HST6067 The U.S. Civil War in Global Context

Module summary

The U.S. Civil War of 1861-65, which culminated in the victory of the ‘free labor’ and the emancipation of four million slaves, has often been read as a purely American story. Yet as historians have shown, the effects of the conflict reverberated around the world, silencing the Manchester mills that ran on the fruits of slave’s toil, remaking the rural economies of countries as far flung as Japan and Egypt, and inspiring European nationalists, liberals and socialists in their own revolutionary struggles for unification and liberty.Abraham Lincoln understood as much at the time. His Gettysburg Address moved gracefully between the particular circumstances of the United States and the universal propositions that the Civil War had put to the test. At the outset of the conflict he had offered Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the struggle to make an Italian nation state, a command in the Union army. Pro-slavery Confederates too sought Old World allies: rumours even abounded after 1861 that they were ready to replace their president with a Habsburg prince. Probing such connections between developments in the U.S., Europe, and beyond, we will explore where the Civil War sits alongside contemporary struggles for national unification, how it reshaped a global economy that rested heavily on the production of slave-grown cotton, and whether its revolutionary outcome – the annihilation of slavery and extension of voting rights to black men – imprinted society and politics beyond the Union’s borders. The module will introduce you to two methods – one transnational, the other comparative – for studying global history.