In recent years the study of the United States has been reoriented and energized by a wave of scholarship that looks beyond national boundaries and historiographies. One measure of its reach is The Global Lincoln, a collection of essays that recovers for the sixteenth President a vast outlook and audience. The Civil War era has already enjoyed a transnational makeover in work on international anti-slavery (Edward Rugemer, Lamin Sanneh, Gale Kenny), the fluid geography of Confederates (Matthew Pratt Guterl), and the economic convulsions of the war itself (Sven Beckert). The figure of Lincoln, though, still seems a grail to those who would internationalize the core narratives of American history. Lincoln could, at various moments, seem cosmopolitan and insular. He famously universalized the Union struggle as the “last, best hope of earth,” yet he never left the United States, save perhaps for a quick dash across the falls at Niagara. He tweaked the text of the Gettysburg Address to promote “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – rather than of, by and for this government – but he was a cautious statesman who consistently eschewed foreign intervention. (The Confederacy doesn't count.) Among Lincoln's admirers, the global significance of his fight for liberty has typically been assumed rather than demonstrated. This volume invites sixteen distinguished authors to test those assumptions against evidence from Japan to Ghana to Argentina.Footnote ¹

One obvious point of comparison with this effort is The Wilsonian Moment, Erez Manela's pathfinding study of another “universalist” President. Woodrow Wilson had long been presented by American diplomatic historians as an epochal figure on the world stage; Manela's book painstakingly reassembled the multiple Wilsons who were appropriated by nationalists in Egypt, Korea, China, India and elsewhere. Both Lincoln and Wilson were remade by international audiences to suit the hopes, principles or prejudices of a particular nation or era. But while Manela focussed tightly on the “Wilsonian moment” after 1918 – and on the unanticipated wanderlust of Wilsonian self-determination – the contributors to The Global Lincoln take a broader view. Several chapters explore Lincoln's wartime diplomacy, rooting his international reputation in contemporary appreciation of his statecraft. Others consider the influence of Lincoln on the twentieth century's leading politicians and intellectuals: from Sun Yat-sen to Gandhi, Churchill and Nkrumah. Lincoln's reach is not in doubt but, when set against Manela's tightly described “moment,” his influence seems considerably more diffuse.Footnote ²

The contributors are wary of defining a single “Lincolnianism” that might rival Wilson's rhetoric of self-determination. Instead, they identify more than half a dozen versions of Lincoln that travelled widely in the decades after his death: the self-made man; the indomitable wartime leader; the defender of liberal democracy; the proponent of free labour; the opponent of secessionist movements; the political pragmatist; and, of course, the great emancipator. Caroline Boyd, who contributes an essay on Lincoln's admirers in Spain, calls him a “man for all seasons”: clearly his international appeal lay partly in the fact that he was iconic and plastic in equal measure.

Overseas as surely as at home, Lincoln's untimely death was doubly (though not immediately) advantageous: it secured his martyrdom, and it sealed his reputation against the corrosive events of the Reconstruction era. Harold Holzer's study of Lincoln in European prints notes the appeal of deathbed scenes to British and German artists. Nicola Miller, meanwhile, suggests that Latin American observers saw Lincoln as untainted by US imperialism. Although this was partly due to a generous reading of Lincoln's opposition to the Mexican War of 1846–48, it surely depended also on his removal from hemispheric politics at a critical moment. When William Seward steamed into the Caribbean in 1866 in search of new territory, and when Ulysses Grant declined to support the Cuban uprising in 1868, Lincoln had already been sainted as an anti-imperialist by many Latin Americans. “Oh Lincoln! Today is the day you were truly assassinated!” So wrote the Colombian intellectual Carlos Alberto Torre in 1903, as the Roosevelt administration concluded its grubby deal to wrest both a canal and the state of Panama from a furious Bogotá. As with José Martí's tendency in the 1880s to argue that the United States was no longer “the country of Lincoln,” there was a mixture of wishful thinking and serendipity in this nostalgia for the fallen President.

