Every now and again I sit down to write a review for a book and realize I am really under-equipped to review it well. I might have read it, enjoyed it, and benefitted from it, but lack the knowledge or expertise to confidently analyze it. This is exactly the case with Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.
The book’s big idea is that the year “1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are.” In this case, the “us” refers to those who live in what we might call the modern, industrialized West. Of course when we hear “1776” we probably think first of the American Revolution. And when we learn that the author is an Englishman we might think we know what he is going to say. But we would be misled, for his point is not to argue that everything went wrong when America threw off its loyalty to the crown. What he argues is that if we want to understand who we are, we need to understand that year, for “it was a year that witnessed seven transformations taking
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