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Technology and the Rise of Great Powers:How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition
Book Talk with Jeffrey Ding
Microsoft’s Book Talk series features leading authors discussing how the next wave of technology will impact our world.
About the Book
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In this book, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.
Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.
“One of the best books examining […] how technology enables national power is from Jeffrey Ding. […] An important and interesting book." — Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
“A rich and essential contribution that transcends any one intellectual field. To say Technology and the Rise of Great Powers is timely is an understatement, given both the intensifying economic and security competition between the United States and China as well as the very visible advent and apparently rapid spread of AI.” — Jonathan D. Caverley, US Naval War College
“Ding’s Technology and the Rise of Great Powers provides a powerful new argument about how technology can change world politics. He shows that creating an infrastructure of education and training systems for developing new general-purpose technology skills is critical to global leadership. Power transitions in global politics may depend more on ordinary engineers than on heroic inventors.” — Helen Milner, Princeton University
“A well-written, ambitious book. It will certainly have a major impact on the field and will likely kick off an important debate on the role of technology in great power relations.” — Abraham Newman, Georgetown University
About the Author
Jeffrey Ding is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. His book Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, published with Princeton University Press in August 2024, investigates how past technological revolutions influenced the rise and fall of great powers, with implications for U.S.-China competition in emerging technologies like AI.
Dr. Ding’s research has been published in academic journals such as European Journal of International Relations, Security Studies, and International Studies Quarterly, and his work has been cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets. He regularly briefs government leadership on issues at the intersection of technology and national security, including testimonies before the Senate Intelligence Committee and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Ding's weekly "ChinAI" newsletter, which features translations of Chinese conversations about AI development, reaches 22,000+ subscribers. He received his PhD in 2021 from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Growing up in Iowa City, Ding became a lifelong Hawkeyes fan and attended the University of Iowa for his undergraduate studies.
Featured speakers
Jeffrey Ding is joined by Nanna-Louise Linde and Silke Wettach.
Jeffrey Ding
Author
Nanna-Louise Linde
Vice-President European Government Affairs, Microsoft
Silke Wettach
EU Journalist