One of the major strengths of this collection is its elaboration of the transmission networks that carried Lincoln to the wider world. Some of these networks were maintained by American officials: embassy parties commemorated the Lincoln centennial in 1909, the US Information Agency carefully choreographed an international celebration of the 1959 sesquicentennial, and George W. Bush squeezed “Lincoln Corners” into Pakistani and Malaysian public libraries after 2005. (A policy that has been quietly continued by Barack Obama.) Other networks were managed by non-Americans, especially by the British. In his essay on Lincoln's reputation during the Civil War, Lawrence Goldman bemoans the “total misconception” of Lincoln's purposes among many readers of the London Times, who were prisoners of that newspaper's skewed coverage of the war. As Adam Smith notes in his essay, this initial British scepticism soon gave way to sustained appreciation and even hagiography, with Lincoln immortalized as a figure of Anglo-American wisdom and courage by the early twentieth century. (By 1918, George Bernard Shaw was complaining of a British “cult of Lincoln.”)

Lincoln's achievements were vouchsafed and trumpeted by leading political figures: Garibaldi in Italy, Lloyd George in Britain, de Valera in Ireland, Nkrumah in Ghana. They were carried by missionaries and imperial officials to the furthest reaches of the British Empire. And they were sculpted and pruned by textbook authors, who quickly recognized Lincoln's symbolic power. It's no surprise that textbooks for Native Americans or Filipinos would seize upon Lincoln, though their authors can hardly have envisaged that the resistance leader Luis Taruc could revere Lincoln while condemning American control over the Philippines. It's more arresting to learn that Lincoln was the only foreigner to appear in a well-used 1902 Japanese textbook on moral education: an entire Japanese generation grew up with stories of Lincoln's probity and honesty, even as they learned virtually nothing about his political career.

While the Civil War and the emancipation struggle are central to our modern understanding of Lincoln, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century appreciations focussed predominantly on his self-made status. Lincoln's commitment to liberty was important to the Japanese intellectual Inazō Nitobe, the Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó, and the Weimar President Friedrich Ebert, but it was his humble origins and “natural” sense of justice that confirmed Lincoln as an apostle of meritocracy. What he was not, in virtually every setting described by this book, was an apostle of racial equality. Race represents a startling omission from The Global Lincoln: many contributors admit that the “great emancipator” seems hardly to have travelled at all. Even where this aspect of Lincoln's career resonated with global figures – Kwame Nkrumah or the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, for example – the circuit of influence seems weak. An obvious explanation is that emancipation was hardly central to Lincoln's legacy at home. By the 1880s, as Kevin Gaines and David Blight suggest in their contributions, Lincoln's views on race were debated more often by African Americans or embittered ex-Confederates than by the white custodians of his memory. But it still seems surprising that, to borrow Marilyn Lake's and Henry Reynolds's term, a global colour line could be drawn at the turn of the twentieth century – the supposed meridian of Lincoln's worldwide influence – without any embarrassment to his standing.Footnote ³

These essays do a wonderful job of recovering the fact of his global reach, but Lincoln-spotting can occasionally seem removed from mainstream political currents, even a little geeky. It would be churlish to expect the contributors to account for Lincoln's lack of influence on particular countries or regions, but the essays don't always offer a domestic context against which to measure Lincoln's apparent ubiquity. Jörg Nagler, for example, draws upon a 1930 essay by Lincoln's German biographer, Emil Ludwig, to demonstrate that some European intellectuals could prefer Lincoln to Bismarck. But he doesn't explore Ludwig's contention elsewhere in this essay – published in English in the New York Times – that “in Europe many of the so-called educated people do not know Lincoln.” Ludwig grumbled that, when he tried to pitch his biography to German publishers, none of them could place his subject: “Lincoln? Wasn't he the first President over there, the one who founded the United States?” At its most expansive and eloquent, this collection invites us to consider Lincoln both as a personification of the United States and as (in Jay Sexton's words) “the standard to judge how his successors have since deployed its power” (300). This careful phrase is worth unpacking. Did Lincoln inspire overseas audiences directly, in ways that provoked sincere disappointment when the United States failed to honour his ideals? Or was Lincoln a kind of lingua franca for foreign statesmen who sought American support for their own political struggles?Footnote ⁴

