Brian Maye, Irish Historian

Fifty years ago, the Anglo-American establishment reversed the policies and principles on which America was founded, introducing globalism based on unfettered free trade. In this first volume, covering the 1750s to the 1850s, Anton Chaitkin looks at the strategists who created the American industrial revolution, arguing they did so to promote human progress rather than from a simple profit motive and that they encountered stiff opposition from the British empire and its American slave-plantation partners who feared industrialisation as a threat to their power. Not unexpectedly, this story is mainly about Americans but there is a very insightful chapter on how the British under Lord Shelburne developed a self-centred economic strategy in late 18th-century Ireland they would afterwards use against America and France. Thought-provoking and very relevant to our times.

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