Nineteenth-century globalization made America exceptional. On the back of European money and immigration, America became an empire with considerable skill at conquest but little experience administering other people's, or its own, affairs, which it preferred to leave to the energies of private enterprise. The nation's resulting state institutions and traditions left America immune to the trends of national development and ever after unable to persuade other peoples to follow its example.
In this concise, argumentative book, Eric Rauchway traces how, from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, the world allowed the United States to become unique and the consequent dangers we face to this very day. Eric Rauchway has written for the "Financial Times" and the "Los Angeles Times." He teaches at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of "Murdering McKinley": "The Making of" "Theodore Roosevelt's America." He lives in northern California. In a mere fifty years, the United States transformed itself from a second-tier country crippled by its effort to abolish the appalling institution of human slavery into a great power unlike any the world had ever seen. The question of how it did this should command our attention all by itself, but the question of why it became such a peculiar--and incompetent--empire surely ranks as one of the great questions of modern history. For truly, measured by consequences, few global disasters can match the mismanagement of the international system in the 1920s, which owed almost entirely to bad decisions made in America. All that saves the United States from complete responsibility is the answer to the first question, of how this change happened so fast: America became a great power so swiftly, and became such a peculiar empire, because the rest of the world made it that way. Globalization does not always level the world's playing field. It produces winners, losers, and, on occasion, global economic disasters. As Eric Rauchway compellingly shows, no nation more clearly reflects the effects of globalization's uneven influence than the United States. A historian's answer to the rosier predictions of economists, "Blessed Among Nations "is a narrated reminder that we need merely to review the decades between the end of the Civil War and the aftermath of World War I--the first era of globalization--to realize that one nation's enrichment need not benefit the whole world. An incisive explanation of why America has inspired more envy than imitation, "Blessed Among Nations" warns that if we do not better understand how the United States failed, early on, to master the forces that made it what it is today, we stand to make the same mistakes again, in a world with even higher stakes. "I can always depend on Eric Rauchway to display the meticulousness of a careful historian with the literary flair of a fine novelist. "Blessed Among Nations": "How the World Made America" adds to this admixture a powerful public voice as well. A tour de force."--Eric Alterman, author of "When Presidents Lie": "A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences"
"The opening chapter of "Blessed Among Nations" notes how much the United States differed from other industrial and industrializing nations between 1850 and 1920. The book;s main theme is that despite its unique character, the United States benefited extraordinary from globalization . . . As a description of various aspects of American behavior and development, the book is provocative and thoroughly researched. Rauchway writes very well and unearths interesting examples to illustrate his points. As a supplemental reader, the book will stimulate questions and elicit animated discussion."--John M. Dobson, "The Journal of American History "
"Provocative . . . "Blessed Among Nations" combines the same fluid writing style, bold interpretive approach, and ambitious agenda that made the work of mid-twentieth century historians like Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward so important and so broadly relevant."--Joshua Zeitz, "American Heritage"
""Blessed Among Nations" is a welcome contribution to a growing literature that examines the history of the United States in the context of global economic development. Rauchway pulls a mass of interesting and complex information together into a solid, convincing, and clear narrative that will lead readers to a new appreciation of the depth of the United States' historical engagement with the global economy and to an understanding of the intimate consequences of this engagement for the country's political, social, and institutional development." --Walter Russell Mead, "Foreign Affairs"
"America's rise to preeminence, the author argues, was the product of a perfect storm of foreign investment, luck, and global instability, and we forget at our peril the fickle nature of such forces. With hegemony comes responsibility, he suggests, responsibility that the U.S. may presently be all too willing to shirk."--"The Atlantic Monthly"
"Written by an accomplished, imaginative historian who well understands those beginnings of modern America--the years of the Progressive Era--this book on one level suggests why socialism never took root in the United States, and why the supposed melting pot and the early Federal Reserve System worked as they did, but on quite another level develops a highly revealing argument how Americans' faith in their 'empire' and their exceptionalism shaped in often unexpected ways what we now call globalization and their part in it."--Walter LaFeber, Tisch University Professor, Cornell University
"I can always depend on Eric Rauchway to display the meticulousness of a careful historian with the literary flair of a fine novelist. "Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America" adds to this admixture a powerful public voice as well; a tour de force."--Eric Alterman, author of "When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Con