Some foreign leaders seemed genuinely smitten. Kevin Kenny makes a strong case for the resonance of Lincoln during the struggles over Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with both de Valera and Lloyd George claiming Lincoln for their (opposing) positions on Irish independence. Although he doesn't appear in this collection, I was reminded also of the late Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, whose 2001 book Roh Moo-hyun Meets Lincoln is as sweetly unaffected in its appreciation of Lincoln as it is unlikely. (Since Roh sought to reunite the Korean peninsula through peace rather than war, I hope he makes it into Global Lincoln 2.) But genuine acolytes are relatively hard to find, at least among the major leaders who have invoked Lincoln at one point or another. Gandhi made only a few references to Lincoln in his early career, and almost none thereafter. Kwame Nkrumah used Lincoln principally to translate his political goals – decolonization and African unification – to an American audience. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's embattled President, suspended his nation's constitution in 2007 with the excuse that “Abraham Lincoln usurped rights to preserve the union.” But this was surely directed more at an American audience than at a local one: Musharraf presented Lincoln as an early opponent of “illiberal democracy,” a concept familiar to readers of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s and 2000s. Musharraf's inspiration came not from a South Asian tradition of Lincolnphilia, but from the general's copy of Richard Nixon's Leaders: a book that might warm the hearts of lonely autocrats in a tight spot. Even as Lincoln was invoked in Islamabad, a world away from Washington, he had hardly escaped an American frame.Footnote ⁵

Does it diminish Lincoln to suggest that his global impression retains a distinctly American outline? I don't think so. Few historical figures truly slip the bounds of their nation, and Lincoln's reputation was fashioned and remade during America's startling passage to global dominance. But I'm inclined to think that Lincoln's audiences beyond the United States were quickly aware of his symbolic power not only (or even mostly) within their own societies. Instead, Lincoln provided a means to consolidate their desires and priorities in a world increasingly shaped by American imperium. We tend to think of Lincoln as a man of miraculous concision: a communicator who could bind an audience to his purposes without upsetting the delicate balance between humility and eloquence. From the 1860s to the twenty-first century, American policymakers have tried to export Lincoln to a global audience, and to square the circle of nationalism and universalism that has bound the nation's rise to global power. This collection suggests that some of the most ambitious acts of translation have come in the other direction, as overseas intellectuals and politicians have tried to sell their versions of Lincoln back to the United States.

Among the earliest to perceive the global-historical significance of the American Civil War was Karl Marx. Writing on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association in January 1865, Marx framed the conflict as a developmental stage of “matchless struggle” that would signal the ascendancy of the proletariat both within and beyond the borders of the United States. Lincoln was famously saluted in this letter as “the single-minded son of the working class” – a designation that, with the odd exception, Marxist historians of the long nineteenth century have been reluctant to reaffirm.Footnote ¹

The shift to transnational interpretive modes as a means of generating fresh understandings of the past has been under way for several decades now and requires no further documenting here. Yet, as Marx's remarks indicate, we would do well to note that, in following such practice, it is often the case that we are hardly unlocking a sense of the geopolitical ambit of struggles that the contemporaneous agents and commentators were themselves unaware of. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln at moments managed to supersede even a global framework in his understanding of the conflagration's ultimate meaning, attaching in this context a cosmic significance to the United States, which he regarded as reforging its political identity in the crucible of war. Lincoln was in no doubt that for advocates of democracy and republican government everywhere his nation was the “last best hope of earth.”

