THE COUSINS’ WARS, by Kevin Phillips, Basic Books, 718 pages, $32.50.
You might imagine that any effort to find common ground among the causes, loyalties, and politics of three wars as seemingly diverse as the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War would of necessity be a massive undertaking. And sure enough, in The Cousin’s Wars Kevin Phillips covers a vast amount of territory while building his case for an underlying continuity of politics and, somewhat more surprisingly, religion in these conflicts. Phillips’ extensive documentation of regional, ethnic, economic, and denominational trends throughout three centuries of the transatlantic entity he calls Anglo-America forms a broad panorama of three turbulent centuries that were connected by common threads. The wars determined the course of events, says the author, that led “from a small Tudor kingdom to a global community and world hegemony,” thus fulfilling the belief of the English-speaking people that they were a “chosen race.”
Looking at each of the military conflicts in turn, beginning with the English Civil War, Phillips identifies the origins and ongoing political leanings of aristocratic Royalists and their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century incarnations, and the High-Church plantation gentry of the American South. In contrast, the Puritan Parliamentarians of the English Civil War seeded the American North with working-class religious non-conformists. Phillips admits at the outset that he was surprised at the degree to which religion defined loyalties in all three wars, but his research bears this out–most dramatically perhaps in the case of the exceptions that prove the rule. His analysis of American Loyalists and pro-American British sentiment during the Revolution, and of secessionist sympathy in the North and pro-Union movements in the deep South in 1861, support the conclusion that religion, more than geography, social class, or political orientation, played the predominant role in shaping loyalties on both sides.
These conflicts, Phillips argues, played themselves out to the mutual benefit of both segments of Anglo-America, creating by the early twentieth century a world dominated by twin English-speaking regimes–one aristocratic, the other republican–that have shaped the contemporary world through a combination of Pax Britannica and Manifest Destiny.
Bruce Heydt is the managing editor of British Heritage magazine and the author of several articles on American and British history and travel.
