God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World
Walter Russell Mead Atlantic, 320pp, £25
For historians, a little intellectual playfulness isn't a crime. Looking for parallels between, say, the 16th and 21st centuries is absolutely fine, as is searching for grand historical patterns. The trouble starts when an author tries to fit a complex historical process into a neat-and-tidy ahistorical design. Regrettably, this is precisely what Walter Russell Mead has achieved.
In his account of why and how Britain and America have won so many military, political and economic victories over the past 500 years, there is little indication that the world-views of successive centuries were all that different from one another. We hear about Oliver Cromwell facing down the Spanish, Joseph Addison sniping at Louis XIV's France, England confronting Napoleon and the French Revolutionary armies, Lloyd George versus Kaiser Wilhelm, Reagan battling the Soviet Union, Bush pursuing his war on terror. A very mixed historical bag, you might suppose. Well, apparently, not. According to Mead, they were all curators of the same Anglo-American sensibility, trying to convince the world of their shared ambition to reconcile self-interest and idealism.
This blithely collapses half-a-millennium's-worth of political and philosophical thought into a single idea. To be fair, Mead's account of what happened - the wars we won, the maritime supremacy we established, the wealth we accrued - is rather good. When it comes to explaining why this all came to pass, however, things become more hazy. There is much vague talk of a confluence of religious, social and psychological factors that allowed us to exploit capitalism to the full and, with a passion for liberty, open societies and human rights in tow, to pursue our grand strategy.
But Mead is not being triumphalist. For the most part, he does not pretend that national self-interest ("to acquire all the power that can be acquired") was anything other than the lodestone of policy-making, nor does he shy away from scolding our historical record, or present-day misdemeanours. A large part of God and Gold is taken up with an anatomy of why the rest of the world has tended to resent or despise the intrusions of London and Washington. My real objection is to Mead's notion of a five-centuries-long overarching Anglo-American strategy. I doubt that, if you managed to get Oliver Cromwell and Ronald Reagan in a room together, they would discover that they shared many geopolitical nostrums or tactics.
All of this aside, there are still many valuable things within these pages. Any book that forces Americans to revisit their (British) pre-1776 history is a boon (this is a subject rarely taught in today's US schools: there was a time when every schoolchild could give you chapter and verse about the 1689 Glorious Revolution - try asking now). Nor could anyone doubt Mead's enthusiasm and literary chutzpah.
For all its nonsensicality, this book is an engaging read. Ultimately, though, Mead wants us to learn from the lessons of history in order to confront the challenges of today. For that to work (and it is always a delicate labour) you have to get the history right.
The problem here is not political - at times, especially during his nifty digest of sensible future directions in US foreign policy, it is difficult to make out Mead's allegiances - but historical. God and Gold conflates, compares and confuses with abandon. Today's radical Muslims are apparently much the same as the 16th-century's radical Protestants; today's European community apparently inherits Charles V's or Napoleon's ambition to keep Britain in check.
Such caricatures presumably make for whizz-bang journalism, but not for reliable historical scholarship.
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