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Books : The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America
Product Description: A strikingly fresh and revisionist explanation for the rise of Anglo-America as the dominant cultural and political force in the world today by the bestselling author of The Politics of Rich and Poor.
The question at the heart of The Cousins' Wars is this: How did Anglo-America evolve over a mere three hundred years from a small Tudor kingdom into a global community with such a hegemonic grip on the world today, while no other European power-Spain, France, Germany, or Russia-did? The answer to this, according to Phillips, lies in a close examination of three internecine English-speaking civil wars-the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. These wars between cousins functioned as crucial anvils on which various religious, ethnic, and political alliances were hammered out between the English-speaking cousin-nations, setting them on a unique two-track path toward world leadership-one aristocratic and aloof to dominate the imperial nineteenth century and the other more egalitarian and democratic to take over in the twentieth century. They also functioned as unfortunate and deadly cultural crucibles for African Americans, Native Americans, and the Irish.
Phillips's analysis shows exactly how these conflicts are inextricably linked and how they seeded each other. He offers often surprising interpretations that cut across the political spectrum-for instance, that the Constitution of the United States, while brilliant in many respects, was also a fatally flawed political compromise that contributed mightily in setting the stage for the final-and the bloodiest-cousins' war: the American Civil War.
With the new millennium upon us and triggering widespread assessment of our nation's place in world history, The Cousins' Wars provides just the kind of magisterial sweep and revisionist spark to ignite widespread interest and debate. This grand religious, military, and political epic is the multi-dimensional story of the triumph of Anglo-America.
Amazon.com Review: Political commentator Kevin Phillips (author of the 1991 bestseller The Politics of Rich and Poor) takes a break from analyzing the latest election returns with this sweeping history of Anglo-American exceptionalism. How did the political culture of Anglo-America rise "from a small Tudor kingdom to a global community and world hegemony"? asks Phillips. His answer comes in the course of studying three wars--the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Civil War. Phillips does not examine the military history of these conflicts, looking instead at the political, religious, economic, and sectional interests that shaped them. He makes several eye-opening observations, comparing, for instance, a "state-by-state portrait of which counties, towns, districts, or regions were loyal" during the American Revolution to "ethnoreligious maps of the modern-day Balkans." This is a hefty book (over 600 pages, not including appendices and footnotes), and while Phillips's preface is a bit self-absorbed, admirers of David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel will find much to like between its covers. --John J. Miller
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - A fresh perspective
Kevin Phillips argues that the English Civil War, the American Revolutionary War and the U.S. Civil War were all battles in the same civil war. Roundheads versus Cavaliers, merchants versus nobles, Yankees versus Virginians, Whigs versus Tories, North versus South, the names might change but the opponents were essentially the same. According to Phillips, the origins of the struggles lay in geographic, religious, and socio-economic divisions in England.
On the one side were East Anglian Puritans, low church protestant tradesmen and merchants, both those who stayed in England and those who emigrated to New England. On the other side were the bishops, high church Anglicans, aristocrats, and other loyalists, including lower-class footsoldiers from the northern border regions of England who migrated to the inland, mountainous regions of the South and mid-Atlantic North America, while their upper-class allies became the Virginian colonial elite.
The freshness of Phillips's thesis for an American audience comes from his attention to the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. From that perspective, the main conflict of the Revolutionary War was not between Britain and the United States, but between old enemies that cut across national boundaries within the English-speaking world. Then, following that conflict through the U.S. Civil War give a fresh perspective on a war that is in need of one.
Phillips concludes that the outcome of the three struggles led to Anglo American world dominance. It is a sympathetic account, as Phillips clearly approves of Anglo dominance, but the book is worth reading even for those who don't.
Rating: - The best book on American history i have ever read
This is an amazing book, written, not by a formal scholar, but someone who made history himself, through his political activism for the Republican party in the late 60s. Kevin Phillips has clearly developed intellectually since then. Reading this book, and especially his subsequent "American Theocracy", makes me wonder whether he now understands the words of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity".
