Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also the author of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. (Full disclosure: My daughter Eliana is his research assistant and helped him with research on the book in its final stages.) Were it not for the fact that it was just published this past Tuesday, the book would have been a good candidate to make Michael Barone’s list of five best books illuminating the shared heritage of Britain and America (as would Barone’s own Our First Revolution if anyone but Barone had compiled the list.)
In his lucid introduction to the book, Mead describes God and Gold as “a book that reflects on history and tries to find meaningful patterns in the flow of events[.]” As he reflected on the source and meaning of the Anglo-American ascendance over the past 300 years, Mead writes, he did not find “any recent books that address the whole subject in a serious way.” According to Mead, the topic of the common history of the two peoples in world affairs has not received the attention it deserves. In some ways, he observes, “the best book on the subject remains Winston Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, published in 1956, but for all its many virtues that book is too old, too Anglo-centric, and too influenced by the author’s political agenda to meet the needs of a twenty-first century public.”
In short, God and Gold is an ambitious book on an important subject that I think would naturally be of great interest to our readers. Mr. Mead has kindly responded to my request for a message to Power Line readers about the book:
The conventional wisdom says that the history of the last 300 years is the story of the rise and fall of Europe. I think that is wrong. The main trend in world history has been the development and continuing growth of a global system of power, finance, culture, ideology and trade based first on the power of Britain and then on that of the United States. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain has only been defeated in one major great power war
