A Closer Look at the Rise of a Great Nation

The rise of great powers: a topic that has been discussed for ages. The Age of Discovery at the end of the fifteenth century brought unprecedented commercial prosperity to Europe and ushered in an era of dialogue and competition among nations around the world. Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States rose one after another, taking control of the seas and becoming global powers. The stories of these nations' rise and fall offer lessons for today and shape the future. How did the Netherlands, a “low country” that struggled against the sea, rise so rapidly and take center stage on the world stage in the seventeenth century? How did Britain, an island nation occupying only 0.2 percent of the world's land and then home to just over twenty million people, rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to become the world's richest and most powerful empire, “the empire on which the sun never sets”? How did modern France come into being, and how did it decline and revive? How did the United States, a country with a history of barely more than two hundred years, rise to become the world's only superpower today? This book offers vivid answers to each of these questions.