American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s ed. by Don H. Doyle (review)

Ian Tyrrell, Paul Quigley, and Andre Fleche, among others, pioneered the transnational turn in Civil War–era scholarship, trying to understand the conflict in a broader international framework. Don Doyle adds to the growing list with American Civil Wars, a collection of eleven essays. Overall, the essays speak to three themes and illustrate how international relations, imperial conflicts and rivalries, and slavery/abolition debates changed in the Civil War–era Atlantic world.

Jay Sexton leads off the international relations section with his familiar argument that the Civil War was a "watershed" moment that placed the United States on the path to global power. Embracing a traditional diplomatic history methodology, Howard Jones revisits the humanitarian intervention debate in the British cabinet in the fall of 1862 juxtaposed with British self-interest and concerns over slavery. Meanwhile, Patrick Kelly indicates that southern secession ended all aspiration for southward expansion, but fears lingered and overshadowed diplomatic relations between Mexico and the Confederacy.

The second set of essays illustrates how imperial policies and designs changed during the Civil War era. Richard Huzzey explains the changing nature of British imperial policy with the granting of self-government to the Canadian territories and removal of the same from Jamaica to avoid Afro-Caribbean rule. Meanwhile, Stève Sainlaude claims that Napoleon III's imperial designs in Mexico neither adequately pursued the Confederacy as an ally for Archduke Maximilian nor accounted for Mexico's new sense of national loyalty. Despite the conservative attempt to establish a monarchy, the liberal constitution of 1857 had gained enough support to provide a basis of opposition and a legal framework for Mexico, as Erika Pani shows. Shifting to the Caribbean, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara connects the revitalization of the Spanish Empire, demands for liberal reforms, and the occupation of Santo Domingo to illustrate the growing threat to slavery within Cuba. Anne Eller argues that the disastrous attempt to recolonize Santo Domingo destabilized the Spanish Empire, teaching Cubans and Puerto Ricans methods to resist Spanish rule.

The final set of essays presents the dynamics between the Civil War and abolition in Brazil and the Spanish Empire. Matt Childs starts the discussion, showing how the Lyons-Seward Anti-Slave Trade Treaty of 1862, the emergence of homegrown abolition societies in Spain, and the Ten Years' War fundamentally undermined slavery in the Spanish Empire. Finally, Rafael Marquese demonstrates the attention paid by Brazilians to the Civil War and Reconstruction era, drawing conclusions that eventually brought about emancipation but also highlighting the domestic factors of global economic changes undermining forced labor.

The goal of transnational history is to undercut the problematic notion of U.S. exceptionalism; however, some of the contributions seem to foster rather than challenge the idea. For example, Don Doyle's introduction nurtures the problematic notion that the Union's victory in the Civil War rescued representative government, which he frequently conflates using democratic and republican government interchangeably. Sadly, except for Pani's brilliant essay, the volume is silent on the subject. Furthermore, the introduction's flow diagram presents the proto-fascist Paraguayan regime of Francisco Solano López as republican. Furthermore, Huzzey, Childs, and Marquese acknowledge that domestic forces in the British, Spanish, and Brazilian Empires respectively provided significant impetuses for change, rather than external forces. Finally, American Civil Wars indicates that the most important diplomatic moment was not the intervention debate of 1862 but the anti–slave trade treaty of the same year.

These issues aside, American Civil Wars is an excellent thought piece, forcing historians to look beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state to place the Civil War into a global framework. While most of the work embraces what David Armitage would term cis- and circum-Atlantic methodologies, lacking are personal transatlantic experiences. There is much left...