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The Anglosphere Challenge |  |
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About the Book
| Synopsis |
| Table of Contents |
| Chapter Samples |
| Book Index |
| Bibliography |
The
Anglosphere
Challenge
by James C. Bennett
Annotated Bibliography
As I am not presenting this book as a work of scholarly research, but rather in the nature of a connected series of essays suggesting some new perspectives and their consequences, I have chosen not to insert numerical reference citations in the main text. As I do draw extensively on a range of books, and particularly upon several works I consider to be foundational to the Anglosphere idea, I have chosen to use the collective reference approach. This section is therefore divided into a "general source works" section, presenting and commenting upon the works whose relevance applies throughout the book, followed by a chapter-by-chapter reference, relating various points and arguments to works of particular relevance to that section.
GENERAL SOURCE WORKS ON THE ANGLOSPHERE QUESTION
The following books are among the principal works of scholarship and thought on which I have drawn in proposing the idea of the Anglosphere perspective; their influence underlies the entire book. My describing them as "General Source Works on the Anglosphere Question" indicates their importance to my thinking, rather than implying that their authors endorse or agree with the arguments of this work in part or in full, credit or blame for which is entirely mine.
David Hackett Fischer’s work Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in North America presents an effective challenge to one of the central myths of American exceptionalism: the Turner’s frontier thesis. He argues convincingly that American culture exhibits great continuity from the British Isles to the New World, and that differences between American regional cultures are overwhelmingly the product of the differences between regional cultures of the British Isles. Turner’s theories of a transformation through the frontier experience is effectively disproved, particularly in light of a continual evolution of the Anglosphere cultures through ongoing frontier experiences within the British ideas and subsequently.
Fischer’s picture of Anglosphere continuity is consistent with the Anglosphere exceptionalism whose English roots are shown by Macfarlane to be deep, and whose overall characteristics are shown by Véliz to be wide and distinct when viewed through a comparative lens. Together, they add up to an Anglosphere culture that is persistent and pervasive over many generations, distinct throughout its history from other European-origin civilizations around it, and bearing for its time a particularly strong variety of civil society.
Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York, Free Press, 1995) is an excellent book for thinking about, and comparing and contrasting cultures and subcultures, and particularly about the role of high trust in successful civil societies. It builds on previous scholarly work of a more academic nature, most particularly Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, and the subsequent discussions of social trust, in a broader and more accessible manner.
Alan Macfarlane’s work, primarily The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978) is certainly one of the critical foundations underlying modern Anglosphere thought. It refutes in detail the prevailing Marxist assumption that England had been just another European peasant society before the modern era and the Industrial Revolution. Macfarlane makes a strong case for the distinctness of English-speaking civilization and its unique social mode reaching back to at least the fifteenth century, and possibly well before. This stands much Marxist and other economic determinist thinking on its head. Rather than a product of the Industrial Revolution, Anglosphere individualism may have been one of the leading causes of it.
Although English Individualism is a highly academic study (written in a dense academic style) that concentrates primarily on land tenure in medieval England, its implications, like those of Fisher’s, are profound and have gone remarkably unnoticed in many circles that should be aware of them. Macfarlane’s concluding chapter, in which he speculates on wider implications and possibilities, is an invitation to further Anglospherist scholarship that has been largely unexploited to date by thinkers other than Macfarlane himself.
Among Macfarlane’s other works, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986), is also of interest to the question of English, and by extension Anglosphere exceptionalism. Just as Macfarlane’s work on land tenure suggests that English individualistic family patterns predated (and have contributed to the origin of) the Industrial Revolution, so Marriage and Love suggests that English mores on the status of women gave sex far more value outside of the role of motherhood far earlier than Continental cultures. Similarly, the view of marriage as primarily a contract between individuals rather than as a sacrament, or as a contract between families, is usually thought of as a result of the Protestant Reformation and Calvinism in particular. Macfarlane points out English law long predating the Reformation that treats marriage as an individualistic contract and, in contrast to Roman-derived Continental law, denies either a Church or a family veto on the right to marry.
Subsequent to the writing of the text of this work, Macfarlane’s The Riddle of the Modern World became available. This is an extended discussion of what Ernest Gellner calls "the conditions of the Exit"—specifically, the exit from the cycle of the rise and fall of bureaucratic authoritarian empires caused by the linked phenomena of the Scientific-Technological and Democratic Revolutions. Written in the form of a discussion of four critical thinkers on this topic—Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville, and Gellner—it goes into much greater detail on some of the interesting questions raised in English Individualism and serves as further substantiation of the general issue of Anglosphere exceptionalism.
It is also worth noting that Macfarlane and the authors he discusses in The Riddle of the Modern World properly place the emergence of the Anglosphere’s complex social system built around individualism in the wider context of the emergence of individualism in the West in general, a process that extends at least as far back as ancient Greek civilization. A particularly useful reference on the early emergence of individualism in consciousness is found in The Marvellous Century: Archaic Man and the Awakening of Reason, by George Woodcock (New York, W. W. Norton, 2000).
Kevin Phillips has written in The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (Basic Books) an excellent, comprehensive, and accessible treatment of the three principal internal conflicts of the Anglosphere—the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Phillips mentions the prospect for closer Anglo-American collaboration at the end of the book, but he fails to elaborate.
He is also not conversant with the issues of the Information Economy and the next likely phases of the Scientific-Industrial Revolution, and is therefore unduly pessimistic about the Anglosphere’s future. He sees the fact that the Anglosphere is further into the transition than the rest of the world as a weakness (because of the decline of traditional Industrial Age manufacturing) than as a strength. This is like fearing (in, say, 1860) that the transition from sailing to steamships was going to doom British and American naval power because their advantages in timber-framing and sailmaking were fading.
Claudio Véliz, in The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America (University of California Press, 1994) approaches the Anglosphere question from a comparative viewpoint, quite successfully. It would not be excessive to say that Véliz is to today’s emerging Anglosphere what Tocqueville was to nineteenth-century America, the perceptive outsider who sees the forest where natives see only trees. His book is an extremely erudite and impressive survey of the contrasting natures of the "Gothic Foxes" of the Anglosphere and the "Baroque Hedgehogs" of the Hispanosphere. Professor Véliz, a Chilean who has lived much of his life in Australia, England, and America, knows both spheres intimately.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, Touchstone, 1996) is the canonical book on the "civilizational" analysis of the world political structure. He discusses briefly the idea of an English-speaking alliance as a civilizational-based unit, although without including the nations of the British Isles.