The essays in The Global Lincoln are well researched and full of interesting facts and factlets (a personal favourite among the latter being the revelation that Nelson Mandela played the part of John Wilkes Booth in a high-school re-creation of the Lincoln assassination). The resonance of the war over slavery is shown to extend to various parts of the globe but, perhaps for understandable reasons, the bulk of coverage is oriented towards Western Europe and, in particular, the British Isles. Kenneth O. Morgan and Kevin Kenny offer salient snapshots of Lincoln's afterlife in Wales and Ireland respectively. There is, notably, no contribution from a historian of Scotland which may (or may not) be attributable to the “Scottish-Irish” political sensibilities of the Confederacy. David Lloyd George, perhaps the Civil War President's most notable non-American statesman-acolyte, plays a noteworthy role in both these chapters. As prime minister, Lloyd George resisted what he viewed as efforts on the part of Irish nationalists to “secede” from the crown. This was a charge rebutted by Eamon de Valera on the fairly compelling grounds that in Ireland, unlike the United States, “there never has been a union.” Morgan perceives Lloyd George's appreciation as a “final chapter” of sorts given the way Liberal nonconformist forces in Wales and elsewhere in Britain gave way to a rapidly expanding Labour Party after World War I. Interestingly, he notes, British Parliamentary socialists did not share Marx's positive view of Lincoln to anything like the same extent as their social-democratic counterparts in Germany. The link with antiradicalism had somewhat deeper roots in France. Late nineteenth-century French radicals, Michael Vorenberg claims, were presented with an image of Lincoln as a conservative opponent of rebellion, the Paris Commune being likened to the Confederate revolt by the Journal des débats. Perhaps something stuck of this perception of Lincoln as a “benign counterrevolutionary” which, along with postbellum America's embrace of an aggressive brand of capitalism and vicious state-backed violence directed at trade unions, would hardly have appealed to socialists in nations such as Britain and France with their own democratic traditions.

Beyond the European sphere of influence, Vinay Lal offers a careful delineation of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi's understandings of Lincoln whilst freely acknowledging the paucity, relatively speaking, of extended reference. The one undeniably relevant area covered here relates to the inspiration Lincoln provided to B. R. Ambedkar, the former Columbia University student and political leader of the “untouchable” Dalit caste. Lal judiciously interrogates the validity of Ambedkar's pro-Lincoln assertions and questions the analogy made in a 1936 Time magazine editorial where he was described as the “Untouchable Lincoln.” Several contributors note the ways in which various networks of cultural communication set up within the British Empire, such as those evident in India, served to disseminate ideas about political leadership. In one of the collection's most penetrating pieces, Jay Sexton uncovers the uses made of Lincoln by the United States Information Agency (USIA) as a tool of Cold War ideological persuasion. The USIA sought “Lincolns,” in this way, within numerous historical-political traditions primarily as a means of “Americanizing” struggles for national liberation. Yet, as Sexton also acknowledges, this strategy risked “blowback” in the form of peoples contesting the meaning of Lincoln in light of their own quests for what they themselves believed him to embody: political equality, mass democracy and an aversion to exploitation. It hardly needs to be said that American neo-imperial and Cold War imperatives often served to subvert rather than reinforce such commitments. The result, as Nicola Miller points out in the particularly charged context of Latin America, was that Lincoln could be “associated with the United States only in the sense that he represented the last gasp of its founding idealism” (218).

Ultimately, it is difficult to contest the case that Lincoln is embedded most deeply in those nations or regions who either lay claim to a long-term liberal political tradition (Britain, France) or have experienced extended ideological contact with the United States (Latin America, Germany, Japan). Some chapters, such as those on Africa and Southeast Asia, fail to attain a similar level of resonance perhaps for these reasons (though each contains coverage of genuine interest, such as Kevin Gaines's examination of Lincoln's appeal to Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah in his efforts to unify political sentiment in postcolonial Africa). This failure is notable in itself and it is interesting to speculate whether Lincoln will provide any sort of inspiration in the Middle East in the years to come as both violent and nonviolent uprisings continue to demand the reordering of polities and societies there. This will unfold, of course, under close US observation, if not direct and indirect forms of involvement.

