The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism

Series: Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War

by Duncan A. Campbell and Niels Eichhorn

Series edited by T. Michael Parrish

354 Pages / 6.00 × 9.00 × 0.94 in

Hardcover

9780807181515

Published: 2024-04-10

$55.00

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eBook

9780807181812

Published: 2024-04-10

(Requires the Leaf e-Reader app)

$19.95

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While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict’s similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was “one among many” such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War’s place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.

Eichhorn and Campbell examine the development of nationalism and its frequent manifestation, secession, by comparing the American experience with that of several other nations, including Germany, Hungary, and Brazil. They compare the Civil War to the Crimean and Franco-German wars to determine whether the American conflict was the first modern war. To gauge the potential of foreign intervention in the Civil War, they look to the time’s developing international debate on the legality of intercession and mediation in other nations’ insurgencies.

Using the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes, Eichhorn and Campbell suggest the extent to which the United States was an imperial project. To examine realpolitik, they study four vastly different practitioners—Otto von Bismarck, Louis Napoleon, Count Cavour, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, they compare emancipation in the United States to that in Peru and the end of forced servitude in Russia, closing with a comparison of the memorialization of the Civil War with the experiences of other post-emancipation societies and an examination of how other nations mythologized their past conflicts and ignored uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of reconciliation.

The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.

“This is an important book. . . . The authors have put forward a compelling argument for the nineteenth-century United States as a ‘nation among nations,’ therefore making it comparable to other regions of the world and also connected to them by the many transnational links discussed in the book. In doing so, they have succeeded in destroying the last remnants of American exceptionalism while offering American historians a number of suggestions for future comparative studies focusing on important themes such as nation-building and nationalism, warfare and technology, religion and culture, and emancipation and imperial expansion in the central decades of the nineteenth century.” ~Enrico Dal Lago, author of Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy

“Lucid and learned, The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism is the most imaginative and sweeping guide yet in the effort—then and now—to understand the relationship of the U.S. Civil War to the transformations of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Eichhorn and Campbell utilize both comparative and transnational tools to capture what made the U.S. Civil War distinct and—more crucially—what reveals it as a part of the ongoing transnational transformations of nation, war, and belonging.” ~Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War

“This is a fascinating and insightful book that will be essential reading for anyone interested in the international context that shaped and was shaped by the American Civil War. The authors provide both a useful appreciation of current scholarship in the field and pointers for future research based on transnational and comparative perspectives.” ~Michael J. Turner, author of Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain

“The book, structured in a series of chapters that address various aspects of the Civil War in a transnational context, offers some interesting insights on issues such as secession, nationalism, the nature of warfare, and emancipation, among other ideas. A concluding chapter discusses the issue of historical memory in an international context. Historians will find that the authors have addressed many of the familiar themes and questions surrounding the war, from whether the Civil War was the first modern war to the question of secession and its relation to nationalist movements. Recommended.” ~CHOICE