In my review here of Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World I forgot to mention how amusing it is, and stuffed with anecdotes that my magpie mind adores.

For example, the origins of the Bank of America were new to me (pp141-143) – the Bank of Italy as it was known until 1930, founded by one A.P. Gianni, the self-taught son of Italian immigrants. Mead writes: “Gianni's business model was as simple as it was revolutionary.” It was – integrity. His customers trusted him and he chose customers whose character and judgment he trusted. What's more, his new bank provided financial services to ordinary people. Its innovations such as the long term self-amortizing home mortgage, municipal bonds, automobile credit served the great majority of the population – a contrast with the modern tendency for financial innovations to serve the better-off. Well-off customers can change their pension investments from their smartphones but people on low incomes living in the wrong postcode can't even get a current account.

I also laughed a lot at a chapter on the religious and doctrinal battles of the 17th century. Really. Mead's thumbnail sketch of Church of England pragmatism is funny, accurate – and aroused a sense of national pride. How marvellous that the poet John Dryden wrote a defence of the CofE in iambic pentameter! How characteristic of the national church not to worry overmuch about doctrine but to remain even now very firm about unseemliness in royal marriages.

Mead writes (p205):

“Deprived of the comforts of an absolute or closed philosophy, poor Nietzsche stared into the philosophical abyss and groaned with sick, fascinated horror: 'Nothing is true and everything is permitted.' That hasn't been the Anglo-Saxon response. English bishops saw this truth and saw not the slightest reason to leap into any abysses. .. Instead, they went on to set out the rules for finding Easter each year.”

There is much more entertainment. The book is a great read.

Whether one agrees with Mead's conclusion – in effect a Whig interpretation of history – that the open, sceptical, pragmatic Anglo-Saxon way points to progress and will ultimately triumph over other approaches is another matter. I think so but am not as sure as Mead. Having now seen both Eastern Europe in 1989-90 and the Middle East in 2011 choose traditional freedoms, perhaps my lifetime will also see the ultimate test: will China – as Ian Morris argues – become the world's dominant power? Can it do so without permitting any of the classic liberal political freedoms? Is a dynamic, open market economy compatible with authoritarian politics and repression of speech?