The Civil War as the European powers saw it

The American Civil War was fought on American soil, but the Union and the Confederacy also fought for friends abroad. D. P. Crook’s history follows that second contest, and above all the view from Britain and the other great powers of Europe, which had to weigh their sympathies against their trade and their strategic aims.

Its chapters take up the questions that hung over the war from outside: whether Europe would stay neutral, whether it might intervene, how it reacted as the fighting went on, and why Confederate diplomacy in the end failed. Crook’s point is that the war belonged to a wider international system, not to America alone, and he tells it that way.

This is the first printing, published by John Wiley & Sons in 1974, in red cloth with its original illustrated cream dust jacket, and both show only minor wear from the shelf and from handling.