Chapter 1
Some new books appear: Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One and Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate began this trend; Jean-Jacques Servant-Schreiber’s The American Challenge (Simon and Schuster, 1979) was the European equivalent, with America as the foreign challenger.
Thinking about the Revolutions of the Singularity
five revolutions: Some interesting books describing possible Singularity breakthroughs include the work of K. Eric Drexler (Engines of Creation, Nanosystems, and Unbounding the Future, the later coauthored by Christine Peterson and Gayle Pergamit) and Robert A. Freitas’s Nanomedicine, Volume 1: Basic Capabilities (Landes Bioscience, 1999). Less radical but still transformative visions include such works as Elizabeth McCaughey Ross’s discussion of nongenetic medical advances in American Outlook (Spring 2000). A wild card, but again a potentially transformative one is Thomas Gold’s The Deep Hot Biosphere (New York, Springer-Verlag, 1999), which deals with the possibility of a biogenic origin of petroleum.
Bounded and Unbounded Problems: The Space Development Example
history of space exploration: I covered some of these topics in Privatizing Space Transportation (Bennett, James C., and Salin, Phillip K., Reason Foundation, Los Angeles, 1987) and more recently in the Hudson Institue’s 2020 Forecast. For the story of America’s early work on space transportation, see Project RAND, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Space Ship, Report SM-11827, Douglas Aircraft Corporation, May 2, 1946, and especially the long-classified Feed Back Summary Report (Lipp, J. E., and Salter, R. M., eds. Project) Contract No. AF 33(038)-6413, The Rand Corporation, March 1, 1954). I am particularly indebted to the former chairman of the board of directors of American Rocket Company, Stuart Kreiger, for pointing out the importance of the latter document. He should know; he had been the team leader on Project Feedback.
Y2K as the Opposite Case: Mistaking Bounded for Unbounded Problems
my column in Strategic Investment The column appeared quarterly between 1995 and 2000, in Strategic Investment newsletter, Baltimore, Agora Publishing.
Civil Society and the Hazards of the Singularity Revolutions: The Case of Nanotechnology
a long, pessimistic essay William Joy in Wired magazine, March 2000.
Civil Societies and the Economy of the Singularity
peaceful states are peaceful because of the strength of their civic statehood The "democratic argument against war"—that that democracies do not start wars against democracies—goes back at least to Kant. Once examined, this rapidly becomes an exercise in taxonomy. Is it valid, for example, to call Britain in 1914 a democracy, and Germany not? The case for, more precisely, strong civil societies not warring on each other is strengthened by Spencer R. Weart’s Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1998). This is an important piece of research into the historical case for the "democratic argument against war." His distinctions among democracies, autocracies, and oligarchies, and research into their historical implications, is an original refinement of that argument. He mentions but does not elaborate on the fact that democracies tend to form "permanent leagues" with each other, which become important actors in international relations. Network commonwealths as I have defined them could be considered one form of such "permanent leagues."
Hobbes and Rousseau in Cyberspace
a few rich Singapores and many poor, conflict-torn Kosovos See for instance the various speculations of Thomas L. Friedman, whose The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, Anchor Books, 2000) offers a recent treatment of globalization (symbolized by the Lexus) versus cohesion of local cultures (symbolized by the olive tree) by a reasonably pro-globalization author. He has some strange quirks, however, such as seeing the European Union in its current incarnation as a pro-globalization force, rather than a quixotic attempt to graft all the little "olive trees" of Europe into one big, harmonized Euro-Olive-Tree which can then stand up to the Lexus. Contrast Robert Kaplan, whose An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future (New York, Random House, 1998) sees much of what is happening in the decentralization of America and the descent of the rest of the world into anarchy.
Georgie Anne Geyer’s Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship (New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996) is another regretful look at the waning of the economic state. Like Kaplan, Geyer sees the decline of the United States as a centralized nation-state, and the loss of coherence at the federal level. Although she has an acute understanding of the role of multiculturalist ideology in contributing to this decline, she fails to see the stronger economic pressures, which also undercut the coherence of the current American national state. Kaplan is more aware of the fact that the unity and coherence of the American state is a relatively transitory episode, "from (T.) Roosevelt to (F. D.) Roosevelt," and in decentralizing, America is returning to its more normal state of being.
Similarly, Michael Lind’s The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York, Free Press, 1995) contains an excellent critique of the current multicultural school of politics; basically, however, he doesn’t have a clue about the coming economy. He is a member of the Hold Your Breath and Stamp Your Feet school of national sovereignists: he feels that we can revert to the economic and political structure of the Industrial Era by force of political will, without addressing any of the real issues of loss of the ability of states to control such transactions. He mistakes the effect (loss of ability to control economic activities) for the cause (which he attributes to a lack of desire, or failure of will).
Other influential books along this line include William Pfaff’s The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism (New York, Touchstone, 1993) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 1993).
These particularly discuss the issues of nationalism, decentralization, and devolution.
Three that have attracted attention on the question of the future of state institutions include Kenichi Ohmae’s The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York, Free Press, 1996), Jean-Marie Guehenno’s similarly titled (in the English translation) The End of the Nation State (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), and Walter Wriston’s The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World (Scribner, 1992).
Lord David Howell, an economist who served in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, has written a recent and thoughtful book on some of the same issues. The Edge of Now: New Questions for Democracy in the Network Age (Macmillan, 2000) covers many of the same points as this work, and from a similar perspective.
Of course one constant source of popular imagery that advances the picture of the rich Singapore/poor Kosovo future is the "cyberpunk" school of science fiction. The seminal work is probably Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?, which became the source for the film Blade Runner, which provided much of the standard imagery of the chaotic future. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (Neuromancer, in 1984, and Schismatrix, 1985, respectively and most notably, and together, The Difference Engine, 1990) explicitly generated the cyberpunk school, although Vernor Vinge anticipated many of its themes in True Names (1977). Neal Stephenson further refined the genre into the "cypherpunk" school, named after the nonfiction Cypherpunk Manifesto of Tim May (private circulation 1991, subsequently widely distributed on the World Wide Web). See Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond Age (1995) (to my knowledge, the first appearance of the word "Anglosphere"), and Cryptonomicon (1999).
