Atlantic Empires.

Mr. Lind is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo-America, by Kevin Phillips (Basic, 707 pp., $30)

AS the beginning of the third millennium approaches, the hegemony of Anglo- American culture for the moment faces no challenge. As a result of the global conflicts of the twentieth century, the United States has replaced the British Empire as the leading global military, industrial, and financial power, and English is the lingua franca of elites across the planet. The Cousins' Wars is, in the words of its author, "a book about how three great internal wars seeded each other and, in so doing, guided not only politics but the rise of Anglo-America from a small Tudor kingdom to a global community and world hegemony."

The subject may seem a surprising choice for Kevin Phillips. A political analyst and commentator, he has shown a remarkable ability to discern emergent trends in American politics in the electoral tea leaves. Here he unites his recent interest in worldwide political patterns with his long- standing interest in the details of our own country's domestic affairs to produce his magnum opus.

Seven hundred pages long, overflowing with statistics, crowded with charts and maps, yet written in conversational prose, this is the kind of sweeping, provocative history for the general reader that American academics once wrote.

The Cousins' Wars is, in effect, two books. One is a thick book examining the links between three Anglo-American revolutions-the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. The other is a slim essay seeking to explain why the two-headed entity of Anglo-America achieved global dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As to the first subject, the notion that the American Civil War was another round in the conflict between Puritan "Roundheads" and southern "Cavaliers" is a cliche, but one with a kernel of truth, according to Phillips. The English Civil War pitted "Cavaliers with Celtic allies versus Puritan England"; the U.S. Civil War pitted "Cavaliers with Southern Celtic stock allies and Northern Irish sympathizers against Yankee Greater New England." A similar pattern manifested itself in seventeenth-century North America during the English Civil War, as Puritan New England supported Cromwell and Cavalier Virginia became a refuge for royalists.

Phillips has more difficulty fitting the American Revolution into this schema. After all, in 1776 the New England "Roundheads" and most of the southern "Cavaliers," who had been opponents during the English Revolution and who would be adversaries again during the U.S. Civil War, teamed up against a common enemy-the Crown. Phillips admits that "[t]o call the English Civil War as important as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in laying groundwork for the American Revolution invites controversy." Nevertheless he valiantly shoehorns the southern planters together with the New England Puritans. This requires Phillips to redefine the southerners as "Low Church Anglican country party-turned-Tidewater gentry"-a play on words that permits him to equate southerners with the country squires who supported Cromwell.

One need not agree with all of Phillips's interpretations, however, to profit from his fresh look at both British and American history. Of course, readers will quibble about matters of emphasis or fact. With respect to factual accuracy, a reviewer can only spot-check subjects that he knows well. Phillips's remarkable command of the political geography of my native Texas, from the nineteenth century onward, gives me confidence in his discussion of other regions.

And what Kevin Phillips does not know about American and British elections and civil-war alignments is probably not worth knowing. Several hundred pages into The Cousins' Wars, the reader may suspect that this is true of much of what Phillips knows, as well. The careful, state-by-state, county- by-county analysis that Phillips has perfected in analyzing recent American politics tends to dissolve the great trends he is describing into minutiae. At times The Cousins' War makes one imagine a mural in the Capitol dome done in the painstaking pointilliste style of Georges Seurat.

The pace picks up when Phillips turns to his second theme, that "England's expansion into North America, following the political unification of the British Isles, was the decisive fact of the modern world." Phillips connects the stories of the Anglo-American civil wars with the rise to global predominance of Anglo-American civilization by speculating on the consequences of the "cousins' wars" for both Britain and the United States. According to Phillips, "The First [British] Empire, [which was] Whig-built, English in ethnic origin, Low Church Protestant in religion," gave way to "the Second British Empire, which looked east to India."

Writes Phillips, "The First Empire had really been English." But not so the Second Empire. "Irish and Highlanders might garrison it, Scots might manage its banks or design its bridges, but the imperial subject population was largely non-British-and colorfully non-English." As the center of gravity of the empire shifted from North America to Asia, the center of gravity in British ideology shifted to the aristocratic Right-and "England" was redefined as "Britain."

Phillips finds parallels in the newly independent United States. Political power shifted from post-Puritan New England to the Tidewater southern planter elite and its Scots-Irish allies, who pursued a policy of expansion into Indian territory and Latin America comparable to the Second British Empire's growth in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

If Phillips is to be believed, the U.S. Civil War in both the U.S. and Britain reversed these shifts in dominance. The success of the Union armies empowered the Republican post-Puritan Greater New England, while inspiring the British working and middle classes and Low Church Protestant reformers- and demoralizing aristocrats who sympathized with the defeated southern ruling class. "Instead of Americans circa 1775 seeking the rights and liberties of Englishmen, the interaction had come full circle: Englishmen were looking to the cousins' wars to secure them the rights and liberties of Americans."

Without "demographic and linguistic imperialism," Phillips writes, "Anglo- America would have been much smaller and weaker. Gaelic might still be a major language in the British Isles and Greater Germany might have become the twentieth-century colossus of the West." Along with the North American Indians, the great losers in the story of the rise of Anglo-America, Phillips argues, were Ireland and Germany. In 1541, Ireland had almost half the population of England and Wales; by 1900, England had seven times the Irish population. Without planning to, the United States reinforced English predominance in the British Isles by absorbing enormous numbers of Irish immigrants.

The U.S. performed a similar service in behalf of Britain's position in the world by digesting much of the planet's German population. "One can only surmise how different the industrial and military outcomes of the twentieth century could have been had the 25 to 30 million German-Americans of 1917 or 1941 still remained in Europe or had they controlled a German-flavored Upper Mississippi Valley Confederation created in an 1860s break-up of the previous United States." Despite a significant degree of German-American (and Irish-American) resentment of the Anglo-American wars against Germany, the bids for hegemony of the Kaiser and Hitler were defeated thanks largely to American forces commanded by officers with names like Pershing (Pfoerschin), Nimitz, and Eisenhower.

Phillips's analysis leads one to wonder whether the twenty-first century will see the reversal of the centuries-long ascendancy of the Puritan tradition in both the U.K. and the U.S. If the spinning off of Britain's constituent parts results in the replacement of the United Kingdom by a multinational federation, an English nation-state might find itself hemmed in to the west and north by new Celtic nation-states-and subordinated to Germany, the dominant nation in the European Union. In the United States, demographic trends will continue to strengthen the Cavalier/Celtic South at the expense of post-Puritan Greater New England. (Between 1990 and 1996, the South led with 46 per cent of the country's total population growth.) The English Puritans and their American cousins may have done more than any other groups to shape the modern world, but their historic rivals the Celts, Germans, and southerners may inherit it.

In The Cousins' Wars, Kevin Phillips applies his trademark brand of scholarship to a subject grander than any he has treated before, with results that are always thought-provoking and frequently convincing. It is easy to be interesting; it is much more difficult to be faithful to the facts. It is a measure of Phillips's achievement that he so often manages to be both.