Amy Chua, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has written an ambitious book covering a vast array of empires and other powers. The work reaches from the Great Persian Empire to Rome and the contemporary US hyperpower. Her analysis also includes an outlook on the possible challengers to the latter, namely China, the European Union, and India.

The book is generally well-written. The question, however, is whom she wants to address: scholars and students looking for new insights or a quasi-erudite public in search of intelligent entertainment? Despite the numerous footnotes, one cannot avoid the impression that it is more of a “Reader’s Digest” type of work.

The central thesis of Chua’s book is that tolerance is a necessary condition for world dominance and that, conversely, intolerance is starkly associated with the decline of hyper-powers. For her, the United States is the quintessential example of a society that rose to global dominance through tolerance. However, this thesis is too simplistic to have much explanatory value, and her scholarship is questionable — the choice of sources is highly selective and far too narrow to do justice to the breadth of history and culture covered.

The limits of Chua’s thesis and of her scholarship are closely related. It seems that she has used almost exclusively secondary sources written by Anglo-Saxon scholars, picking out what is consistent with the basic thesis of the book and discarding the rest. She reduces the complexity of a multitude of variables to just one, namely tolerance or intolerance. There is almost a complete neglect of the role of economic factors in the rise and decline of political entities. In fact, beyond stating the obvious—namely that being open to foreigners with high skills is bound to have a positive impact on the prosperity of a country—Chua proves little else. Instead of demonstrating a new and original thesis, she selects an arbitrary number of cases that fit her overall claim. This sort of approach is neither historically illuminating nor conceptually tenable.

Historically, the only thing the shrewd observer is probably able to say in the light of empirical evidence is that tolerance may foster a country’s rise, but also its decline; it may be a sign of strength, but also a sign of weakness, of losing grip, of giving in. Much depends on the context. Intolerance may breed hostility, eventually leading to uprisings and military defeat; it may stifle trade, but it may also help consolidate a country or empire to prevent its dissolution.

Conceptually, it is hard or even impossible to prove any causality between tolerance and an empire’s rise. What one can say, for example, is that Britain was successful and also tolerant. Tolerance may breed success, may be concomitant with it, or may emanate from it. In a sense, the tolerance-intolerance thesis has a corrosive effect, as the relentless endeavor to subjugate all facts under the thesis distorts her argument.

In fact, Chua undermines her own thesis by arguing that tolerance was instrumental in both the rise and the decline of the Roman Empire. Moreover, is it not somewhat contradictory to state that Genghis Khan’s “bloodthirstiness, ethnic and religious tolerance allowed the Mongols to achieve and maintain world dominance?” One may wonder how valuable tolerance-cum-bloodthirstiness is.

Sometimes Chua shows herself how shaky her main thesis is, for example, when she argues: “If the thesis of this book is correct, America is a hyperpower today above all because it has out-tolerated the rest of the world.” She continues in this same weak vein: “If this is true, and if history is any guide, China can overtake the United States as the world’s next hyperpower only if it outdoes the United States at strategic tolerance.” She adds: “Can an authoritarian, rogue-state-friendly China possibly do so?” One may ask somewhat ironically here whether it is not true strategic tolerance to tolerate even rogue states. In short, the somewhat simplistic nature of the book’s central claim appears to exclude other key factors and ignores the complexity of tolerance itself.

The trouble with a seemingly ingenious thesis is that it tends to distort history and thus mislead the reader. Chua attempts to gloss over this basic flaw by coming up with a bold, but ultimately undemonstrated, assertion about virtually each example in her analysis. Without the turn to tolerance, she claims that “it is highly unlikely that the Moghul Empire could have lasted as long as it did, or reached its dazzling heights of cultural grandeur.” On Britain, she writes that “it is no coincidence that the period of Britain’s uncontested global supremacy” was also a time of high domestic tolerance; conversely, “Britain’s collapse also stemmed from its failure of tolerance abroad.” She asserts that after WWII, “the United States developed into one of the most ethnically and racially open societies in world history” before concluding that “not coincidentally, this was also the period in which the United States achieved world dominance.” At the same time, Chua admits that it is sometimes hard to prove a causal link. She asks whether Britain’s tolerance after 1689 assisted its rise to world dominance and answers candidly that “this of course is impossible to know.” This reveals a fundamental problem with the entire book. By reducing the rise and fall of nations and empires to the question of tolerance with cultural glue, Chua can point to some more or less significant correlations, but she fails to establish any clear and coherent causation.

This problem affects her conclusion about the fall of certain empires. When it comes to the so-called Axis Powers (Germany and Japan), Chua writes about the inability of extremely intolerant societies to attain world dominance. One could argue that their failures had nothing to do with their intolerance, but, on the contrary, this intolerance was the prerequisite of their successes, albeit ephemeral.

Moreover, it is possible to question Chua’s choice of cases. She sometimes writes extensively about rather petty details such as Romulus and Remus, Dutch eating habits, or spicy intimate aspects of the life of Cyrus the Great. She could have used the space for writing about city-states such as Venice, Genoa, or Florence, or even Soviet and French attempts to move toward world dominance.