Linux as a Foreshadowing of the Economics of the Singularity
A new "Theory of the Network" to supplement and update Ronald Coase’s A Theory of the Firm (1937). Coase’s brilliant work asked the simple question, "Why have companies? Why not just have a number of individuals contracting and cooperating with each other?" His answer, obvious once the question was asked, was transaction costs. Having to pay a support person for every letter typed, having to pay a receptionist for every call answered, would become impossibly complicated and expensive in a large cooperative enterprise. But what happens when the relationship of transaction costs to scope of effort is substantially altered by technology? For all the discredited hype of the Internet bubble, the fact remains that one of the effects of the Internet, and related technologies, is to change that relationship. We have only started to think about how that change will play out. This doesn’t disprove Coase’s fundamental insight in any way, but it does require rethinking some of the immediate conclusions of his 1937 article.
The Second Gateway wave of deregulation, decontrol, and privatization and the First and Third Gateway concepts are discussed at greater length in my article in American Outlook (Spring 2000).
Chapter 2
Historians such as William McNeill, David Landes, and Thomas Sowell have been generating what has been called a "macrohistorical" analysis. William McNeill’s The Rise of the West is probably the foundational book of this analysis. The macrohistorical view emphasizes the emergence of particular entrepreneurial characteristics in Western civilization as the key to its rise. David S. Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, W. W. Norton, 1998) is very good on the role of civil society in creating wealth, although taking a rather static view of free trade issues. Thomas Sowell’s Conquests and Cultures: An International History (New York, Basic Books, 1998) is one of the best and most accessible discussions of the macrohistorical worldview. His Race and Culture: A World View (New York, Basic Books, 1994) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (New York, Basic Books, 1996) are useful discussions of the racial and cultural issues in particular.
The debate over the relative role of culture in development is hotly contended in academia. A useful guide to this, with a tilt toward those who believe culture is a critical element, can be found in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York, Basic Books, 2000), Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. Note that it is coedited by Samuel Huntington, whose The Clash of Civilizations is itself a source of controversy.
Carlo Cipolla’s Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and European Expansion 1400–1700 (New York, Pantheon Books, 1965) is worth reading for its discussion of the interplay between technology and cultural-historical development, a critical element of this type of analysis.
England, because of its position offshore from the European continent . . . England’s insular situation is the starting point for almost any discussion of English (and ultimately Anglosphere) exceptionalism. Paul Johnson’s The Offshore Islanders (Phoenix Press, 1998) is one of the more useful discussions of this point.
Some historians have begun to deny the criticality of Britain’s insularity. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature (Macmillan, 2000) dismisses Johnson and other insularists rather cavalierly. Fernandez-Armesto discusses a category he has created which he terms "small-island civilizations" and argues that such civilizations have certain ecologically driven similarities. He then makes a rather unsupported leap to dismiss insularity as a factor in British exceptionalism (and further leaps to dismiss the validity of British exceptionalism, without any particular argumentation) because Britain does not fit his category of small-island civilization. Although he does not articulate it, he seems to be making an argument that only small islands can enjoy exceptionalism on account of their insularity.
Yet a very brief consideration of the counterfactual serves to dismiss Fernandez-Armesto’s dismissal of British insularity and English exceptionalism. If the Channel were, by geological quirk, to be shrunk to the width of a fordable river, or eliminated altogether, it is hard to construct a credible scenario in which (to construct only the most limited of lists) Phillip of Spain, any of the various ambitious Louises of France, Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin could not have succeeded in invading and subduing England by land, where in fact they aspired and failed by sea. Either England would have been just another Netherlands in European politics, or it would have responded by becoming another France: a fortified, centralized, militarized state with a strong standing army and all the political and sociological consequences thereof. Without admitting an unqualified geographical determinism, it is difficult to see how Britain’s particular geographical circumstances have not been a significant factor in its exceptionalism.
Norman F. Cantor, Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System (New York, HarperCollins, 1997), is a good historical discussion of the Anglo-American legal system.
Common law as a significant factor in Anglosphere exceptionalism is neither sentimental nor imaginary. For example, consider this: "According to Ira Millstein, a lawyer at Yale’s International Institute for Corporate Governance, market-based capitalism seems much more likely to take root in countries with a legal system based on English common law and with an independent judiciary. It seems to fare less well in countries with legal systems based on European civil law, particularly the French version of it. Common law is more flexible and quicker to adapt to change, provides stronger investor protection, and is less likely to sanction heavy-handed state intervention. But it will be difficult for civil-law countries to move in that direction, says Millstein. ‘You can’t just become a common-law system overnight.’" (The Economist, May 18, 2002, A Survey of International Finance, p. 28.)
a doctrine that survives today in the "Identity Christianity" movement. Although "British Israelites" and their contemporary offshoot, "Identity Christianity," have very long roots in English religious and political discourse, they have gravitated to a peculiar corner of the far right today. Howard Bushart, John R. Craig, and Myra Barnes, Soldiers of God: White Supremacists and Their Holy War for America (New York, Kensington Books, 1998) is a good discussion of the Identity Christianity movement and its relations with neo-Nazis in the United States.
Joel Dyer’s Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning (New York, Westview Press, 1997) is an informative discussion of militias, mid-American rage, and the Identity Church movement. I find it a bit simplistic and deterministic in assigning blame to particular administration farm policies and underplaying the genuine cultural divisions between the New York- and Washington-based cultures and the regional cultures of the Plains and Mountain West. Additionally, as further information about possible cooperation between fundamentalist radicals and American white supremacists emerges, some parts of Dyer’s thesis about the purely American and right-wing roots of these movements begin to seem less likely.
The Anglosphere and the New Understanding of the West
Ambivalence toward the Continental European concept of the nation-state. Adam Zamoyski’s Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776–1871 (London, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1999) is a very useful discussion of the emergence of the respective Anglosphere (although he doesn’t use the term) and Continental European concepts of the nation and the nation-state. Interesting is his account of the continual disillusionment of Continental nationalist radicals who admired the American Revolution and its supposed nationalism from afar but who discover the religious-sectarian and mercantile roots of the American republic on closer inspection. As Conor Cruise O’Brien observed in his similarly illuminating The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 1996), America and France have since the time of their respective revolutions chosen to enjoy a mesentente cordiale that inevitably is shattered upon closer inspection.
What’s a nation? Nationalism (John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Oxford University Press, 1994) is a useful introduction to the standard thinking on the nationalism question. John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1982) is another competent review of the nationalism question from an academic perspective.
What Is the Anglosphere?
Védrine, in his book Hubert Védrine (Dialogue avec Dominique Moïsi), Les cartes de la France à l’heure de la mondialisation (Fayard, 2000).
