In the 19th century, both Italy and the US were young countries pursuing liberal nationalism even as unity was threatened by a recalcitrant southern population. This nuanced analysis of abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism, Lincoln and Cavour, and the nation's two civil wars provides powerful new insights into their histories.

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.

In this sequel to his landmark study, historian Peter Kolchin compares the transition to freedom after American emancipation with the Russian Great Reforms The two largest transitions from unfree to free labor of the many that occurred in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth century took place in the United States and in Russia. Both occurred in the 1860s, and in both the former slaves and serfs strove to maximize their autonomy and freedom while the former masters worked to preserve as many of their prerogatives as possible. Both were partially—but only partially—successful. In this magisterial and long-awaited work, historian Peter Kolchin shows that a more radical break with the past was possible in the United States than in Russia, with the Southern freedpeople coming to enjoy republican citizenship, whereas Russian peasants remained subjects rather than citizens. Both countries saw conservative reactions triumph in the late nineteenth century. While this conservatism was common in most emancipations, it was especially strong in Russia and the American South, in part as a reaction against the major efforts to restructure the social order that went by the name of Reconstruction in the United States and the Great Reforms in Russia.

This book challenges existing accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which political developments are explained in terms of the rise of the nation-state. While monarchies are often portrayed as old-fashioned – as things of the past – we argue that modern monarchies have been at the centre of nation-construction in many parts of the world. Today, roughly a quarter of states define themselves as monarchies as well as nation-states – they are Royal Nations. This is a global phenomenon. This volume interrogates the relationship between royals and ‘their’ nations with transnational case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe as well as South America. The seventeen contributors discuss concepts and structures, visual and performative representations, and memory cultures of modern monarchies in relation to rising nationalist movements. This book thereby analyses the worldwide significance of the Royal Nation.

Sheds new light on both pro and antislavery politics in the nineteenth-century Americas. The creation of new frontiers of slave commodity production and the expansion and intensification of slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the southern United States were an integral part of the expansion of the world economy during the nineteenth century. Beginning from this vantage point, The Politics of the Second Slavery brings together a group of international scholars to reinterpret pro- and antislavery politics both globally and nationally as part of the forces that were restructuring Atlantic slavery. Individual chapters shed new light on the decolonization and nationalization of slavery in the Americas, the politics of proslavery elites both within particular countries and across the Atlantic region, the abolition of the international slave trade, and slave resistance.

Between 1861 and 1865, both the Confederate South and Southern Italy underwent dramatic processes of nation-building, with the creation of the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, in the midst of civil wars. This is the first book that compares these parallel developments by focusing on the Unionist and pro-Bourbon political forces that opposed the two new nations in inner civil conflicts. Overlapping these conflicts were the social revolutions triggered by the rebellions of American slaves and Southern Italian peasants against the slaveholding and landowning elites. Utilizing a comparative perspective, Enrico Dal Lago sheds light on the reasons why these combined factors of internal opposition proved fatal for the Confederacy in the American Civil War, while the Italian Kingdom survived its own civil war. At the heart of this comparison is a desire to understand how and why nineteenth-century nations rose and either endured or disappeared.

Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name: the Civil War. In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government. And it spilled over national boundaries, tying the United States together with Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Britain, and France in a struggle over the future of slavery and of republics. Here Gregory P. Downs argues that we can see the Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centered in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain. Downs introduces a range of actors not often considered as central to the conflict but clearly engaged in broader questions and acts they regarded as revolutionary. This expansive canvas allows Downs to describe a broad and world-shaking war with implications far greater than often recognized.