The U.S. Civil War in World History

As we sit and ponder the 150th anniversary of the end to the most crucial conflict in U.S. national history, it is important to spend time reflecting on its global significance. That conflict is, of course, the U.S. American Civil War, and its importance for remaking the United States of America into a more unified nation-state is unquestionable.¹ However, the period between the 1850s and 1870s was one of national consolidation across the globe. Italy, Canada, Germany and Japan, to name a few, all experienced movements designed to strengthen political unity through nationalism. Not only that, but America’s war was merely one example of many civil wars during the period, and although the destruction was devastating (620,000 killed), the violence certainly was not unique (20 million died in China’s Taiping Rebellion). What did make this conflict unique was that it ushered in, as historian Sven Beckert put it, the world’s first truly global raw materials crisis.² The raw material he had in mind was cotton, and the war it produced had tremendous ramifications for labor, capital and state power across the globe.

In a speech given before the United States Senate in 1858, James Henry Hammond spoke of the South as a place with “territory enough to make an empire that shall rule the world.³ With such confidence, he proclaimed that, should [the North] make war on us by threatening the system of slavery that fueled the world’s most lucrative industry, we could bring the whole world to our feet [because] . . . Cotton is king.⁴

Since the late 18th century, the cotton industry had been expanding exponentially. The state-legitimized appropriation of Native American land, technological innovations and slave labor all combined to produce a situation in which a majority of the world’s cotton supply emanated out of the American South. With credit lines extended from British bankers, American merchants and industrialists in the North were tied to a transatlantic network of cotton production that was responsible for sending 77 percent of the raw cotton they manufactured to Great Britain. France sent 90 percent and Russia, 92 percent. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier called this white gold the Haschish of the West, a drug that was creating powerful hallucinatory dreams of territorial expansion, of judges who decided that right is wrong and of heaven as a snug plantation with angel negro overseers.⁵

These delusional dreams manifested themselves more poignantly after the Mexican-American war (1848), when the United States government found itself in possession of a vast new frontier. The question of whether or not this new territory would be dominated by cotton cultivators and their slave labor or by free farmers became a central antagonizing issue. Southerners, of course, pushed for the former. The belief that their cotton – and by extension the slave labor that produced it – was so crucial to the fabric of the Atlantic world gave them, in the words of another historian, the presumption of success” if war were to break out.⁶

Of course this presumption was a colossal miscalculation, for the European powers did not recognize the Confederacy, even after Jefferson Davis’ government banned all cotton exports to pressure them to do so. Shortly after, the Union blockaded the South to ensure that most southern cotton never left the ships upon which they were loaded, even after the Confederacy abandoned the embargo. In just two years after the conflict erupted in 1861, 3.8 million bales of cotton exports dwindled to virtually nothing.

It was only with slight exaggeration that the Chamber of Commerce in the cotton-manufacturing city of Chimnitz, Saxony proclaimed in 1865 that “never in the history of trade have there been such grand and consequential movements as in the past four years.⁷ Indeed, the global cotton industry dramatically transformed after the U.S. Civil War, with consequences reverberating across the world. For one, the loss of such an important raw material led the European imperialist powers into new territories in order to secure a new supply (cotton does not grow in Europe). Regions of South America and Africa were profoundly affected by this, but also India, which was the number one cotton-producing region of the world before Europeans embarked on the Age of Exploration (1500s) that changed the entire world economic structure. As the British gained a firmer grip over the region that once belonged to the Mughal Empire, they developed a new kind of empire. The other European powers followed suit, justifying their expansion and incursion into primitive lands with notions of a civilizing mission.

These changes had a dramatic impact on creating the globalized world in which we live today, which still operates on oppressed forms of labor. Young children picking cotton in the fields of Uzbekistan and sweatshop factories in Bangladesh are byproducts of a shift in global capitalism that started to emerge in reaction to the U.S. Civil War.

It is easy to lose sight of the fact that our history is intrinsically connected to the rest of the world, especially when history as a field of study is so heavily influenced by the nation-state perspective. The things we do as a nation and as individuals do sway the course of history, as the story of the Civil War demonstrates. We live in an interconnected world that binds us together as humans, and it has been this way for longer than most of us can imagine. It’s high time we start paying attention to it.