Cultural Nations and Regions: What’s the Difference?
the proper definition of a region is part of a debate including Darrell Dellamaide’s The New Superregions of Europe (Plume, 1994) and particularly Joel Garreau’s influential The Nine Nations of North America (Avon, 1981). An interesting and influential discussion, primarily impressionistic and anecdotal rather than scholarly, that divides North America into a number of "nations," based on a combination of economic and cultural factors. Garreau tends to oversimplify and to overrate economic factors while underrating cultural and historical factors. Published before Fischer’s magisterial work, he seems to be unaware of the powerful continuity of the westward cultural streams originating from the settlement of North America. Despite these limitations, the book is useful in examining the fact that regional differences are extremely significant in North America.
Becoming a Self-Aware Civilization: The Anglosphere Perspective
Memetic, rather than genetic, identity The idea of a "meme" as the rough informational equivalent of a gene in cultural evolution, was first advanced by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976). Substituting a cultural-evolutionary view of the Anglosphere for the social-Darwinist Anglo-Saxonism of previous visions is critical for understanding the phenomenon.
The second vision, that of Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner was promoted in a series of books and publications and was part of the founding vision of the English-Speaking Union, which survives today as a cultural organization. It was also the driving motivation behind the establishment of the Rhodes Scholarships. Insight into Rhodes’s concept, highly racial, Anglo-Saxonist, and imperialist, is disclosed in his remarkable Confession of Faith (1877). A less social-Darwinist version of the second vision is found in works of later advocates such as George Catlin in works like Anglo-Saxony. Perhaps the last serious advocate of the second vision was James Burnham, who in The Struggle for the World (1947) advocated a union between the United States and the British Empire as part of a program for containing and defeating the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most lasting influence of Burnham’s book was its impact on the thinking of George Orwell. Orwell’s vision in his Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was of the division of the world into three contending totalitarian states, one of which, Oceania, was based on the English-speaking world and its dependencies. Orwell’s geopolitical vision, represented by the political tract attributed to "Emmanuel Goldstein" in the novel, was drawn almost entirely from Burnham’s work.
Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (London, Cassell and Company, 1956–1958).
The Three Memetic Plagues of the Anglosphere
Archbishop Wulfstan quoted in Oxford History of England, Kenneth O. Morgan, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1984).
extended hot-and-cold war that lasted for the entirety of Elizabeth I’s reign Anglo-America must properly be seen as an Elizabethan enterprise rather than a Jacobean one, even though permanent formal settlement in the territory of the future United States was not finally accomplished until after Elizabeth’s death. A case could be made that Americans still exhibit more Elizabethan virtues and vices than were retained in England itself. Certainly the context of the settlement enterprise was part and parcel of the ongoing conflict with Spain and the Counter-Reformation. A useful discussion of the Elizabethan roots of both the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies is found in Giles Milton’s Big Chief Elizabeth: How England’s Adventurers Gambled and Won the New World (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2000). This is a popular account of the first century of the Anglosphere’s extension into North America, with particular regard to the political context of the founding and possible sabotage of the Roanoke colony within Elizabethan court politics.
The South Carolina planters described by William W. Freehling The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (Oxford University Press, 1990). Freehling’s work is an excellent, very thorough treatment of the run-up to the American Civil War, with particular emphasis on the demographics and economics of slavery and gradual emancipation in the prewar period. It argues powerfully that the ending of the U.S. slave trade in 1808, a result of the compromises needed to create the Constitution, was the beginning of the end of slavery in America, and that the secessionist movement was driven by South Carolina’s desperate endgame need to reopen the trade or conquer other slave-bearing territories in Latin America.
Brazil, the great slave destination of the New World See particularly Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (New York, Touchstone, 1997). A very comprehensive history of the Atlantic slave trade, particularly useful for putting the Anglosphere role in the slave trade in the wider perspective—of the 11,328,000 African slaves carried in the Atlantic slave trade, only 500,000 were landed in what is now the United States; by far the largest destination was Brazil, where 4,000,000 landed.
The Gunpowder Plot (1605) brought all these issues to the fore See particularly Lady Antonia Fraser’s Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (1997). Neither a "Popish Plot" directed from Rome, nor a useful figment of Protestant imagination, as respective partisans have charged, the Gunpowder Plot now seems to have been blowback from the shadowy intelligence underworld of the Anglo-Spanish cold war of Elizabethan times. Fraser’s work incorporates substantial new evidence in this story of alienated military-veteran drifters with eerie premonitions of later events. I am indebted to Garry Wills’s Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford University Press, 1995) for the ingenious and instructive device of imagining the circumstances of the Gunpowder Plot in the context of the political environment of 1950, with the Communists in the role of the Catholics. This device is a useful point of departure for further thinking about the continuity of Anglosphere attitudes about conspiracy.
Coming Home to the Anglosphere
The Iberian slave civilizations of the New World and their interaction with Anglosphere plantation practice, primarily in the Caribbean but also in Barbados-settled South Carolina and the Deep South Dixie states, are discussed in Thomas’s Slave Trade and also in Peter Linebaugh’s and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2001). Although I use the term Iberian because New World slavery was primarily a Portuguese phenomenon, Anglosphere slavery was most directly influenced by Spanish practice rather than Portuguese. By terming Iberian civilizations "slave civilizations," I am emphasizing the fact that slavery was a practice embedded in and integral to Roman law (as Tocqueville observed, "Roman law is slave law") and that the Spanish and Portuguese imperial civilizations were organic continuations of Roman civilization. In English Common Law, on the other hand, slavery and slave codes were grafted on by colonial statute. This did not necessarily make the life of the slave in the Anglosphere any better; in fact, it led to the doctrine of the slave as chattel, rather than as a human being with some rights, however limited. However, it made abolition of slavery as a whole the eventual focus of moral thinking, rather than melioration of the slave’s lot, as in Spanish and Portuguese thought.
Hydra is an interesting work as part of the "Atlantic system" approach. By focusing on the underclasses usually ignored in older triumphalist histories, it shows the development of a memetic Anglosphere encompassing the British Isles, the English Caribbean, English North America, and English outposts in Africa very early on in the history of settlement. This Anglosphere, of course, communicated in the medium of an English-based Creole language and reflected Anglosphere working-class culture rather than upper- or middle-class culture. However, it anticipated and paved the way for the later broad multiclass Anglosphere later formed by mass emigration.
Theorists such as Oswald Spengler Arthur Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York, Free Press, 1997) provides a useful history of declinism as an ideological strain, including relatively little-known chapters of that history such as the Spenglerian basis of the thought of W. E. B. DuBois, and therefore of much African-American contemporary thought.
The concept of Western civilization was prolonged Gress’s From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York, Free Press, 1998) provides an excellent review of the narratives about the West, favorable and otherwise.
