Book Review

Comparative/World

It would be easy to caricature the argument of this book as anglocentric, old-fashioned, and triumphalist. But although anglocentered, Kevin Phillips's account is neither old-fashioned nor triumphalist. Phillips presents a meditation on the emergence of Great Britain and the United States, treating them as one historical unit. He makes three major points. First, civil warfare was essential to the creation of both the English and the American national polities. Second, there is more than casual continuity from the English Civil War through the American Revolution to the American Civil War. Each, he suggests, gave rise to the next, and each in some form represented a continuation of the problems and the alignments of its predecessor(s). Third, this long cycle of wars generated a historical phenomenon that is greater than either Britain or the United States taken on their own separate counts.

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In reductionist form, this might seem to be a continuation of the argument advanced by David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), and Phillips does lean heavily on Fischer. He leans on other scholars, too, and any specialist will recognize whole passages that are merely derivative (although that is the necessary price of synthesis). Rather like Fischer's formulaic recital of folkway categories, Phillips's repeated invocation of Puritan/Roundhead/Yankee and Anglican/Cavalier/Southerner continuities seems, by the end of his book, to have something of a mantra quality.

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