“Enough to make yer proud,” said Winston Churchill, on learning of the arrest of a junior colleague for exposing his private parts in sub-zero temperatures in a London park, “to be an Englishman.”

There has lately been a freshet of books, articles and initiatives designed to make one feel the same way. A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark advances the proposition that it was the social evolution of the British Isles, towards thrift, literacy and nonviolence, that provided uniquely favourable conditions for the emergence of the first truly industrial revolution: in other words the first occasion on which the provision of more wealth and food was not simply cancelled by the resulting overproduction of new mouths to feed. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, by the Tory historian Andrew Roberts, is a conscious secondary evocation of the grand Churchillian project of the same name, and credits the English diaspora with almost every humane innovation from civil engineering to parliamentary government.

Now comes Walter Russell Mead, the Henry Kissinger Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to offer a paean to the combination of maritime strength and liberal global-mindedness that enabled the hardy Anglo-Saxons to establish a world-spanning empire and, when they lost it, to ensure that it was inherited by another vast English-speaking dispensation.

America may now be the greatest colossus in history but size, in Mead’s view, is not all-important. All you need is an outward-looking attitude, such as will draw your merchant ships out to sea and your navies to protect them, and give you an interest in maintaining a “liberal empire” of free trade. The first to see this were the Dutch, or more precisely the “United Provinces” [UP] of the Netherlands. The next were the denizens of the United Kingdom, closely followed by those of the United States. Thus, in Mead’s formulation, “the last 400 years of world history can be summed up in 10 letters. . . The story of world power goes UP to UK to US”.

This is a fair example of the author’s fast-paced and aphoristic style, combining micro-details with a macro sweep. He writes easily and well and he has read prodigiously. His general thesis will be fairly familiar to anybody who has studied either the Weberian theory of the “Protestant ethic” and its relation to capitalist entrepreneurship, or the famous 19th-century book by the American admiral, Alfred Mahan, about the critical role of sea power. On this analysis, the 1688 revolution that we still call “glorious” identified dynamism and hope with commerce and with the open seas. It defeated its clumsier land-based allies, from the Spain of Philip to the France of Bonaparte, and it learnt from its biggest mistake, which was the attempted repression of the American colonies and colonists.

Henceforward, groups of English settlers overseas would receive extreme indulgence and encouragement from the motherland, and rapidly become self-governing. Here, by the way, is a clue to that Malthusian question I touched on earlier: you don’t have to feed those whom you export. Between 1812 and 1914 alone, these islands launched more than 20m emigrants, whose descendants went on to people vast expanses of the earth. Taking Churchill’s pride one step further, one might say that we have exhibited a national genius for fornication.

Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Mead describes the unwritten laws of the Anglosphere as “the Protocols of the Elders of Greenwich”, and contrasts the spaciousness of this open conspiracy with the narrowness and constriction that had landlocked mainland Europeans tussling over barren chunks of Silesia while the Brits went surging over the main. Mead unambiguously says that the victory of the English-speaking world over Bonapartism, Prussianism, fascism and communism was more or less foreordained. In an amusing chapter on antiAmericanism (he calls it Waspophobia) he argues that all forms of antiBritish and antiAmerican propaganda, apart from demonstrating an unpleasant envy and jealousy, are implicitly sympathetic to totalitarianism. This would of course be music to the ears of some of the Bush-Blair faction, who explain all hostility in terms of fanaticism, but it is a half-truth at best. Surely nobody studying the history of Anglo-imperialism can be as lenient as that. Otherwise (to raise just one tiny question) how is it that Ireland is still not quite counted “in” when people go on about the “English-speaking peoples”?

Not since Macaulay have we been offered such a Whiggish and optimistic account: a history that places us on a point in a parabola that is still arcing steadily upward. Nice as the contrast may be to the sickly masochism and guilt of so many of today’s western liberals, I rather wonder if Mead’s closing chapters will be enough to cover our present age of anxiety. He proposes, as part of the resolution of our current crisis with the Islamic world, the revival of a sort of American civic religion, based on the insights of the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. This is slightly too convenient – Niebuhr was another believer in the Protestant ethic and a co-thinker of Adam Smith – but for some Americans he would be too religious and for other Americans not religious enough. At least, however, Niebuhr was a man who warned against imperial hubris, as did Rudyard Kipling. It is, after all, precisely at the high noon that one must make the effort to keep the Recessional in mind.

God & Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World by Walter Russell Mead

Atlantic £25 pp320

God & Gold is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship

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