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

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorJames Eldin Reed
Published date01 March 2010
Date01 March 2010
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/002070201006500123
Subject MatterComing AttractionsReview
/tmp/tmp-178F6D2YFm6Y0n/input | Reviews |
enforcement operations to resolve conflict. While they make a strong case
for reenergizing consent-based peacekeeping, their contributions also invite
new analyses. Such new approaches might use alternative measures of
success and pay more attention to the role of force and regional actors in
making peace. Students of politics have much to learn from the authors’
seamless integration of current international debates into their work.
Nicholas Gammer/Thompson Rivers University
GOD AND GOLD
Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World
Walter Russell Mead
New York: Knopf, 2008. 449 pp, US$27.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-375-41403-9
In view of the author’s interest in ideas and conviction that history is indeed
relevant to the analysis of current affairs, this reviewer is predisposed to find
God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the 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, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in US foreign policy at
the Council on Foreign Relations, represents a style of thinking about “the
big picture” that is somewhat rare in official Washington today. And the
chosen subject for his current book is nothing if not relevant to burning
questions (yes!) of modernity, the rise and fall of empires, and the trajectory
of historical forces in the early 21st century.
Sadly, the author makes a hash of his opportunity. His argument, in
brief, is that “the Anglo-Saxons” have dominated the world over the 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 of the elders of
...

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