Mary Nolan's The Transatlantic Century comprises twelve chapters on the changing nature of American–European economic, political, cultural and social relations in the (very long) twentieth century (1890–2010). Belonging to the textbook series “New Approaches to European History,” this book is aimed at an audience of high-school students and undergraduates and gives a good overview of the discussions that have occupied global and international historians in the last two decades.

The book starts with a discussion of US isolationism and European imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Very interestingly, it situates transatlantic history within a broader global context and includes a thought-provoking section on different imperial cultures. This initial chapter also raises questions that shape the structure of the whole book, such as the complex meaning of Americanization and anti-Americanism or the role of Russia in the transatlantic relation.

In chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 Nolan covers quite extensively the ambivalent relations between European powers and the US during the Great War and in the interwar years. She gives a remarkable analysis of the disparate consequences of World War I in the US and in Europe but also narrates with great detail the increasing financial entanglement between both continents. The book includes a quite broad coverage of the bold political and economic experiments of the interwar period that led to the New Deal in the US and to corporatism and authoritarian regimes in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Nolan makes the “honeymoon” of transatlantic relations – starting roughly at the end of World War II and finishing in the early 1970s – coincide with the “golden age” of the so-called American Century. The foundations of this privileged relationship rested on US soft- and hard-power domination over Europe through the successes of Fordist mass production and military might, as well as the existing transatlantic consensus regarding Keynesianism and anticommunism. In this period, Nolan claims, Europe acted as a junior partner in a US-dominated international architecture. Nolan is at her best in the section on “culture wars” where, through a subtle analysis of European architecture, urban planning, interior design and fashion, she challenges the paradigm of a one-way Americanization by capturing the importance of intra-European ideas and circuits in the circulation of artistic and cultural styles.

In the 1970s, the oil crisis, the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order, the exhaustion of the Fordist model of mass production and the challenge of Keynesian policies questioned, according to Nolan, the transatlantic consensus. The author raises interesting questions on the hopes and disappointments brought by the global 1968 protests as well as new forms of political involvement such as feminism and environmental and human rights activism. The book has an original reflection on the deceived promises of “eurocommunism” and incorporates much of the new literature on the causes of the USSR's collapse.

On the most recent period, Nolan points to the “God gap” between an increasingly secular Europe and a “reborn” America, the “market gap” between US free-market fundamentalists and European social democrats, and the “war gap” between US unilateral interventionism and the European multilateral approach to international affairs to explain the divergence in European and American interests since the 1990s. It is particularly the latter, the increasing divergence in terms of foreign policy mostly due to US adventurism, that has led to most recent waves of political anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism on each side of the Atlantic.

Despite its many qualities, this thought-provoking book has several limitations. First, it is unclear whose history Nolan is trying to narrate. While the first chapters focus on the lives of politicians, businessmen and labor leaders in the pre-1945 period, the last chapters give less importance to elites and include more stories of students, workers and intellectuals.

Second, as the author acknowledges, the definition of “Europe” changes throughout the book. This, of course, reflects the changes in borders resulting from European conflicts as well as the Cold War split between East and West Europe. However, it is difficult to understand why the chapter on World War II focusses almost exclusively on the “complex political relations among US, Soviets and the British” (156) or why, throughout the book, the south of Europe and Ireland are almost completely left out of the picture – except for the traditional lip service to the Spanish Civil War and the Fascist regime and the subsequent paragraph on political terrorism in Italy, Spain and Ireland. On a related issue, while the book carefully acknowledges the differences between European countries, the US is treated as a monolithic bloc.

Third, the treatment of economic debates is quite simplistic – Nolan seems to imply that most of the debates emerging from major twentieth-century economic crises have been a mere reinstantiation of the Keynes-versus-Hayek reading of the Great Depression (111), and fundamental economists from both sides of the Atlantic who framed public debates are completely absent from the book – where are Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman, as well as Franco Modigliani, Jan Tinbergen, Richard Stone or John Harsanyi?

Fourth, some of the public figures who have shaped the transatlantic debate in recent years are surprisingly absent: Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair play an unexpectedly minor role in the book.

Finally, the book covers well the origins and evolution of NATO but overlooks the relevance of international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank and the UN for the evolution of transatlantic relations.

All in all, The Transatlantic Century provides a panoramic view of the most recent advances in the field of transatlantic studies with up-to-date bibliographic background and well-selected illustrations that should stimulate students and newcomers to the field.