The thesis of Kevin Phillips’s enormously ambitious, in some ways beguiling, but fatally flawed book The Cousins’ Wars[1] is that there are strong cultural connections between the English Civil War of 1640– 1649, the American War of Independence of 1776–1783, and the American Civil War of 1861–1865. In each case, the protagonists on both sides were very much the same kind of people with the same religious beliefs, political affiliations, and economic interests. And rather than representing three distinct contests, the wars should be seen as the deciding events in a long process that led from the origins of English Protestantism in the sixteenth century to the global dominance of the American political and economic system in the twentieth.

Over three centuries, Phillips argues, similar sides were taken in each of these three wars. On the long-term winning side were the constituencies of commerce, industry, the maritime sector, the centers of immigration, the principal cities, low church evangelical religion, and the proselytizing middle classes. The long-term losing side was based on landed agriculture, with its feudal remnants and servitude; its hierarchical and liturgical religion; and its greater ratios of horsemen, soldiers and cavaliers. “At each point in each nation’s history,” the author writes, “it was a necessity—perhaps it was also a destiny—for the former to push aside the latter.” Ultimately, he wants us to see the present globalization of liberal-democratic politics and market-driven economics as both the fulfillment of the English Reformation and the irresistible emergence of