The transatlantic war: Britain and the American Civil War revisited

Abstract

Readers of this journal are well aware that the study of the American Civil War has taken a global turn in the past two decades – some of them, indeed, have led the way. The internationalization of the field has been a welcome development in U.S. historiography in the twenty-first century in general and for good reason the Civil War has been at its forefront. Abraham Lincoln consistently emphasized the war’s transnational significance, of course, perhaps never more eloquently than in this famous line from his annual message to Congress in December 1862: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” At first, transnational scholarship concentrated on the ways in which the war’s politics played out on the international stage, asking an old question: what was the impact of the conflict overseas? Answers concerned previously marginalized groups and, in particular, working men seeking representative forms of governance at home. Placing secession and Confederate nation-building in comparative perspective with other separatist movements was especially popular. The field of inquiry expanded beyond narrow diplomatic channels and high politics that characterized the prior work of foreign policy historians but remained within the realm of the masculine and the political (and still does). The gaze outwards from North America also turned the other way as developments beyond U.S. borders have been shown to influence domestic history in significant ways, providing a more holistic understanding of America’s conflict. The Atlantic World features prominently in the Civil War’s global turn and there is a strong case to be made that the war had the greatest impact there. The four books under review