With The New York Times seemingly leading a crusade to besmirch America’s past (and therefore present?), discussion of that heritage is clearly a matter of the present-day culture wars. As Jonathan Scott’s book, How the Old World Ended, demonstrates, those of an earlier era are also with us again. Much of his book would have sat comfortably with modish writings of the 1960s, for example by the Marxist Christopher Hill. Here we have a simplistic account of modernity and modernization, and, more generally, of causation. In a lumper’s dream, early modern Western republicanism is regarded as a crucial shifter bearing the weight of new concepts and methods that helped produce the Industrial Revolution. With the fundamental link being the influences of Dutch republicanism on mid-seventeenth-century England, republican ideology is seen as key on both sides of the Atlantic. The year 1649 is presented as inaugurating, in England, the “real ‘first modern revolution,’ ” with “history-changing economic consequences” and a radical transformation of manners. Words and phrases are swirled around in a heady, self-intoxicating mix of revolutionary change. The below is typical of the main text, neither introductory flourish nor concluding peroration:

Over two centuries the contexts of all of these revolutions linked old worlds and new. They coincided with, and helped to bring about, the decline of Iberian and the rise of Anglo-Dutch-French (North-West Atlantic) imperial power. They exploited and exacerbated military-fiscal overstretch, the risks attending which became increasingly grave between the sixteenth and eighteenth