By the year 1200 slavery was nearly extinct in England Oxford History of Britain.
Of the 11 million slaves Thomas, Slave Trade.
Thomas’s statistics on slaves landed by the Atlantic slave trade give the following breakdown by destination:
Brazil 4,000,000
Spanish empire (including Cuba) 2,500,000
British West Indies 2,000,000
French West Indies 1,600,000
British North America/U.S. 500,000
Dutch West Indies 500,000
Europe (including Canaries, Madeira, etc.) 200,000Total 11,328,000
These statistics are significant not as an exercise in proportioning moral blame (which of course they do not) but in illustrating the point that the Atlantic slave trade was in Spanish and Portuguese America an organic extension of the classical Mediterranean pattern of slavery and slave-worked latifundia, but an alien graft onto an Anglosphere that, like Northwestern Europe in general, had left slavery behind in the early Middle Ages. As Tocqueville wrote, "Roman law . . . is slave law." Slave codes and black codes governing freedmen always rested uneasily within Common Law.
Free black men who were property holders were not deprived of the vote in Virginia This story, along with an interesting set of discussions about the gradualness of development of racial chattel slavery in the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century, can be found in Scott L. Malcolmson’s One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.) This is an interesting narrative of white-black-Indian relations in America, including the interesting story of the gradual Africanization of Cherokee slavery (and the conclusion that slavery is more intrinsically compatible with a collective culture than an individualistic one) and the somewhat different experiences of slaves in Cherokee culture. The book’s usefulness, however, is somewhat limited by the author’s overgeneralization from his own experiences.
Sir Francis Drake . . . developed a plan to "roll back" the Spanish Empire This fascinating story is related in Ronald Sanders’s Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism (New York, HarperCollins, 1978). In addition, Sanders provides much interesting information about the key years between 1500 and 1700 as the English-speaking world attempted to deal with the phenomenon of racially based slavery and colonization of lands inhabited by other races.
not as an inherent part of English-speaking civilization David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Dallas, Spence Publishing Company, 1999) discusses racial guilt as an aspect of political correctness, and its fruits in contemporary America from the perspective of a reformed practitioner of the art. An ironic side note about the propagation of the Anglosphere guilt narrative can be found in Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes (Henry Holt & Co., 2002) in which he traces the source of much of the negative picture of Captain James Cook and his explorations in the Pacific. That source, as related by Horwitz, was deliberate denigration of Cook’s record by New England missionaries in early Hawaii, who wished to spread ill-will toward Britain as a result of competition with British missionaries.
An indigenous Anglosphere ideology, abolitionism See Fischer, Albion’s Seed, on the role of the Quakers in England and America, and Many-Headed Hydra for the broader context of English religious radicalism of the English Civil War era and its relation to abolition of slavery and other, now generally accepted, modern attitudes.
Quaker culture . . . was also the source . . . of most of the principles see again Fischer, Albion’s Seed, on the Quakers. When calculating when women gained the franchise in the Anglosphere, the beginning of the process was not 1879 in Wyoming, or 1920 nationwide in the United States. One must begin with the institution of parallel men’s and women’s meetings in the Quaker congregations of seventeenth-century England, which had to reach consensus internally and mutually before a decision could be recorded.
Third-rate Spenglerist narrative See again Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History
as Robert Conquest observed Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York, W. W. Norton, 2000), although primarily a reflection on the totalitarian ravages of the twentieth century (which Conquest called by name long before other, more fashionable intellectuals had to eventually admit he was right) contains a useful discussion of the history of the British Empire and its transformation into Commonwealth, in the context of which his observation on the fallacy of equating the transformation of the British Empire with the Gibbonesque concept of a fall of Rome is made. It also contains an excellent analytical chapter on the European Union and a following chapter advocating some form of Anglosphere alliance as an alternative to other forms of world organization. Conquest’s history of intellectual courage, and his status as one of the first contemporaries to call for an Anglosphere alliance, surely should earn him the distinction of a Wise Elder of the Anglosphere.
Also worth reading on the question is David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Penguin Books, 2001). This is another attempt to break new ground in the examination of Britain’s Second Empire and Commonwealth experience. Rather than seeing the imperial project primarily in economic determinist terms as a fundamentally exploitative venture, Cannadine makes a well-argued case that the Second Empire was primarily an attempt at recreating overseas the values and social positions of the landed aristocracy that were fading at home under the impact of the Industrial Revolution. This gives further impetus to the examination of the paradox of a society that, at home, gave free rein to what Drucker termed the creative destruction of the market economy, while abroad allied itself with the traditional princes against exactly the same sort of middle-class entrepreneurs from which it drew its wealth and power at home. This paradox in particular laid the roots of revolt against the empire in India, Egypt, Iraq, and the more developed parts of Africa, while maintaining Britain’s position in less-developed countries like Jordan or the Persian Gulf emirates.
Chapter 3
proposals like that of author Clarence Streit who was an influential proponent of a federal union of the democracies in books such as Union Now: The Proposal for Inter-Democracy Federal Union (New York, Harper, 1940). Ironically, Streit’s work was an evolution from the work of the turn-of-the- century Anglo-Saxonists like Milner and Catlin. This evolution took the form of expanding from a concept of a core union between the United States and the British Empire, to gradually including other Western democracies, to ultimately including non-Western, nondemocratic states, the latter vision eventually resulting in the United Nations. Another variant excluded the United States from the vision and eventually led to the European Union. This evolution was partly the result of the gradual discrediting of the exceptionalism of the original Anglo-Saxonists, under the pressure of an economic-determinist view of the Industrial Revolution and emergence of constitutional democracy. Today Anglospherist approaches critique world federalism on the basis of a new generation of scholarship that revindicates the Anglosphere exceptionalism in understanding these phenomena, and again ironically now counterposes Anglospherist concepts of cooperation to world-federalist and pan-Europeanist derivatives of originally Anglo-Saxonist schools of thought.
Proposal to create a free trade agreement between NAFTA and the European Union by Gordon Brown as reported in the Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 2001.
One World through the Internet?
Gateways through which a society must pass This approach was discussed by the author at greater length in American Outlook (Spring 2000).
Trust and Civil Society
the characteristic of trust See again Fukuyama’s Trust and Harrison and Huntington’s Culture Matters.
Hanseatic Leagues in Cyberspace
The German Hanse See particularly Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1970).
