![]() ![]() By the middle of the nineteenth century, the slave South had assumed a central role on the world stage. While colonies came and went, while economies boomed and crashed, slavery relentlessly grew-and nowhere more than in the United States. Slavery was the first, most powerful, and most widespread kind of globalization in the first three centuries after Columbus. Long before the Civil War, the United States embodied the possibilities and contradictions of modern western history. Created from European ideas, involvement in Atlantic trade, African slavery, conquest of land from American Indians and European powers, and massive migration from Europe, the United States took shape as the world watched. More obviously than most nations, the United States was the product of global history. Slavery and Nineteenth-Century Globalization ![]() How that experiment fared in its great crisis-regardless of what happened-would eventually matter to people everywhere. The American Civil War, played out on the brightly lit stage of a new country, would be a drama of world history. The country was still very much an experiment in 1860, a representative government stretched over an enormous space, held together by law rather than by memory, religion, or monarch. The young nation touched, directly and indirectly, India and Egypt, Hawaii and Japan, Russia and Canada, Mexico and Cuba, the Caribbean and Brazil, Britain and France. Defining nationhood, deciding the future of slavery, reinventing warfare for an industrial age, reconstructing a former slave society-all these played out in the American Civil War.īy no means a major power, the United States was nevertheless woven into the life of the world. People in other nations could see that the massive struggle in the United States embodied conflicts that had been appearing in different forms throughout the world. Playing down the centrality of slavery to their new nation, white Southerners built their case for independence on the right of free citizens to determine their political future (3). Confederates claimed that they were also fighting for a cause of world-wide significance: self-determination. can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity." The struggle, Lincoln said, was for "a vast future," a struggle to give all men "a fair chance in the race of life" (2). It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy. Abraham Lincoln argued that his nation's Civil War "embraces more than the fate of these United States. Newspapers around the globe reported the latest news from the United States as one vast battle followed another, as the largest system of slavery in the world crashed into pieces, as American democracy expanded to include people who had been enslaved only a few years before (1).īoth the North and the South appealed to the global audience. Americans demanded the world's attention during their Civil War and Reconstruction. ![]()
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