The Business Of Civil War

Publisher Description

This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion. This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers. Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor. Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.

Within the context of the absence of effective state sovereignty and the presence of numerous armed struggles for power, Nande traders have managed to build and protect self-sustaining, prosperous, transnational economic enterprises in eastern Congo. This book discusses the commercial enterprises of the Nande trust networks and the subsequent transnational community they have produced, thereby challenging the assumption that a weak state or a failed state or even a collapsed state can be presumed to signal a failed society. It demonstrates the fact that several sovereignties and property right systems can coexist side by side, reinforcing each other an idea which seems inconceivable for those with a normative view of governmental institutions and state sovereignty. Rethinking the question of African state formation, the study contributes to the formulation of a more rigorously transnational and local paradigms in the study of post-colonial African state formations. It constitutes an original contribution to critical theory of societal responses to processes of state implosion, and the anthropology of new social formations that emerge when states disintegrate, especially in war-torn Africa. The book also discusses issues related to the dynamics of conflict, new state formation, transnational trade network, ethnicity, and global political and economic governance. In the midst of abundant anti-ethnic literature on African studies, this study posits that there may be a renewed usefulness and necessity in theorizing the salience and continuing production of ethnic differences in a manner that challenges the notion of ethnicity as merely a devious and divisive invention of colonialism that must simply be overcome.

During World War II, the United States helped vanquish the Axis powers by converting its enormous economic capacities into military might. Producing nearly two-thirds of all the munitions used by Allied forces, American industry became what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "the arsenal of democracy." Crucial in this effort were business leaders. Some of these captains of industry went to Washington to coordinate the mobilization, while others led their companies to churn out weapons. In this way, the private sector won the war—or so the story goes. Based on new research in business and military archives, Destructive Creation shows that the enormous mobilization effort relied not only on the capacities of private companies but also on massive public investment and robust government regulation. This public-private partnership involved plenty of government-business cooperation, but it also generated antagonism in the American business community that had lasting repercussions for American politics. Many business leaders, still engaged in political battles against the New Deal, regarded the wartime government as an overreaching regulator and a threatening rival. In response, they mounted an aggressive campaign that touted the achievements of for-profit firms while dismissing the value of public-sector contributions. This probusiness story about mobilization was a political success, not just during the war, but afterward, as it shaped reconversion policy and the transformation of the American military-industrial complex. Offering a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of the "arsenal of democracy," Destructive Creation also suggests how the struggle to define its heroes and villains has continued to shape economic and political development to the present day.

Through his close association with Generals McClellan and Meade, Hooker and Sherman, Le Duc learned to master the army's bureaucracy and overcome the hardships of trying to keep Union supplies on the move. His memoir is unique in depicting the details of life in the Quartermaster Department."--Jacket.

Responding to President Lincoln's initial call for troops, the 18th New York Infantry emerged as one of the Excelsior State's first regiments and mustered many of its earliest volunteers. Formed of companies from across the state, the unit saw combat early, suffering the first casualties of the Bull Run campaign when they were ambushed on the march four days before the battle. As part of the Army of the Potomac, they fought at Gaines's Mill, Crampton's Gap, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Drawing on numerous sources including several unpublished letters and diaries, this book gives the complete history of the 18th--from the first enlistee to the last surviving veteran (who died in 1938)--with an emphasis on the experiences of individual soldiers.

An Inky Business is a book about the making and printing of news. It is a history of ink, paper, printing press, and type, and of those who made and read newspapers in Britain, continental Europe, and America from the British Civil Wars to the Battle of Gettysburg nearly two hundred years later. But it is also an account of what news was and how the idea of news became central to public life. Newspapers ranged from purveyors of high seriousness to carriers of scurrilous gossip. Indeed, our current obsession with “fake news” and the worrying revelations or hints about how money, power, and technology shapes and controls the press and the flows of what is believed to be genuine information have dark early-modern echoes.