Review: God and Gold Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World

Abstract

GOD AND GOLD Britain, America and Making ofthe Modern World Walter Russell Mead New York: Knopf, 2008. 449 pp, US$27.95 cl°m ISBN 978-0-375-41403-9In view ofthe author's interest in ideas and conviction that history is indeed relevant to analysis of current affairs, this reviewer is predisposed to find God and Gold: Britain, America, and Making ofthe Modern World to be of compelling interest. In an international relations field too often dominated by philistines, fuzzy thinking, and technocratic policy intellectuals, Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in US foreign policy at Council on Foreign Relations, represents a style of thinking about the big picture that is somewhat rare in official Washington today. And chosen subject for his current book is nothing if not relevant to burning questions (yes!) of modernity, rise and fall of empires, and trajectory of historical forces in early 21st century.Sadly, author makes a hash of his opportunity. His argument, in brief, is that the Anglo-Saxons have dominated world over past three centuries because of their unique blend of capitalist democracy and Protestant religion at home, a largely benign hegemony abroad based on free trade, and an ingenious structure of international finance, and that all this has been undergirded strategically and militarily by sea power. This time-proven system, based on what Mead calls the protocols ofthe elders of Greenwich (360), should give us confidence - as against declinists like Paul Kennedy, late Samuel P. Huntington, and others - that the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy will continue into foreseeable future (271). For Americans chief lesson ofthe last three hundred years is easy to state as a principle, but much more difficult to put into practice, Mead writes. Here is lesson: plan works. Stick to plan. The 'protocols ofthe elders of Greenwich' are still best guide to grand strategy (361).In his conclusion Mead pulls out all stops. In a triumphalist trumpet voluntary, intellectual ornament of Council on Foreign Relations effuses that the values that have shaped Anglo-American world and by which Anglo-Americans have gone on to take lead in last three tumultuous centuries remain values that bring success... these values are leading us westward and upward... America will continue rushing forward, however steep slope or forbidding terrain, bearing banner with strange device: Excelsior! (413).All works of history, perhaps especially middle-brow renditions of history, inevitably reflect intellectual and political culture of era in which they are conceived and written. Whatever Mead's intention, passages quoted above insensibly reflect mindset of George W. Bush's America. They seem jarring, to say least, in Barack Obama's America of flamboyant multiculturali sm, international financial collapse, massive trade imbalances, economic distress at home, and highly problematic military adventures east of Suez, as an old-style American anglophile of Ivy League -educated kind might well express matter. Yet this reviewer has a hunch that Mead's deliberately archaic turns of phrase and anachronistic mindset will seem equally odd in today's multicultural London.Certainly Mead's reading of British history and of modern history generally is not likely to earn him an invitation to lecture at Oxford or Cambridge anytime soon. Mead laments that the study of British history and culture has almost vanished from American schools today, and that lamentation is no doubt sincere. Moreover Mead (like Paul Kennedy, Niall Ferguson, and even Simon Schama) is right to insist that Americans interested in world affairs should study closely history of Britain and of British empire. …