Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War.

Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War. By Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 362. $45.00, ISBN 0-8139-2502-9.)

Nations, nation making, and nationalism have been at the center of contemporary historical inquiry. Specifically, from the 1980s onward, an important group of scholars, including Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and Ernest Gellner, have claimed that nations as we know them are "modern" products arising from "invented traditions" or from sociocultural processes under whose firm control stand the political-economic elites. Though originally focusing on Europe and its former colonies, this new scholarship on nationalism has progressively expanded its horizons to include the United States, thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Liah Greenfeld, Drew Gilpin Faust, and James McPherson.

Yet the American Civil War era has proven a difficult subject from the viewpoint of experts on nationalism. And while it is commonplace to state that the Civil War forged America into a nation, only recently have scholars started to analyze the real significance of this often made assertion. In doing so, they have discovered, unsurprisingly, a number of characteristics in common between the process of American nation making of the Civil War and contemporary or later processes of "modern" nation making in Europe and beyond--as very recent studies by Susan-Mary Grant, Thomas Bender, and Christopher Bayly testify.

Intellectually, Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf's Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History. and the American Civil War owes more than one debt to Bayly's massive The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, Mass., 2004), a work that, though much broader in scope, has at its heart a similar concern for defining "modernity" as an umbrella term for the cataclysmic economic and sociopolitical changes that have occurred in the last two hundred years--changes whose roots are clearly traceable in the "long" nineteenth century. Unlike Bayly, the Onufs focus specifically on the close relationship between the "modern" process of nation making, the establishment of national and international markets, and the wars waged by expanding "modern" nations on other nations--a relationship that the authors see as a defining characteristic of our "modern" world.

It is not difficult to understand why the authors--one an expert on international relations and the other a well-known scholar of the Jeffersonian era and the early American Republic--have decided to focus on the American Civil War as an example with which to illustrate their ideas regarding nations and "modernity." In doing this, they have certainly broken new ground, not just by placing the American Civil War firmly within the context of an age of emerging "modern" nations but also by providing a novel definition of the Civil War itself as the first war between two of these "modern" nations--the Union and the Confederacy--and thus, in this sense, rather than the "total war" sense, showing that it was a prelude to World War I and World War II. Particularly illuminating in this respect is the introduction to the book, which the authors have centered on Abraham Lincoln's conceptualization of the "crisis of the Union as an epochal struggle for the new nation's soul" (p. 4). It was through this type of conceptualization that Lincoln clearly showed his awareness both of the link between the American Civil War and European nationalist struggles and of the universality of the liberal principles for which the Union stood.

The core of the book is divided into two parts, which roughly correspond to the different areas of expertise of the two authors. Part I (mainly Nicholas Onuf's responsibility), vaguely entitled "Modern History," is as much a historical as a philosophical tour de force through which the author attempts to define modernity as a sharp break with the past that dates to the Renaissance but was reinforced by the Enlightenment and the emergence of nineteenth-century liberalism. As we might expect, the author treats John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith as key thinkers in this process. Onuf also frequently acknowledges the importance of the ancient roots of "modern" thinking and often cites classical authors, first and foremost Aristotle. Possibly the most important concept here is the idea that "liberalism presupposes a bounded setting within which a number of autonomous, self-directing entities interact freely within the limits imposed by their formal status as equals and the agreements they have made" (p. 14). Thus, according to nineteenth-century liberalism, the principles of self-determination and self-reliance applied to nations as much as to people.

Part II (primarily Peter Onuf's section) builds on the important theoretical background on the liberal nationalism of Part I to provide a specific case study with the treatment of antebellum and Civil War America. Starting from the assumption that in order to understand the Civil War we need to place it in the "modern" world to which it belonged rather than within the narrow confines of an American historical narrative that is too often marred by teleological arguments, the author convincingly shows how by 1860 northerners and southerners had come to think of themselves as two different nations with different ideas about their relationship regarding both slavery and the market. In practice, even though each acted according to the tenets of nineteenth-century liberalism, northerners and southerners understood it in different ways and emphasized different aspects of it. Whereas northerners identified the Union with the nation and sought a policy of protectionism for the benefit of American manufactures, southerners identified their region with the nation and sought a policy of free trade for the benefit of their plantation-based economy. Thus, the Civil War was the first of a number of wars that, over the following century, "modern" nations would fight over comparable issues.

Seen from this perspective as a clash between two "modern" liberal nations over different concepts and uses of the market--a clash at the heart of which was slavery--the American Civil War gains a further dimension, which helps us in interpreting it correctly as one of the fundamental events of the nineteenth century. This, then, is a much needed book that one hopes will stimulate more historical work on the crucial international and comparative dimensions of the American Civil War.

ENRICO DAL LAGO 

National University of Ireland, Galway