This is a genuinely ambitious and absorbing book, which deserves to be widely discussed. The shock referred to in the title of the book is cultural. David Ellwood (a British historian based in Bologna) understands culture as embracing “mass” and high culture, technology, political and economic innovation, in all, in America's “energizing faith in the future,” which he argues has consistently redefined progress in the West from 1898. Europeans have been on the receiving end of these cultural shocks, sometimes reluctantly so. Ellwood does not give the Europeans much agency and depicts them as largely reactive and perhaps even overwhelmed by the muscularity of the US. In 1944, he notes, even General de Gaulle was dazzled by America's dynamic prosperity and found it bursting with promise when he visited the country (250). (This is the exactly the same reaction that Deng had, when he first visited the US from China some twenty-five years later.)

The book is structured around three key moments. They are, not surprisingly, the Great War, the Second World War, and, finally, the end of the Cold War. At each of these moments the US was the agenda setter and uncontested driver of economic and cultural innovation in and beyond its own borders. Each time, this was in the face of European collapse, impotence, indecisiveness, or political inadequacy. Americans “invented” first the New Deal (for themselves), then the Marshall Plan (for Western Europe), and finally the technological revolutions of the 1990s and beyond (for a global market).

The core of the book deals with the Cold War years, and the Marshall Plan is given a place in twentieth-century international history that it has not had since the debates of the 1980s and 1990s between Alan Milward, Michael Hogan, Geir Lundestad, David Ellwood himself and many others. However, before he examines both the making and the selling of the Marshall Plan, he explores the ways in which the Second World War was the seedbed of ideas about change well before the Cold War seemed inevitable. In a formidably wide-ranging chapter (chapter 6, “A Very Philosophical War”) Ellwood discusses the work of well-known and less well-known writers on both sides of the Atlantic to show that the “vision thing” in the US derived largely from sources within the US itself, as Michael Hogan has also earlier explained. At the same time the Europeans (the British and French, largely) were also developing their own “welfare-based” ideas as a defence against the waves of change and innovation from America, as well as to try to prevent future wars.

The last section of the book must have been the hardest to write: the 1990s and the first decade of this century are awash in a tsunami of journalism and commentary. It is not yet clear what the lasting significance of many of the events of these years was – or, indeed, which actually were the important moments at the time. However, Ellwood's overview is very lucid here, and he writes with the sharp eye of the historian, sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Chapter 10 should, at the very least, be required reading for every diplomat and politician who needs or wishes to see how the immediate past developed to bring us to the world of today.

If this all sounds a little breathless, this does indeed reflect the style of this magnum opus. But the book is always underpinned by very careful and detailed evidence, and is supported by a wealth of literature that has frequently been unearthed from unusual places and in many languages, and revives the significance of half-forgotten contemporary observers from Europe and the US. This book is not a diplomatic or an international history, but a history in which ideas, influences, peoples (“mass man”) and governments are given equal attention.

As the book has such a wide range, it is perhaps churlish to ask for more. However, this reader found that the largely sympathetic reading of the US's role avoided two other sets of “shocks,” to which Ellwood might perhaps have turned his expert eye. The potentially malign role of innovation emerging from within the US military–industrial complex, and nuclear weaponry, and even the ongoing physical presence of US bases in Western Europe after the Second World War, made an imprint too, shaping the “cultural dimensions of American power” (1). Social, gender and civil rights issues, as well as religion, have also shaped the “power dimensions of American culture” (1) in Europe, but both these areas largely remain beneath the radar of Ellwood's analysis. While including them might have made for a project of almost impossible breadth, such cultural interactions have increasingly shaped our European understanding of the impact of the US. These observations in no way detract from the singular success of a major project which addresses the enigma of expansive American energy and economic innovation in the last century over Europe, and which, as Ellwood tentatively suggests, may even continue to do so globally.