asia, including kicking off China's Century of Humiliation? Pretty sure most of the big internal social reforms came in the 20th, too.
A second case study can be found in the United States itself, after the binge of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. That industrial boom transformed America, but it created poisonous inequalities, social and environmental damage, and gross corruption. Republican Theodore Roosevelt led a “Progressive” movement that reformed politics, business, labor rights, the environment and the political swamp of corruption.
And it's just flat-ass wrong to suggest the U.S. was in decline after the Gilded Age. That was when the U.S. was openly calling itself an empire, right in the middle of all sorts of heavy-handed interventions throughout Latin America, when the fully-industrialized U.S. started to take economic, political, military, and cultural leadership from Europe. Just... what?
Seems like something I would have written half-drunk the night before it was due in undergrad.
This screams "Wiki-level analysis of history." First, no fucking way did they do any real digging into late-17th century Spain, to say nothing of the USSR, which may be the only relevant comparison anyway. This is starting with your thesis and arguing how historical facts fit it, not starting with the facts and developing a thesis from there.
I'd love for someone with better knowledge of British history to chime in, but pretty much every part of this seems suspect. Britain was in decline in the mid-1800s? When it was winning the Crimean War, taking Crown control of India (after putting down the Indian Mutiny) and expanding all over Asia, including kicking off China's Century of Humiliation? Pretty sure most of the big internal social reforms came in the 20th, too.
And it's just flat-ass wrong to suggest the U.S. was in decline after the Gilded Age. That was when the U.S. was openly calling itself an empire, right in the middle of all sorts of heavy-handed interventions throughout Latin America, when the fully-industrialized U.S. started to take economic, political, military, and cultural leadership from Europe. Just... what?
Lol mid 1800’s for the British is known as their imperial century. Don’t know what that author is thinking