Wayne H. Bowen. Spain and the American Civil War.

Abstract

Amid the recent interest in internationalizing the history of the American Civil War, Spain has received little attention. As Wayne H. Bowen observes, existing scholarship on the wider world's engagement with the American conflict has focused too much on Britain and, to a lesser extent, France. To ignore Spain and its Caribbean colonies, he successfully demonstrates in this book, is to miss an important part of the story. A potentially important part of the story, at least. For Bowen does not so much argue that Spain actually affected the course of the Civil War in any significant way (or, for that matter, that the Civil War had any fundamental impact on Spanish history) as that it might have done so. Bowen makes a major contribution to our understanding of the global implications of the Civil War by sketching out the contours of Spanish responses to the U.S. crisis against the backdrop of Spain's global presence in the 1850s and 1860s. After decades of decline, these years saw a resurgence of Spain's global aspirations, inspiring interventions in the Crimea, Indochina, Morocco, Mexico, and most importantly Santo Domingo, which was re-annexed by Spain between 1861 and 1865 in a move that would have been unthinkable had the United States not been distracted by civil war. Spain seemed poised to grasp any opportunity to reestablish some portion of its former global dominance. Events in the United States between 1861 and 1865 offered just such an opportunity, but it was one of which Spain ultimately did not take advantage.