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The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. By Kevin Phillips. New York: Basic Books, 1999. xxviii + 707 pp. $32.50 cloth.
Despite his subtitle, Kevin Phillips really means to tell readers that longstanding developments in demographics, and not just politics and religion, determined the triumph of an Anglophone, Protestant imperium in the Atlantic World. The roots of that triumph lay in the confessional struggles of the sixteenth century, clashes that played out their implications for what became Great Britain in the English revolutions of the seventeenth, and then shaped North America in the conflagrations of the Seven Years' War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. All of these conflicts exhibited the vicious, internecine, and distinctly uncivil behavior reserved for family quarrels where deep religious passions and memories continue to be stirred. If alternatives to this grand drama can be imagined, Phillips seems to think that a rather odd alliance of Gaelic- and German-speakers might have turned the triumph aside. But he does not believe this, of course, because he rightly argues that the recurrent conflicts always had dimensions that transformed parties on...