Description
Recently, IR scholars have used the framework of uneven and combined development (UCD) to illuminate the distinct role of ‘the international’ in historical development. UCD centers on the consequences of “multiplicity,” i.e., the fact that societies co-exist and continually condition each other’s development. We approach the American Civil War from this perspective, tracing the complex economic, political, and ideological interconnections between the North, the South, and ‘the international’. In doing so, we make a clearer distinction between societies and polities: the fleeting political divorce of North and South exemplifies societal multiplicity (within one polity) leading to an emergent (geo)political multiplicity (two antagonistic polities), marking the societal and the geopolitical as distinct registers of social ontology. Moreover, we consider the North’s attempt to re-subsume the South as a radical instance of ‘passive revolution’, a concept first developed by Gramsci to capture the molecular processes of a top-down revolution both maintaining and reconfiguring ruling class power. We argue that this passive revolution arose from the wider conditions of uneven and combined development. In turn, the North’s project of remaking the South produced a unique amalgamation of social forms with its own distinct tensions, contributing to the rise of Jim Crow.
