How the Anglo-American Imperium Came To Be

Political junkies who think of Kevin Phillips primarily as a prognosticator--as most do because “The Emerging Republican Majority,” his first book, predicted the outcome of the Reagan Revolution 11 years before it hit--can hardly be prepared for “The Cousins’ Wars,” an attempt to describe the grand pattern of political development in the last four centuries of English and American history. Historians will take exception to his use of evidence and his argument, and some are bound to find the whole enterprise dubious. They will make a mistake, however, if they dismiss his arguments out of hand, for both academics and general readers can profit from this book.

As would a conventional historian, Phillips begins with a question and then constructs an argument to answer it. How, he asks, did Reformation-era England--a poorish kingdom on the periphery of Europe, a state that did not yet control even Scotland and Ireland--spawn the international English-speaking community that would dominate the world in the 19th and 20th centuries? Most modern historians, rejecting the providential and racist explanations of their forebears, have preferred economic explanations, stressing either the mutually energizing connections between Puritanism and commerce, the early emergence of industrial capitalism in England or some combination of the two. Phillips readily greets the importance of economic and religious factors but insists that there is a larger underlying explanation for the trajectory of both English and American historical development: war. Or, to be precise: civil war.

This may not sound surprising, but given the ways that historians generally construct the stories of England and America, it has a couple of novel and challenging implications. First, academics tend to regard English and American history as distinct narratives. Staggering numbers of books have been written on the English Civil Wars, the American Revolution and the American Civil War, but almost no one before Phillips has ever tried to make all three events part of a common narrative. Instead, scholars have worked within separate frameworks, which have stressed the peaceful side of national development: in the English case, the development of a constitutional and legal system predicated on parliamentary supremacy; in the American case, the democratic growth of a freedom-loving people. In both narrative frames, elements of continuity dominate over episodes of violent disruption. Wars are treated as significant events, but their significance lies in their comparative rarity. They are the exception rather than the rule of narratives driven, in Britain, by the logic of institutional evolution and, in the United States population growth and settlement of new territories.

The second implication is that historians have been more drawn to the study of wars’ causes than their effects. In part this is because the effects of wars are so difficult to measure with any precision. But it also results from a certain visceral reluctance to regard one’s national historical development as a function of violence. As a result, English and American historians alike have been able to write huge numbers of monographs on their nations’ wars without ever fundamentally altering the grand narratives of national development to suggest that warfare has been a central influence, much less a determining one.

Yet England and the United States together suffered three horrendous civil wars between 1642 and 1865, and if Phillips is right, all three had lasting revolutionary effects on the transoceanic community of “cousins” that Phillips labels “Anglo-America.” The 17th century’s defining convulsion came in the English Civil War of 1642-49, when the forces of Parliament and Puritanism beheaded the king, overthrew the Church of England and established the republic that would last until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. A little over a century later, another civil war split the Anglo-American world in two and established the independence of the United States. The American Revolution created a new nation but in the process left unresolved crucial issues of constitutional interpretation. These internal contradictions, glossed over and compromised from 1789 until the 1850s, finally exploded in the biggest blood bath of all, the American Civil War of 1861-65. This decisive conflict structured American domestic politics for a century and positioned the Anglo-American community to achieve global hegemony. The United States, transformed from a weak confederation into a modern, militarily strong nation-state, had resolved the problem of slavery; British politicians could now regard the United States as a potentially valuable (and ideologically palatable) ally. After nearly a century of antagonism, the U.S. and Britain began to move on the convergent paths that would eventually meet in the so-called special relationship of the 20th century.

Phillips investigates each war and its political effects in great, occasionally numbing detail, circling back in digressions and repetitions that will frustrate many readers. Yet it is worth bearing with him, if only because of his ability to draw parallels between these events, parallels so strong that it sometimes seems as if the participants were trying to replicate the basic pattern. Roughly speaking, Phillips describes a recurring irrepressible conflict between two cultural antagonists. On the one hand, a traditional order, rooted in pre-capitalist social relations and dedicated to hierarchy and central authority, seeks to maintain social stability and its inherited power. Opposing the traditionalists is a vibrant and forward-looking commercial class, committed by its Protestant radicalism to freedom of conscience as a prime political value and thus also to an individualism profoundly threatening to the establishment. The old order seeks to perpetuate its control; the religiously inspired insurgents articulate their opposition and try to assert their rights--a new political order emerges from the wreckage of war.

