World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman (review)

In the final paragraphs of her epilogue, Amanda Foreman refers to Allan Nevins's assertion in his 1959 monograph Ordeal of the Union that the transatlantic "contest waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of public opinion" affected the outcome of America's civil war more directly than any battle. Once largely overlooked, the subfield of the war's international history now comprises a considerable body of literature. Union, Confederate, British, and French diplomacy; European (particularly British) public opinion; foreign soldiers and sailors (blue and gray); international finance; the blockade-running trade; the European-built Confederate commerce raiders—each has received detailed attention. Foreman calls World on Fire "an attempt to balance the vast body of work on Anglo-American history in the 1860s with the equally vast material left behind by witnesses and participants in the war—to depict the world as it was seen by Britons in America, and Americans in Britain, during a defining moment" (806). The author aims to not merely tell the story of the British government's role in the Civil War but she also shares the multifarious roles of numerous individual Britons. She partially succeeds in this monumental undertaking, though more clearly with regard to the former than the latter.

Foreman's most significant contribution in World on Fire is her masterful account of the complex and often minutely choreographed framework of Victorian diplomacy. The book transitions section-by-section between a diplomatic history of Britain's quest to remain impartially neutral and a more general military overview of the war. Roughly half of the book is dedicated to a thoroughly readable and lucid synthesis of the existing literature (and Foreman's own research) addressing Britain's relations with both the Union and Confederacy. Foreman brings to this work the human touch of a true social historian, illuminating her narrative with delightful character sketches, which invigorate passages that might otherwise tend toward dry and obscure diplomatic history. Works by earlier scholars, from Ephraim Adams and Frank Owsley to Charles Hubbard and Phillip Myers, do not lack such observations, but Foreman gives them new life and places them squarely in the foreground. The retiring, diffident, melancholic, and rigidly professional British minister to Washington, Lord Richard Lyons; the blustering, unpredictable, deeply political, but increasingly astute U.S. Secretary of State William Seward; the resourceful, relentless, irrepressible Confederate navy purchasing agent James Bulloch; the self-important, peevish, untested, but ultimately statesmanlike U.S. minister to London Charles Francis Adams; the haughty, inadequate, inflexible, and often unrealistic Confederate envoy to London, James Murray Mason—Foreman renders such characters three dimensional with a deft skill not common among traditional diplomatic historians.

World on Fire also fully incorporates the cultural elements of international relations into this diplomatic history. Foreman contrasts the stunning success of Confederate propagandists such as editor Henry Hotze and celebrated spy Rose Greenhow with the failure of similar missions by northerners such as newspaperman Thurlow Weed. She thereby explores the broad public enthusiasm for the Confederate cause that so piqued U.S. officials, drawing upon and hopefully making more accessible to a popular audience works such as Richard Blackett's Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

Foreman successfully balances an eye for detail necessary in writing diplomatic history with the art of translating mountains of information into a flowing story. She recounts, for example, the legal challenges James Bulloch faced in commissioning naval vessels in British shipyards under the restrictions of the 1819 Foreign Enlistments Act. This story, including minute details such as the precise time a foreign office order for the detention of the future CSS Alabama was placed in the tray for outgoing telegrams, is well known to anyone familiar with Frank Merli's Great Britain and the Confederate Navy (Indiana University Press, 1970); however, Merli's meticulous but densely technical work has not...