The Great Powers and the American Civil War
A Select Bibliography
Compiled by Dr William Young
University of North Dakota
Originally posted in Civil War History (11 September 2012)
The following list of books is valuable for studying the foreign affairs of the Great Powers of Europe before and during the American Civil War. It also contains diplomatic and other studies dealing with Union and Confederate foreign relations during the conflict.
Adams, Ephraim Douglass. Great Britain and the American Civil War. 2 volumes. New York: Russell and Russell, 1925.
Bartlett, C.J. Defense and Diplomacy: Britain and the Great Powers, 1815-1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.
__________. Peace, War and the European Powers, 1814-1914. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Baumgart, Winfried. The Crimean War, 1853-1856. London: Arnold, 1999.
__________. The Peace of Paris, 1856: Studies in War, Diplomacy, and Peacemaking. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1981.
Berwanger, Eugene H. The British Foreign Service and the American Civil War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.
Blumberg, Arnold. A Carefully Planned Accident: The Italian War of 1859. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1990.
Boaz, Thomas. Guns for Cotton: England Arms the Confederacy. Shippensburg: Burd Street Press, 1996.
Bourne, Kenneth. Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815-1908. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1967.
Bowen, Wayne H. Spain and the American Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011.
Bridge, F.R. and Roger Bullen. The Great Powers and the European States System, 1814-1914. Second edition. Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005.
Brown, David. Warrior to Dreadnought: Warship Development, 1860-1905. London: Chatham, 1997.
Brown, David. Palmerston: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Callahan, James M. Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1901.
Carroll, Daniel B. Henri Mercier and the American Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Case, Lynn M. and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1970.
Chamberlain, Muriel E. British Foreign Policy in the Age of Palmerston. London: Longman, 1980.
__________. “Pax Britannica”? British Foreign Policy, 1789-1914. London: Longman, 1988.
Coppa, Frank J. The Italian Wars of Independence. London: Longman, 1992.
Courtemanche, Regis A. No Need for Glory: The British Navy in American Waters, 1860-1864. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1977.
Crook, David Paul. Diplomacy during the American Civil War. New York: John Wiley, 1975.
__________. The North, the South, and the Great Powers, 1861-1865. New York: Wiley, 1974.
Cross, Coy F., II. Lincoln’s Man in Liverpool: Consul Dudley and the Legal Battle to Stop Confederate Warships. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007.
Cunningham, Michele. Mexico and the Foreign Policy of Napoleon III. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Ferris, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.
__________. The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977.
Fuller, Howard J. Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenges of British Naval Power. Westport: Praeger, 2008.
Goldfrank, David M. The Origins of the Crimean War. London: Longman, 1994.
Hanna, Alfred J. and Kathryn A. Hanna. Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.
Hamilton, C.I. Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840-1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Hubbard, Charles M. The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.
Jenkins, Brian. Britain and the War for the Union. 2 volumes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974-80.
Jones, Howard. Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
__________. Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
__________. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Lambert, Andrew. Battleships in Transition: The Creation of the Steam Battlefleet, 1815-1860. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984.
__________. The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853-56. Second edition. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Lester, Richard I. Confederate Finance and Purchasing in Great Britain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.
Mahin, Dean B. One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999.
Matzke, Rebecca Berens. Deterrence through Strength: British Naval Power and Foreign Policy under Pax Britannica. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
May, Robert E., editor. The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995. Essays by Howard Jones, R.J.M. Blackett, Thomas Schoonover, and James M. McPherson.
McMillan, James F. Napoleon III. London: Longman, 1991.
McPherson, James M. War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Merli, Frank J. Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, 1861-1865. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.
__________. The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Myers, Phillip E. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2008.
Mosse, W.E. The Rise and Fall of the Crimean System, 1855-1871: The Story of a Peace Settlement. London: Macmillan, 1963.
Owsley, Frank L. King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931. Second edition published in 1959.
Partridge, Michael S. Military Planning for the Defense of the United Kingdom, 1814-1870. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Rich, Norman. Great Power Diplomacy, 1914-1914. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.
Price, Roger. Napoleon III and the Second Empire. London: Routledge, 1997.
Ropp, Theodore. “The Navy of Napoleon III. Chapter in The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871-1904. Edited by Stephen S. Roberts. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987.
Saul, Norman E. Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763-1867. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991.
Schneid, Frederick. The Second War of Italian Unification, 1859-61. Botley: Osprey, 2012.
Sexton, Jay. Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
Spencer, Warren F. The Confederate Navy in Europe. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983.
Sondhaus, Lawrence. Naval Warfare, 1815-1914. London: Routledge, 2001.
Surdam, David G. Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Tucker, Spencer C. Blue and Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006.
Van Deusen, Glyndon G. William Henry Seward. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967
Wise, Stephen R. Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running during the Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
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