There is an absolute wealth of detail in this book, covering both Britain and America from 1640-1865, which demonstrates that the US History course I took in a New Jersey high school in 1972 was, in many ways, a litany of untruth. Specifically, in school I did not learn:
That, during the revolutionary war, Toryism was so strong in the mid Atlantic states (see pages 194-219),
That support in Britain for American independence was so high, or so important in securing victory for the patriots (pp 296-300),
Anything about a middle ground in the lead up to or during the Civil War, particularly the ambivalent attitudes of the northern Scotch-Irish and German and Irish immigrants to Negroes and slavery, let alone about anti-draft riots in New York City in July 1863 (pp 415-440),
That the German ancestry population of America was so huge or influential (see map on page 565),
That the Irish ancestry population was so widespread or so Protestant (map page 575),
That religion, especially the Second Great Awakening, was so important in generating the impulse to war.
After finishing the book, I found myself pondering a number of questions. Perhaps the most important are:
Are German-Americans still more cautious about war than Yankees? But, if so, why did Iowa vote for Bush in 2004, having voted for Gore in 2000?
If the "culture wars" between the "Greater South" and "Greater New England" persist, will there, some day, be a fourth cousins' war with actual shooting? Will the USA ever split up?
What effect will completely new people (Hispanics, Muslims, East Asians) in America have on the dynamic of the cousins' relationship?
Rating: - Repetitive and long-winded, but useful
Cousins' Wars looks at American History from an often-overlooked angle, which is as an extension of British civilization. From this point of departure, Kevin Phillips traces the migration of British political divisions across the Atlantic, and into the foundations of American history. His thesis, that the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War were, in essence, later installments of the English Civil War, is both interesting and persuasive. I also liked his in-depth analysis of British public opinion toward the American Revolution and Civil War, and how it closely mirrored the alignments of the English Civil War. Finally, I think that Mr. Phillips goes to great lengths to show how seriously divided the United States was between gaining independence and the Civil War. This last fact has often been kicked to the side in favor of a simple North vs. South division that neglects many significant exceptions.
On a critical note, I think that Mr. Phillips often repeats the same themes and facts over and over, leading to some quick page-turning at certain points. Moreover, he takes on a lot of tangential subjects that he should include in a separate book. This book could have had fewer pages without giving up its quality.
Rating: - The hidden reality in the story
While this book weaves a dramatic tapestry from 1640 t0 1900 and puts Puritan religion at the center of the development of democratic republican government, its hidden lesson is the existence, since well before the Founders, of a virulent anti Catholic sentiment throughout America.In Phillips' narrative the Catholics appear on the wrong side of every issue. Clearly standing with Charles and the Cavaliers against Parliament. Partaking of a massacre in Ireland of Protestants colonists, leading to Cromwell's terrorist response. A response which Phillips seems to , at least, understand.
In the Revolution the few Catholics in the colonies stand aside with Quakers and others while the Congregational Puritans and the Presbyterian Scots Irish win the new nation. The Civil war sees Irish and German Catholics standing against the Republicans, both in America, and for the Irish, in Ireland itself. Little effort is made to explain these stands as a response to the dramatic persecutions imposed on the Irish Catholics in their homeland and America. No mention of the Church burnings of the 1850s, save for the undeniable role the Know Nothings played in the formation of the Republican Party, is made.
In his latest work, American Theocracy" the Catholic Church plays the heavy in Phillips' America. Always seeking to impose its archaic view of reality on a progressive world. So his failure to fully appreciate the hatred of Catholics present in Cromwellian England and Know Nothing America is expected.
One area of interest in Phillips' investigations into the changing Puritan experience is that from the strict, unbending, believers in being God's Chosen people in Engalnd, God's Chosen nation, the Puritans have never lost their belief in the rightness of their cause; Parliament and the cleansing of the Faith, the resistance to sceptre and crown that became the revolution, both in 1688 and 1776, the fight against slavery. But Phillips does not present the New Puritans, not the right wing followers of Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson, but the rising tide of the Progressive Left, from the same stock as their forebears, from the same places, New England, with the same intolerance for those who do not share their view, but now with an overriding belief in Man and not God.
Rating: - Obstacles Of Phillips
Mr. Phillips presents a plethora of writing that gives intelligence to any reader.
However, Mr. Phillips presents his data in scatter-brained fashion. This guy needs to learn HOW to write, for he certainly knows WHAT to write.
Perhaps, if he read the Aristotle's Poetics, or better yet a dichpering of the work (Artistotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization), Mr. Phillips would learn the power of TELLING a STORY.
Instead, this book is a labor of reading. It requires the reader both to take reading notes and to organize thoroughly any reading notes. This is the only way one can pull together a concept of an argument with support.
Wealth and Democracy is another Phillips example of the same. Great data, poor presentation.
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