| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Torbjørn L. Knutsen. The Rise and Fall of World Orders. New York: Manchester University Press; distributed by St. Martin's, New York. 1999. Pp. viii, 324. Cloth $72.95, paper $24.95.

The title of this book needs translation. Torbjørn L. Knutsen's "world" begins in 1494 and ends in 1945, and what he calls "order" refers to a recurrent pattern of international relations among a handful of European states (p. 1). Yet the second, and for a historian far more interesting, half of the book analyzes the rise and fall of American hegemony between 1917 and 1998, and Knutsen ends his book with a rather half-hearted suggestion that in the 1990s the United States may have resumed the world leadership it enjoyed in the decades after World War II, thus perhaps initiating a second American hegemony analogous to what he recognizes as a second British hegemony that began in 1815. 1

Part one describes the patterns of power that concern Knutsen in five chapters. Their titles explain the cycle he discerns: "The wave of great wars"; "The phase of hegemony"; "The phase of challenge"; "The phase of disruptive competition"; and a summary, "The rise and fall of world orders." According to Knutsen, European states ran through this cycle four (or perhaps five) times, producing an Iberian world order, 1494–1648; a Dutch world order, 1648–1714; a first British world order, 1714–1815; and a second British world order, 1815–1914. This was succeeded by an American world order after 1945, but Knutsen refrains from giving it a definite terminus in his introductory schema (p. 7). 2

Political science became a distinct branch of learning by embarking on resolute search for laws or at least for recognizable patterns in public affairs, and Knutsen is true to this tradition. He seeks regularities in the past and, knowing full well what he is looking for, he finds them. Historians also habitually find what they look for in the tangled record of the past, but Knutsen's systematic cast of mind occasionally overrides inconvenient details more recklessly than I, for one, am comfortable with. . . .

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