An Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon (2004, Hardcover)

Throughout time, from ancient Rome to modern Britain, the great empires built and maintained their dominion through force of arms and political power over alien peoples. In this illuminating work of history, John Steele Gordon tells the extraordinary story of how the United States, a global power without precedent, became the first country to dominate the world through the creation of wealth.

The American economy is by far the world's largest, but it is also the most dynamic and innovative. The nation used its English political inheritance, as well as its diverse, ambitious population and seemingly bottomless imagination, to create an unrivaled economy capable of developing more wealth for more and more people as it grows.

But America has also been extremely lucky. Far from a guaranteed success, our resilient economy continually suffered through adversity and catastrophes. It survived a profound recession after the Revolution, an unwise decision by Andrew Jackson that left the country without a central bank for nearly eighty years, and the disastrous Great Depression of the 1930s, which threatened to destroy the Republic itself. Having weathered those trials, the economy became vital enough to Americanize the world in recent decades. Virtually every major development in technology in the twentieth century originated in the United States, and as the products of those technologies traveled around the globe, the result was a subtle, peaceful, and pervasive spread of American culture and perspective.

An Empire of Wealth is a stirring epic that mirrors the remarkable trajectory of America's history. Featuring a cast of entrepreneurial icons that includes John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Bill Gates, this is a story full of euphoria and disaster, daring and timidity, great men and utter fools. From the Revolution to the Great Depression to the Internet era and the turn of the millennium, John Steele Gordon captures as never before the true source of our nation's global influence.