For four hundred years the Anglo-Saxon powers - the UK and the US and their allies - have dominated the world, both militarily and economically. They have won the wars time and again - and yet the battle for hearts and minds has proved far harder to win. This brilliantly stimulating and provocative book explores why this has been the case: why - from the time of Louis XIV to today's Iraq - British and American armies and businesses have been so successful, yet so much of the world has remained so resistant to their values and ideas.

Mead argues that modern history has been shaped by a series of wars in which Britain and America have faced down one enemy after another, enemies that have rejected and feared their values, their capitalism, liberalism, arrogance, religion and power. He explores the struggles for values that have lain behind these conflicts and asks why, despite all their victories, Anglo-Americans have never succeeded in establishing the peaceful world, safe for democracy and capitalism, that they have hoped for.

His book is both an examination of what this overwhelming concentration of power in the hands of 'les Anglo-Saxons' has meant for the direction of world history, and a deeply thought-provoking exploration of where we might be heading from here.