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

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For 400 years the Anglo-Saxon powers - the UK and the US and their allies - have dominated the world, both militarily and economically. They have won the wars time and time again and yet the battle for hearts and minds has proved far harder to win. This brilliantly stimulating and provocative book explores why this has been the case: why - from the time of Louis XIV to today's Iraq - British and American armies and business have been so successful, yet so much of the world has remained so resistant to their values and ideas. Mead argues that modern history has been shaped by a series of wars in which Britain and America have faced down one enemy after another, enemies that have rejected and feared their values, their capitalism, liberalism, arrogance, religion and power. He explores the struggles for values that have lain behind these conflicts and asks why, despite all their victories, Anglo-Americans have never succeeded in establishing the peaceful world, safe for democracy and capitalism, that they have hoped for. His book is both an examination of what this overwhelming concentration of power in the hands of 'les Anglo-Saxons' has meant for the direction of world history, and a deeply though-provoking exploration of where we might be heading from here.

Reviews

"'Clever, malevolent and with spare time on his hands, Osama bin Laden is supposed to read a lot. If the CIA wants to demoralize and to distract him, it might make sure he gets a copy of Walter Russell Mead's new book.' Economist 'Mead is a scintillating writer.' Niall Ferguson, Financial Times 'Mead's is a huge subject, but he treats it with a light touch... Readers of this astute, informed and entertaining analysis may wonder whether it will stand up to the events that current and future events with throw at it. The best guess is that it will.' Robert Cole, The Times"

Author Bio

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for foreign policy at the US Council on Foreign Relations. He writes regularly for Foreign Affairs, as well as for the New York Times and the Washington Post and is a contributing editor on the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (2001) and Power, Terror, Peace and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (2005).