Thirty-five years ago this past January, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was published with consequences that still amaze me. Already by the end of 1987 my editor, Jason Epstein, could sense that this was not going to have the sales of a “normal” work of history. On one occasion he told me that Norman Podhoretz, a leading conservative figure in the US, had roundly attacked my study in the Washington Post, which was a good reason to instruct Random House to print more copies. Reporting for the New Statesman at the time, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Rise and Fall could be seen “spilling out of briefcases” of those who worked in the American capital and was read in the cabinets and chancelleries of the West. After raiding his compound in Abbottabad in 2011, US special forces found a copy among Osama bin Laden’s books.
For weeks it stayed at the top of the non-fiction bestseller lists of the Washington Post, the LA Times and many other papers, being denied the number one spot at the New York Times only by the mysterious mass purchases of a book called Donald Trump: The Art of the Deal. Sales of Rise and Fall in other countries were also huge. In Japan, the book was hurriedly translated in 28 days, and initial sales were around 600,000 copies. Overall, one estimates, world total sales reached around two million.
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