While the plot remains the same, the characters shift from war to war. The English Civil War casts king and cavaliers against Roundheads in the roles of Traditional Order and Insurgents. The ultimate result is a constitutional monarchy and a transatlantic political culture that underpins relations between England and America until the king and his ministers seek to exercise sovereign power over a virtually autonomous colonial periphery. The American colonists resist, in the name of the rights and liberties that the Roundheads had articulated 125 years earlier. The United States and Britain climb out of the rubble, however, positioned to succeed in ways previously impossible. The Americans, freed from British restraints and a deferential social system, develop into a democratic republic that expands across North America; the British, whose first experiment in empire had been thwarted by the colonists’ claims to rights equal to those of other English subjects, go on to construct a second empire. This time, however, they take care to dominate black and brown people in India and Africa, using notions of white supremacy that few 19th century Englishmen questioned to justify colonialism as a civilizing mission. Unlike the first empire, the second proves wildly successful: By 1850, the sun never sets on it.

The American Civil War opposes Southern slaveholders, who imagine themselves descendants of the old Cavaliers, and insurgent New Englanders who regard themselves as sons of the Puritans. This time, however, the results are a strengthened national government and an industrialized economy that together prophesy an awesome military and economic might. The British, noting the unmistakable signs of future greatness, pursue a policy of rapprochement with their ex-colonies, and “Anglo-America” gradually emerges as a hegemonic political, as well as cultural, reality in the 20th century. Thus Phillips ingeniously links what are usually understood as separate histories into a common story in which everything depends on wars and their legacies. In so doing, he challenges us all to see the development of constitutional monarchy and democracy alike as subordinate strains in the emergence of an Anglo-American imperium that endures to this day. “Not since Rome. . ,” he writes at the conclusion of his last chapter, leaving the reader to fill in the blank: Not since Rome has any empire been so great.

This is obviously a big story and an easy target for specialists inclined to shoot holes in it. Phillips has tried to master three immense histories, but even the vast reading he has done--and he seems to have read or consulted at least 400 books and articles in the course of his research--represents a small fraction of the relevant modern scholarship. Scholars who spend whole careers becoming experts in far narrower fields will not be surprised to find that Phillips has made errors on the way to producing this magisterial narrative. These can be reckoned by the score, and they range from the trivial to the seriously problematic. Is it significant that Phillips maintains that Lord Jeffery (not “Jeffrey” as he spells it) Amherst had an American wife, when his first and second wives were both English? Probably not. Does it matter that Southerners who, Phillips assures us, “rarely knew a foremast from a forecastle,” made up 47.8% of the officers in the antebellum U.S. Navy, whereas only 17.4% came from the New England states? It might, because Phillips treats this assertion as evidence of “the parallel between the English and American pre-Civil War polarizations.” And it does matter that Southern plantation owners, to whom Phillips attributes a cavalier attachment to traditional, pre-capitalist social relations, were growing crops for a transatlantic staples market and behaving in profit-maximizing ways a century and more before the supposedly commerce-minded descendants of the Puritans in New England experienced the Market Revolution.

These discrepancies suggest how academic history tends to differ from the kind of sweeping, highly generalized argument that “The Cousins’ Wars” represents. Phillips researched and wrote his book in four years--first, he tells us, as a diversion and then with increasing focus as he began to see the patterns emerge. Historians, by contrast, typically take twice as long to write books half as big as Phillips’ and more often modify than upend the conventional wisdom in their specialties. This is not because historians are a cautious, unimaginative, pedantic breed but because they are professionally bound to make their interpretations fit all the available facts and obliged by the canon of their craft to be accurate in their treatment of sources and exhaustive in their treatment of previous scholarship.

For such reasons, as well as temperamental ones, the average historian cares about details (the birthplace of Jeffery Amherst’s wife) and the fit of evidence to argument (the proportion of Southern-born officers in the Navy) in a way that Phillips simply doesn’t. As a consequence, historians are apt to discount this book in ways they should not. Hard as it is to write translational history, and rare as it is to do it well, “The Cousins’ Wars” succeeds in breaking down the parochial barriers that confine historians and encourages them to think more broadly about what they know best. Even more important, however, historians need to pay sustained and critical attention to the grand narratives that implicitly shape their work by suggesting to them what questions are worth asking, what stories are worth telling. Such an inquiry has led Phillips to the disquieting recognition that only half our national history is the story of an American republic in which more and more groups have gained access to citizenship and the blessings of liberty. The other half, if Phillips is right (and I think he is), is the story of an American empire--and its implications are ones with which historians, and Americans in general, have not yet begun to grapple.