The New Understanding of the Market: Rules of Thumb for Intervention
works of Ludwig von Mises and Hayek Particularly for these points The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays—by Ludwig von Mises et al. (Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2nd edition, 1996), and The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (collected works of F. A. Hayek, Vol. 1) by Friedrich A. Hayek and W. W. Bartley, eds (University of Chicago Press, university edition, 1989).
The Anarcho-Capitalist Debate and Other Red Herrings
anarcho-capitalism A good general introduction to this school of thought would be The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism by David D. Friedman (Open Court Publishing Company, 2nd edition, 1989).
techno-liberals include Paulina Borsook, author of the amusing but not very deep Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (Public Affairs, 2001), which is fairly typical of technoliberal critiques of technolibertarians. She and others like David Brin point out that the technology libertarians see as liberatory often has roots in government projects. Well, yes, and Columbus’s voyages had roots in a mystical interpretation of the Book of Esdras. Actions often have unintended consequences.
Chapter 4
Space and Power: Geopolitics and the Topology of Information Space
cultural rather than biological evolution Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1990) is the originator of the concept of the meme as the cultural-evolutionary analogue to the gene. It is critical to understand the ways in which cultural evolution differs from its biological counterpart.
The Sinews of the Network Commonwealth
The United Kingdom has tended to get the worst of the deal See especially Derek Wood’s Project Cancelled: The Disaster of Britain’s Abandoned Aircraft Projects (Janes, 1986).
Trade, Defense, and Technology Intersect
Continental militaries have not . . . kept up this pace See for example David C. Gompert, Richard L. Kugler, and Martin C. Libicki, Mind the Gap: Promoting a Transatlantic Revolution in Military Affairs (Washington, D.C., National Defense University Press, 1999); and James A. Thompson’s "How a Militarily Strong Europe Could Help Build a True Partnership," in The RAND Review (Spring 1999). Thompson’s article is particularly interesting in that he diagnoses transatlantic capabilities gaps, notes the British exception to European lagging, but concludes that the answer is urging the Continentals to close the gap. The alternative path, recognizing the gap but realigning organizational structures to adapt to the fact, is never discussed.
Commonwealth or Tribalism
a narrowly defined tribe Again, Kaplan’s An Empire Wilderness, Geyer’s Americans No More, Pfaff’s The Wrath of Nations, and Moynihan’s Pandaemonium are useful discussions of this trend. The work of Scottish nationalist and culturally homogenous state cheerleader Tom Nairn stands in contrast, particularly his Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (New York, Verso, 1997). Written from a Scottish socialist and nationalist perspective, Nairn has interesting insights into the nature of nationalism and the future of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, his Marxist perspective and lack of understanding of the emerging economy undercut the usefulness of his judgments. As a Scottish Marxist nationalist, he actually regrets the principal advantage Scotland has enjoyed, which was the absence of a court culture after 1707, which permitted a particularly rich civil society to spring up in that country. Although much of what he says about the small nation-state would be valid when talking about what I term a civic state, he grossly underestimates the amount of coherence (which as a Marxist he believes is generated through economics) needed to make a working civic state in a weak civil society.
Network Commonwealths around the World
The pension liability issue . . . suggests that the European Union For a timely and careful analysis of the European structural crisis, see Patrick Minford’s Should Britain Join the Euro? (London, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2002).
as the Chinese diaspora forms a worldwide business community This story, and the parallel stories of other ethnic diasporas and the networks they form, is given in Joel Kotkin’s Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York, Random House, 1992). Kotkin discusses the relevance of emerging global, ethnolinguistic networks to the Information Economy. He mentions the English-speaking people, and subgroups within them, as the potential basis for new "tribes." Some interesting parallels with the Indian diaspora are discussed in Gurchuran Das’s India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age (Anchor Books, 2002). For a wider study of the diaspora question today, see also Nicholas Van Hear’s New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal, and Regrouping of Communities (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1998).
claims for the resurgence of Confucianism See William J. F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis, for an insightful picture of China at the end of its Communist phase, and a much-needed historical look at Confucianism in practice, as opposed to the imagined Confucianism of Lee Kwan Yew and other successful de facto Anglo-Confucianists.
fact of interest about Japan Readers competent in Japanese may find the author’s chapter on Japan and the Singularity in a recently published volume in that language to be an interesting further elaboration on these themes. (Not published in English.) James C. Bennett, Tokuiten kakumei ni chokumensuru Nihon (The Singularity Revolution Will Come to Japan) in Chotaikoku Nihon wa kanarazu yomigaeru (The ReEmerging Japanese Superstate in the Twenty-first Century), I. Herbert, ed., London, ed., Tokuma-shoten, Tokyo, 2002.
Chapter 5
the Anglosphere legal tradition of the common law Again, for a good general discussion of the history of Common Law see Cantor, Imagining the Law.
American freedom is unambiguously the result of this constitutional settlement. For example, see Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence by Garry Wills (Mariner Books, 2002).
Jonathan Freedland . . . published the controversial Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic (London, Fourth Estate, 1998). An interesting and controversial discussion of the British roots of America’s institutions. Freedland demonstrates that the greater openness, decentralization, constitutional constraints, and popular sovereignty of the American system have created the results that many critics of the current British system say they want. The subtitle is somewhat misleading, as the book isn’t about the monarchy very much at all. What he really is advocating is an end to an unconstrained executive, centralization, and certain other features of British life. It could better be subtitled "The Case for a British Limited Government," as his goals could just as easily be realized within a monarchical constitution. He is, however, very good on the subject of the common Anglo-American political roots, and the fact that most of the divergence has been a case of America implementing a British radical agenda.
Unusual constitutional ferment throughout the Anglosphere For example, see Vernon Bogdanor, Devolution in the United Kingdom (Oxford University Press, 1999), a good overview of the devolution process in the British Isles from a constitutional and historical perspective. Bogdanor is clear-sighted about the fact that Irish independence was the first chapter of an ongoing saga, a fact that most commentators on British devolution fail to treat adequately. Also on the United Kingdom, see Andrew Marr’s The Day Britain Died (London, Profile Books, 2000), a discussion of devolution and the strains on the historical concept of Britain.
For Canada’s issues, read Lansing Lamont’s Breakup: The Coming End of Canada and the Stakes for America (New York, W. W. Norton, 1994), a good discussion of the constitutional dilemmas faced by Canada, or The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited, by Peter Brimelow (Hoover Institute Press, 1987).
