The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, & the Triumph of Anglo-America (review)

The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, & the Triumph of Anglo-America. By Kevin Phillips (New York, Basic Books, 1999) 707 pp. $32.50

This large, sprawling volume offers an extended comparison of three events--the English Civil War (and its extension, the Glorious Revolution of 1688), the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. The author's principal interests are four. The first is to identify and trace the religious, political, ideological, and geocultural or sociocultural continuities from one of these events to the next. Thus, he charts the flow of ideas and allegiances from commonwealth England to Puritan New England, to the eighteenth-century British Whig and dissenting communities, to the republican American revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century, and to the political debates about slavery that preceded the American Civil War. These continuities are intriguing, if sometimes highly speculative, but the author does not persuade the critical reader that they should carry much weight in explanations of the three events upon which he focuses.

The second of the author's major interests concerns the transatlantic dimensions of these events. He takes special pains to elaborate the effects of the English Civil War upon the American colonies and the responses of various British constituencies to the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Although the author offers little that is new in theses areas, his summary treatments are well done. His third interest is to identify structural parallels among the three events. The parallels are so general, however, that they could apply to almost any large-scale conflict. His fourth interest is to emphasize the regional nature of each of the three conflicts. It is an obvious point, but the author makes it with particular effectiveness and with only occasional oversimplification.

Phillips, a respected political commentator and author of eight previous books on contemporary politics, has done considerable homework. He has read a fair amount of the massive and complex historiography about the three events that he seeks to analyze, but he seems to be largely indiscriminate in his use of that literature. Concerning the American Revolution, for instance, he grants considerable authority to a number of works that have not found favor with specialists. Many experts will bridle at the author's unabashed novo-anglocentrism, which, especially in his early chapters, is egregious. Others will find his stress, explicit in the subtitle, upon the centrality of religious divisions to the shaping of political behavior in the American Revolution and Civil War unconvincing; albeit he often qualifies this point in his analysis. Still others will find his implicit assumption that the strong nation state is the apex of political development questionable and unduly pessimistic, especially in the wake of twentieth-century events. His argument that the "triumph of Anglo-America" was principally a product of the crucibles of war seems enormously overstated. For this reader, at least, demographic, cultural (especially legal and political), and economic imperialism, in combination, would seem to offer a more promising explanation for the ascendancy of Britain between 1815 and 1914 and of the United States after 1945. Finally, very many will think that a shorter and less discursive book would have been more effective.

Jack P. Greene
Johns Hopkins University

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