Matthew Karp, “This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy” (Harvard UP, 2016)

New Books in African American Studies · May 14, 2018 · 1h 8m

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period. In his book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), Matthew Karp examines how American slaveholders and their allies steered American diplomacy so as to preserve and expand slavery as an institution. Adam McNeil is an incoming PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware in…