See James A. Aho’s The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1990), a reasonably objective survey of alienated opinion in the Mountain West states of America, and Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, a discussion of the history of Montana and the economic, political, and cultural roots of the current alienation from mainstream culture which has found roots there. Raban is superior in its breadth of observation to Dyer’s previously cited Harvest of Rage. Since September 11 and its consequential activities, subsequent to any of these sources, there has been a bifurcation in the alienated American Mountain West right. The more moderate majority wing has become conditionally and critically supportive of the Bush administration, while the extreme fringe has adopted an antiwar, pro-Arab stance. The dividing line is fairly congruent with the preexisting line (described fairly well by Aho) between traditional constitutionalists and the racist, anti-Semitic fringe with neo-Nazi influences. The racist fringe tends to attribute the September 11 attacks to a U.S. government–Zionist conspiracy intended to impose totalitarian rule on the United States, while constitutionalists focus more on perceived failures of the federal government to prosecute the war against radical fundamentalists sufficiently vigorously. Also of interest are suggestions of a connection between the Oklahoma City bombing and radical fundamentalist groups.
The Anglosphere Constitutional Tradition and War
Linda Colley’s work Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992). This is the story of founding the Grand Union of the United Kingdom. Very perceptive in understanding the tensions between the nationalisms of England and Scotland versus the emerging loyalties to the new Union. Some, like Tom Nairn, see in Colley a refutation of the concept of British nationhood, because she details the mechanisms through which the British Grand Union narrative propagated itself. However, it is not clear that the mechanisms by which Britain, as such, became something like a nation-state were much different, except in detail, than the mechanisms by which England or Scotland had become nations in the first place; the details are merely more accessible to us for being closer in time and better documented. Of interest to the military question for its portrayal of nonelectoral mechanisms for assessing consent of the population to government measures.
Much of the political effort of the Restoration Stephen Saunders Webb provides a valuable perspective (one quite different from the traditional Whig narrative) in Lord Churchill’s Coup: The Anglo-American Empire and the Glorious Revolution Reconsidered (New York, Random House, 1995) and its two companions, The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire 1569–1681 and 1676: The End of American Independence. These together constitute a discussion of the development of the First British Empire between the Restoration and the Revolution of 1688. The uniqueness of the Whig settlement (and the degree to which the Whig settlement continued to retain useful elements of the Restoration imperial system) and the degree to which that settlement reflected an inoculation against the absolutist Continental systems requires an understanding of the restoration system. See esp. p. 270 of Lord Churchill’s Coup re: continuity of Glorious Revolution and American Revolution and Constitution.
George III was compelled to hire Hessians The point about George III’s need to hire mercenaries from the German principalities because of lack of English enthusiasm for the war was made in Phillips’s Cousins’ Wars.
The bias against standing armies was so great See Charles Messenger, History of the British Army (Greenwich, Connecticut, Bramley Books, 1993). A useful history of the evolution of British military structures.
The Founding Fathers were keenly aware See 1794: America, Its Army, and the Birth of a Nation by David R. Palmer (Novato, California, Presidio Press, 1994). This is an interesting and useful survey of the military events of 1794 and their critical role in the final defeat of the British and Indians on U.S. territory, the formation of the U.S. Army, and the militia versus standing army controversy.
this tradition [the American militia system] could effectively be revived See Gary Hart’s The Minuteman: Restoring an Army of the People (New York, Free Press, 1998). A good treatment of the Anglo-American military system, and a discussion of the prospects for restoring militias as a major element in the U.S.’s defense posture.
Five Civil Wars: Union and Secession in the Anglosphere
Other families, such as the French speakers For an interesting discussion of "spatial" vs. "regime" composition, using the contrasts of Ireland and Algeria, see Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993). This framework ultimately draws on Gramsci’s categories, but appears to be a useful approach that is not dependent on other more problematic aspects of that Marxist theorist’s work.
A unitary state for all Britain In this era of romanticization of the nationalisms of the non-English parts of the British Isles, it is useful to recall that the history of the isles from early medieval times has fluctuated between the extreme poles of a unitary state of the archipelago on the one hand and independence for its constituent parts on the other. Nor have the existing definitions of the components always been the current ones. R. R. Davies, in The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford University Press, 2000) provides a good recapitulation of ideologies of a united Britain long preceding Cromwell’s achievement of it. Also of interest, to show that the line between the "natural" formation of England and Scotland, and the "synthetic" formation of Great Britain, is not as clear as nationalist narratives like to present, is his discussion of a five-nation model of British Isles nationality as an alternative that nearly happened, with Galloway and the Western Isles as a fifth potential nation separate in identity from Scotland. The book also gives a fascinating look at what might be called the first Anglosphere—the extension of English-speaking populations and social institutions beyond the boundaries of England into Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and their eventual melding with the local populations to form what now are the recognized nations of the British Isles. Also of interest is John L. Roberts, Lost Kingdoms: Celtic Scotland and the Middle Ages (Edinburgh University Press, 1997). As he depicts events, Scotland was a Celtic nation, a mixture of the Brythonic Picts and the Goidelic Celts, with heavy Viking influence. It was never conquered by England. How did it become an English-speaking nation? This book is a good discussion of the question.
Simultaneously a war of secession, a civil war, . . . and a social revolution
In addition to Phillips’s extensive discussion of this aspect in Cousins’ Wars, it is interesting to read Mark Perry’s Conceived in Liberty: Joshua Chamberlain, William Oates, and the American Civil War (New York, Penguin, 1997). Perry provides a useful discussion of the events before and after the American Civil War from the perspective of two important figures, North and South. It is most interesting to watch the changing perceptions during the prewar period, as well as the conceptual adjustments made subsequently.
For the war-within-the-war aspect and the complex nature of the New Ulster subsecession, see William W. Freehling’s invaluable The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (2001). Consistent with the cultural-nationalist analysis of the Anglosphere, Freehling demonstrates how the Confederacy was almost as diverse as the presecession Union, and that the various cultural nations were very much at odds with each other. This internal conflict was one of the major contributors to Confederate defeat.
Of course, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (Vintage Books) remains an excellent fictional treatment of the cultural antagonisms between the coastal Dixie culture and the New Ulster mountaineers, and its expression in the struggle between the New Ulster deserters and draft-dodgers and the pro-Confederate internal patrols that constituted, in some respects, a Confederate occupation force in the highlands. Neo-Confederates like to refer to the events of 1861–1865 as the "War of Northern Aggression"; from the viewpoint of core New Ulster, it might have been considered the "War of Southern Aggression against the Mountaineers."
