Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: Confederate Informal Diplomacy and Privatized Violence in British America During the American Civil War
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2019-12
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the Confederate and British colonial relationship during the American Civil War, particularly the networks of minor officials, merchants, and other private individuals that supported the rebellion in the colonies of British America. This support included blockade running most importantly, but also diplomatic tasks, communications, and even military action. This commercial-diplomatic network proved vital for coordinating the movement of arms and supplies from Europe to the shores of the Confederacy, and for protecting the local interests of the Confederacy from Union and British interference. The specific local social and political conditions of the colonies deeply affected the depth and nature of their involvement in Confederate schemes, which had a potential to disrupt regional peace and order far in excess of their size. Ultimately, this project makes the case for the enduring importance of private actors for our understanding of international violence and diplomacy during and after the Civil War. British colonial merchants and elites demonstrated the power to resist or alter the policies of the world’s most powerful state. The Civil War also marked an inflection in the dynamics of privatized violence in North America and beyond. In the antebellum era it existed outside or in cooperation with the state, as with filibustering and privateering, but during the war Confederates looked for new ways to bind private military action and private enterprise to state authority as a response to changes in international law and technology that disrupted the older traditions of international, state-permitted violence.
This dissertation looks at the international Civil War with the British colonies rather than the metropole as the center of gravity, and as such relies heavily on manuscript sources, government records, and contemporary publications written in or about British America, especially the files of the Colonial Office, alongside relevant Confederate and colonial accounts. I begin with an analysis of antebellum relations between the South and the colonies and existing patterns of privatized violence and informal diplomacy and consider how those patterns affected the Civil War and colonies by examining them in the Bahamas, Bermuda, and British North America respectively.
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civil war, blockade running, british empire, privateering, filibustering, informal diplomacy, bahamas, bermuda, british north america
Citation
Cleland, B. (2019). Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: confederate informal diplomacy and privatized violence in British America during the American Civil War (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.