Don H. Doyle. The Cause of All Nations

Don H. Doyle is a prolific and accomplished writer on the international ramifications of the American Civil War. In his latest work, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War, he covers topics such as republicanism and political ideas projected overseas; abolition; foreign legions that fought in the republican spirit mainly for the North; European intellectuals whose liberal writings clarified the war; and translators who skillfully rendered these critical works into English. Giving meaning to all of these strains made the Civil War a global effort. Doyle structures this profound, eloquent book for a wide readership, a point made easier by his fluid writing. He brings to fruition another dimension of the Civil War as a maturing process whose legacies were broadly significant. Doyle argues that for revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Garibaldi of Italy, republican thinkers Èduard Laboulaye and Agénor de Gasparin of France, the American and European presses, and the legions of republican immigrants who made up a large part of the Union armies, the war was a progenitor of republican freedom. In this way, the book complements revealing studies that explore the international dimensions of the Civil War such as those by Howard Jones (Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations [2010]), D. P. Crook (The North, the South and the Powers, 1861–1865 [1974]), Duncan Andrew Campbell (Unlikely Allies: Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship [2007]), Niels Eichhorn (“The British Intervention Crisis of 1862: A British Diplomatic Dilemma?” American Nineteenth Century History 15 [February 2015]: 287–310 and “North Atlantic Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Case for Peace During the American Civil War,” Civil War History 61 [June 2015]: 136–170), Amanda Foreman (A World On Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War [2010]), Richard Blackett (Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War [2001]), Jay Sexton (Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations, 1837–1873 [2005]), and Marc-William Palen (The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896 [2016]). Doyle’s book looks at how Europe and the Caribbean, Mexico, and elsewhere brimmed with the message of freedom. “The Cause of all Nations,” or the transmissions of freedom, collected a large following during and after the four years of the conflict.

Diplomacy · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies