A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman

It's called the American Civil War, but it was much more British than most people think.

By Carmela Ciuraru / August 4, 2011

A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman, Random House, 1008 pp.

When Amanda Foreman’s first book, “Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire,” was published in 1998, the biography became an international bestseller and was adapted into a movie starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes.

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Now, more than a decade later, comes A World on Fire, weighing in at a few pounds and nearly a thousand pages. It’s sprawling, but never boring. Once again, Foreman displays her exceptional gift for storytelling and for making history both fascinating and relevant.

Never mind how many other books have been written on the Civil War. Foreman offers her own enlightening perspective as an author born in London to an English mother and an American father. (She now lives in New York, but holds dual US and UK citizenship.) Her focus is the significant role that the British played in the war, and although it’s hardly a secret, it remains a neglected element in history books.

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The Civil War is a quintessentially American event, a bloody, four-year battle that tore apart the nation and resulted in the deaths of more than 600,000 soldiers. But Foreman calls attention to the tens of thousands of Britons who served as soldiers, doctors, nurses, reporters, and more. “Though united by language and a shared heritage, the Britons in America were nevertheless strangers who happened to find themselves, for a variety of reasons, in the midst of great events,” she writes.

The impact on the British public was considerable – and deeply polarizing. The whole country “had divided over the merits of the Civil War and whether abolition, democracy, the Union, or the right to self-determination had been the real principle at stake,” she writes, quoting a notable essayist who once explained that expressions such as “I am a Northerner,” and “I am a Southerner,” were “as common on Englishmen’s lips as `I am a Liberal’ or `a Conservative.’ ”

Interestingly, Foreman writes that one of the “driving obsessions” behind her book was puzzling out the unlikely allegiances that were stirred in Britain. For complicated reasons, many who deemed themselves “liberal” or “progressive” believed that the Confederacy held a moral advantage in demanding independence and felt aligned with them, rather than with the anti-slavery North. Some were unsure which side to take, or why secession was even an issue.