"The means of doing us a great deal of injury": The involvement of North Germany's port cities and merchants in the American Civil War, 1861-65

Abstract

Current scholarship analyses the American Civil War as a global shock that affected people and places throughout the transatlantic world. But curiously, the role of Central Europe and its major Atlantic ports and merchants has mostly been neglected by this historiographic trend so far. This is rather astonishing, since Hamburg, Bremen, and their hinterlands played a crucial role for the global impacts of North America's bloodiest conflict.