(7 2/5 x 4 3/4 inches). First edition. Second printing. [i]-ix 1-222 [2]. Half-Title, Title, Preface, Contents, Spanish War, New Struggle, England's Decadence, Natural Selection in Literature, Decay of England, Russia's Interest in China, Advertisement. Publisher's original panelled brown cloth, gilt-lettered on spine: [AMERICA'S | ECONOMIC | SUPREMACY] and [ADAMS]. Ink manuscript signature from 1901 on inside pastedown Scion of an American political dynasty, the historian Brooks Adams was nevertheless an unyielding critic of the American economy and political system. His insightful Jeremiads were popular in his day, but unlike Veblen, Sinclair, and other Progressive-era voices, he is now little read. First edition, second printing of a forgotten classic. "During the summer of 1893 I became convinced that the financial convulsion which involved so many widely separated communities could only be due to some profound perturbation which extended throughout the world. Further reflection led me to surmise not only that such a disturbance actually existed, but that it originated at the very heart of the modem social system, or, in other words, at London, and that it was caused by a relative decline in British vitality and energy." - Brooks Adams, from the preface Brooks Adams was an American historian and critic of capitalism who questioned the success of American democracy and understood the March of Civilization to be a westward movement of centers of trade; for instance, during Brooks's lifetime, from London to New York. Adams came from a long Puritan line of Boston Brahmins: he was the son of Lincoln's ambassador at the Court of St. James, Charles Francis Adams Sr., brother to the historian Henry Adams, grandson of both President John Quincy Adams and the then-richest man in Massachusetts, Peter Chardon Adams, and the descendent of the second US president John Adams and the American revolutionary Sam Adams. Adams wrote history from a seemingly endless conservative-aristocratic political genealogy. But the sophistication of his understanding of the workings of American Government up to 1913 is unmatched, and his work still reads as relevant. However, he doesn't seem conscious of the fact that it is the use of political power to benefit a narrow elite which is the basic problem of government. He instead focuses on the incompetence, illogic, and irrationality of those individuals who govern the country. His thoroughgoing critiques of the American system have ensured that his writing be memory-holed. Thousands have read about his illustrious pedigree, but few have had this opportunity to read the man's work.
