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Annee 1 La Ravage Des RaceJust over a quarter of a...

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Annee 1836-1863 La Ravage Des RaceJust over a quarter of a century ago, it seemed, you couldn't buy interest in the international history of the American Civil War. American scholars appeared especially uninterested in a subject that, as Don Doyle's splendid new book reveals, is ripe with possibility.

Late 20th-century indifference was clearly demonstrated in a volume designed to take the war's historiographical temperature, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1998. In their introduction to Writing the Civil War, the distinguished editors James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr. claimed that while 'there are too many specialized subjects for every one to have their place in a single volume of reasonable length', they had nonetheless covered the conflict's 'most significant topics'.

(1) The editors identified areas upon which further light could be shed, including the naval war, public opinion, military tactics, Jefferson Davis, sex and sexuality, and the destruction of slavery; but the list failed to include foreign relations which garnered not a single mention in either the introduction or in any of the 12 essays authored by an elite group of Civil War scholars.

The war's international impact was conspicuous by its absence from this otherwise valuable overview.

The omission of foreign affairs from Writing the Civil War was a curious by-product of American exceptionalism (and was particularly odd given that one of the editors, James M. McPherson, had already written perceptively on the topic in numerous publications).

Fortunately, just as that volume appeared, there were clear signs that interest in the war's international impact had already begun to revive.

In that year, Charles Hubbard produced the first dedicated survey of Confederate foreign relations since Frank Owsley's seminal King Cotton Diplomacy, originally published nearly seven decades earlier.

(2) Hubbard's volume was followed by important studies by, among others, Howard Jones, Richard Blackett, Duncan Andrew Campbell, and Philip Meyers.

(3) In 2010, the University of North Carolina Press confirmed the revived interest with the inclusion of Jones' Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations in its 'Littlefield History of the Civil War Era' series.

(4) Recently, American history's new internationalism has resulted in attempts to understand the Civil War in broader comparative and/or transnational terms (and incidentally move the subject away from its focus upon Anglo-American relations).

Brian Schoen's The Fragile Fabric of Union, a major revisionist study that examined the war's global origins through the prism of Old South political economy, appeared in 2009. (5) It was followed in 2010 by an erudite collection on Secession as an International Phenomenon (edited by Don Doyle) and the next year by Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton's The Global Lincoln, a fascinating set of essays that roamed widely across the political, intellectual and geographic landscape in an attempt to pin down its subject's worldwide appeal.

(6) Internationalizing the sectional war has now become a brisk trade; a collection derived from a 2011 conference held at the College of Charleston, and published last year as The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the Civil War (edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis), reveals this new determination to expand the discussion beyond familiar horizons.

(7) These new approaches are of course to be welcomed; but so too are the efforts at more traditional, less voguish revisionism, exemplified by Brian Jenkins' excellent new biography of Lord Lyons, the often maligned British Minists.

Posted December 1 2023 at 5:28 PM

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