Preserving the National Voice in a Decentralized World
Author Jonathan Freedland has contrasted Bring Home the Revolution
American Cultural Nations and Their Histories
the cultural nations of America Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, of course, is the primary source of the cultural-national analysis of American regionalism as derived from regionalism of the British Isles; Phillips’s Cousins’ Wars provides a particularly useful view of American history from this perspective.
A frequently quoted popular work dividing North America on an (almost) strictly geographical basis is The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau (Avon, 1981). A useful text from a traditional academic viewpoint is F. M. Shelley, J. C. Archer, F. M. Davidson, S. D. Brunn, Political Geography of the United States (New York, Guilford Press, 1996).
Jay Winik’s April 1865: The Month That Saved America (Perennial, 2001) contains a good discussion of the coherence issues in the early republic, and the substantial cultural, economic, and political differences among the states. He also has a useful discussion of the many secessionist episodes and threats between 1776 and 1865, which were more numerous than generally realized.
Also of interest is Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York, Knopf, 2001). Mead follows Fischer’s quadripartite analysis of America in general, but assigns terminology for the outlook based on archetypal representative American political figures rather than the cultural-national terminology used in this work. What is here termed the Midland American pragmatic and commercial outlook he terms the Hamiltonian view; the New Ulster (and to a great extent also the Dixie) view, the Jacksonian; the greater New England moralistic view, the Wilsonian; and the relatively isolationist view that sees democracy as an American system not easily replicated abroad, the Jeffersonian. (The Jeffersonian view is the only one without an easily assigned cultural-national analogue; it has some parallels to tidewater Dixie thought, and some to Midwestern isolationism, which is perhaps the flip side of Midland pragmatism.)
A rare alignment of the interests This paragraph is a brief synopsis of the thesis of Phillips’s Cousins’ Wars.
Progressivism can be understood as an alliance In particular, the rise of the Social Gospel tendency of Protestant Christianity forged an alliance between Greater New England and Midland denominations of Protestant Christianity, fusing the moral purpose of New Englanders with the pragmatism of Midland Americans. See in particular, Robert William Fogel’s The Fourth Great Awakening & The Future of Egalitarianism (University of Chicago Press, 2000). This book advances the theory that Social Gospel progressive Christianity was the true underpinning of the Progressive movement of early twentieth-century America, and was in itself a "Great Awakening" of religious enthusiasm equivalent to the first two waves, and the current Fourth Wave of evangelical Christianity.
A colony in Brazil Dixie’s colony in Brazil is discussed in Eugene C. Harter’s The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (University Press of Mississippi, 1988). A contemporary visit to their descendants, illuminating the gradual racial intermarriage of the colony, is included in a rather rambling and anecdotal first-person travel narrative in Lost White Tribes by Riccardo Orizio (Avril Bardoni, translator) (New York, Free Press, 2001).
the "Yankee-Cowboy War" in his book of that title Carl Oglesby, Yankee and Cowboy War (Berkley, 1977). Written from a leftist perspective, but one that looked back with something like nostalgia to the program of the Roosevelt coalition.
The increasing general racial tolerance in America See Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (Touchstone Books, 1996), which argues that racism should be viewed not as the casual dislike of others, or primitive xenophobia, but rather as a specific early scientific doctrine attempting to explain human variations; and that this doctrine, and the political ideologies that it engendered, have largely disappeared from the cultural mainstream of America (and from that of the Anglosphere in general). Although this change has not brought perfect intergroup harmony, it does make possible a primarily cultural, rather than genetic, understanding of interpersonal and intergroup interactions.
The Relationship between Cultural Nations and Nation-States
The Trudeau project destroyed See especially Brimelow’s Patriot Game.
Cultural Nations in Actuality: North America
are described in Mormon culture by Wallace Stegner Compare Stegner’s description of a Mormon town circa World War II in Mormon Country (University of Nebraska Press, 1982) to Fischer’s description of New England characteristics of ordered liberty in Albion’s Seed. Stegner is an acute observer of North American regional differences; his childhood experiences in an American family on a farm in Alberta presented in Wolf Willow, for example, are interesting to read as an essay on similarities and differences between Anglo-Canadians and Greater New Englanders.
the strongest bonds of the Dixie cultural nation See Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Random House, 1999) for a contemporary account of the persistence of the Confederate narrative in white Dixie and the antipathy to it among African Americans.
map out the areas Albion’s Seed and Freehling’s South vs. the South both are useful in localizing these criteria.
Seymour Martin Lipset . . . has devoted a lifetime of investigation See particularly his Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (Routledge, 1990).
Chapter 6
1776: Divergence and the End of the First Empire
Franklin experimented with constitutional formulas See H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Anchor Books, New York, 2002).
Convergence in Politics: The Dilemma of the Second Empire
Reading works like Nevil Shute’s In the Wet (House of Stratus Inc., 2000; original publication, 1953). Shute’s novel is set a generation into his future, and depicts a strong, monarchist Commonwealth that is far more unified than actually occurred, and still an independent world power on a par with the United States, but with the center of power shifting from a declining, depopulating, social democratic Britain to a vigorous Australia and Canada. He discusses issues that would be relevant in such a Commonwealth, such as the tension between role of the monarchy as a Commonwealth unifier, and its functions specific to its role in the United Kingdom, that have not become acute due to the relative unimportance of the actual organization. However, such tensions still continue to arise: e.g., as when the role of Prince Charles as a spokesman for the British beef industry, which opposed him to the interests of Australia, became an issue in the 1999 Australian republic referendum campaign. Shute’s solution, the creation of an Office of Governor-General for Britain, equalizing its status relative to the rest of the Commonwealth nations, effectively would make the institution a Commonwealth monarchy rather than a British monarchy that is also head of state of some other Commonwealth nations. It is a solution that may return to view should the monarchy’s role in nations beyond Britain continue.
Removing the Roadblocks to the Network Commonwealth
The Falklands War caused a severe internal dispute Sir John Nott’s Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Recollections of an Errant Politician (Politicos Pub, 2002) contains a frank discussion of the Anglospherist-Hemispherist controversy in the Reagan administration during the Falklands War, caused primarily by the fact that the Galtieri regime in Argentina was one of the key players in the Iran-Contra network being run by Alexander Haig.
What’s at Stake: Uses of the Network Commonwealth
The continuing divergence of Britain from the Continent See for example the discussion in Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World by Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 2002) or again Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century.
The idea of a unified Europe built around the "European Social Model." John Laughland’s The Tainted Source (Trafalgar Square, 2000) critiques the Europeanist narrative from a political and historical viewpoint; Patrick Minford’s Should Britain Join the Euro: The Chancellor’s Five Tests Examined? (London, Institute
