Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America

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 so clearly reflects the effects of globalization’s uneven influence than the United States. A historian’s answer to the rosier predictions of journalists, Blessed Among Nations is a sharply 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, we stand to make the same mistakes again, in a world with even higher stakes.