This landmark book is one of the freshest, most provocative, and most significant monographs to appear in the past decade. Ostensibly focused on southern elites’ control of antebellum foreign policy, Karp offers an almost iconoclastic telling of the relationship between southern elites and the federal government from the 1830s through the start of the Civil War, along with an institutional and ideological history of the southern elites who directed U.S. foreign policy.
Methodologically, the book is not particularly innovative, but Karp’s work situates antebellum southern elites more fully within broader Atlantic, hemispheric, and even global worlds than have prior works. What a difference a change in perspective makes. In Karp’s skillful hands, the received wisdom of a generation’s worth of antebellum southern historiography is no longer sacrosanct. For the better part of forty years, antebellum southern historiography has been dominated by an emphasis on differences and diversity within the South;...