The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War ed. by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis (review)

Sven Beckert recently said of global history that, once attempted, it is the kind of approach that “is impossible to go back from.”¹ And it so happens that the latter half of the nineteenth century has received a great deal of global historical attention, including from Beckert himself. Why? Because the era encapsulates much of what scholars have termed the “first age” of globalization, when markets were truly becoming globalized through modern advances in technology, transport, and communication. From Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson’s groundbreaking Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (1999) to Thomas Bender’s A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006) and Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2014), interdisciplinary scholarship has demonstrated that the American position in world affairs during the late nineteenth century was quite often peripheral, and quite often far from exceptional. Although David Gleeson and Simon Lewis’s The Civil War as Global Conflict draws few explicit connections with the prodigious global historical literature, presumably it is within this trend that the editors place their volume. Indeed, Gleeson and Lewis state at the outset that the Civil War needs to be viewed “not just as a local conflict but as a global one . . . to provide a more global approach that moves beyond diplomacy,” through an examination of issues as far ranging as national identity, gender, memory, and ethnicity (2).

The Civil War as Global Conflict is both useful and timely. After all, when the Civil War broke out, the United States itself was already very much a part of the first age of globalization. For example, as Sven Beckert’s article in the December 2004 issue of the American Historical Review shows, the war upset and reshaped the global cotton trade.² And as Brian Schoen explores in The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (2009), the South’s sophisticated understanding of the international power of its cotton exports proved to be a central—if ill-conceived—part of what would become the Confederacy’s “King Cotton” diplomacy. Matthew Karp’s chapter in The Civil War as Global Conflict situates itself within this new literature. Karp links Civil War–era free trade firmly to proslavery forces, suggesting that the international trade liberalization of the late 1840s was “an implicit acknowledgement of the primacy of slave-grown agricultural products” (37). Karp delves into the international and imperial dimensions of the South’s King Cotton ideology, pointing to how southern free-trade advocates correlated British antislavery sentiment with mercantilism, and therefore looked with favor upon the English adoption of free trade in 1846. To southern expansionists, according to Karp, these various international developments in trade liberalization “reflected a larger ideological transformation. The political economy of slavery and free trade had defeated the rival model of abolition and mercantilism” (39–40).

Alexander Noonan’s chapter similarly adds to the global historical literature through his exploration of Russian-American relations during the Civil War. His connecting of Russian-American designs to build a trans-Pacific telegraph line with what would become the successful Anglo-American laying of the Atlantic cable in 1866 is particularly instructive. Why was the Russian government so keen on a Pacific cable? Because of the latter’s ability to “radically” change the transmission of information between Russia and the United States (124). Successful U.S. navigation of the Amur River, part of the far eastern edge of Russia, sparked even greater trans-Pacific lobbying efforts on behalf of a cable to enhance Russian-American communications and trade. Speculation grew around the idea of building a telegraph line that would stretch from the mouth of the Amur, drape across the Bering...