Not astonishingly, the parts on what she probably knows best, namely the Mongol Empire and China, are the most interesting, while those on Europe in general and the European Union in particular are among the weakest. The most astonishing sentence—or blunder—is when Chua writes, “Balzac, who wrote to Descartes in 1631,” implying that Balzac wrote a letter 168 years before he was born.

Leaving this aside, there is a more serious conceptual problem with the book’s argument: tolerance in relation to democracy. Chua exhibits a certain candor when it comes to a specific manifestation of tolerance, namely democracy. One example is of course US democracy, which, according to her, is “providing Americans of any background, creed, or skin color... an equal opportunity to participate and rise in politics” so that “as such, democracy is part of the formula that has made America the hyperpower it is.” Given recent US behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan and the various practices as part of the “global war on terror,” this statement seems to be at best naďve and at worst blind to reality.

Chua’s forecasts and prescriptions are sometimes as simplistic as her interpretation of the past. She writes that only if China “outdoes” the United States on strategic tolerance can it overtake the US. But why not at least discuss the hypothesis that tolerance could bring about the decline and even the demise of China? Certainly Chua’s book would have gained in quality if she had used a more dubitative mode.

Chua relies heavily on authors like Niall Ferguson and Immanuel Wallerstein, but she does not even refer to Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Jacob Burckhardt, or Friedrich Nietzsche. Nor does she refer to more recent scholars such as Raymond Aron, Fernand Braudel, or Charles Kindleberger, or to living scholars such as William McNeill, Eric Hobsbawm, Joseph Nye, Charles Maier, or Tony Judt. Besides a few notable exceptions, she omits continental European thinkers. This over-reliance on a few contemporary works betrays a selective interpretation of world history that tends to be not just Western but specifically Anglo-Saxon. The theme of tolerance is of course part of the US’s foundational principles, but a more critical and careful reading of history would reveal how often political elites and mainstream culture have fallen short of these ideals. Given these limits, it is questionable whether a narrow and dubious thesis about tolerance with cultural “glue” should be extended to the rest of the globe or history at large.

It seems that when writing this book, Chua was probably overambitious and overconfident. She has a thesis, but she has not done much to corroborate it. The object of her study stretches over so many millennia and covers so many empires that a complete investigation would have required the patient work of a team of historians. The question of tolerance in relation to hyper-powers requires a more serious account than this book can provide.