Part of the problem here more generally, to some extent at least, might be the collection's own reluctance to abandon the nation-state as a framework of inquiry. Sexton's chapter, for instance, placed, as it is, at the very end of the book, comes as something of a relief after a long run of essays that begin from an identical premise: the nation-state as the clearest prism through which to determine the measure of Lincoln's global impact. This is ironic given the ostensible remit of the book itself, which is to carry interpretation beyond the tired hermeneutical confines of national(ist) historiography. Greater room might have been made for more adventurous approaches – a focus, for instance, on transnational links between those who have shared or debated Lincolnian political convictions or intellectuals brought together through circumstance who have been prompted to deploy Lincoln as an important point of reference. The detailed correspondence between New England Senator Charles Sumner and British Liberal MP John Bright, which extended for a number of years beyond Lincoln's death, for example, would have made for a potentially illuminating alternative approach of this sort. And then there is the strange tale of Lincoln and the international left already alluded to. There are a number of routes into this question but at least a few of the more interesting among them don't go through the traditional nation-state. It might be noted, for example, how Lincoln was used as a touchstone at a key moment in a fascinating public exchange of letters between Leon Trotsky and the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. This occurred in 1938 in the pages of the New International following the conclusion of the independent Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. The Dewey Commission was set up by a group of American left liberals eager to determine the veracity of the accusations of “counterrevolution” levelled by Joseph Stalin that forced Trotsky into exile in 1929. The exchange, published a year after the commission had exonerated Trotsky, was directed at arguably the most pressing political question of the age among liberals and socialists of various stripes: the nature of the relationship between means and ends in securing political goals. Dewey, after registering the view that there should be some form of moral continuity in the selection of means and ends, received the following reply from the former Red Army commander:

Approaching the transnational from a direction itself less tied to specific nation-states might have served both to multiply the number and to intensify the nature of those cross-border connections uncovered. Political ideology seems like it might have been one, among several, potentially fruitful avenues for pursuing Lincoln's meaning in this respect. How have Lincoln's ideas percolated not only within Marxist political traditions that transcend national boundaries but also within liberal and conservative ones? If the South was the last bastion of an authentic American conservatism, does this explain why criticism of Lincoln since the Civil War has largely been confined to the lunatic margins of neo-Confederate opinion? Some sustained effort to illuminate how conservative historians and thinkers across different nations and regions have understood Lincoln and the meaning of the Civil War more generally might prove insightful. Something distinct and interesting about the evolution of American conservatism, among other things, might have been unearthed in deploying such a method. In this respect The Global Lincoln, whilst it has much to tell us about Lincoln's resonance at cultural and broadly political levels, conveys a less powerful sense of arguably the most meaningful element of his “afterlife.” This is, despite obvious fluctuations across time and territory, the continuing appeal of his political ideas and their capacity to harness themselves to new and evolving political traditions. These are traditions contained, moreover, less than ever before, by culture and geography.

For some time now historians of the United States have been working, in the words of Tom Bender's famous injunction, to rethink American history in a global age. Most of the efforts in this vein have concentrated on opening up the narrative of US history to transnational and global connections, networks, and flows.Footnote ¹ But another, no less important, if somewhat less common, strain of this movement has been an effort to think about the impact of the United States, and of American history, around the world.

The US government, of course, has long tried to use American history abroad in ways useful to the needs of American power. In fact, the final chapter in the volume surveys American efforts to deploy the memory and image of Honest Abe in order to “sell” the United States abroad (as well as the ways in which others wielded Lincoln to criticize US Cold War policies). The chapter focusses in particular on the campaign launched during the Lincoln sesquicentennial in 1959, a campaign codirected by the United States Information Agency and the official Abraham Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission. Some readers may find a measure of irony, then, in the fact that this volume itself emerged from a 2009 conference convened at Oxford University, over the Fourth of July weekend, with the support of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Scholars and their subjects, it seems, intersect in curious ways.

Besides four chapters that stand somewhat apart – the editors' introductory essay, a chapter on Lincoln's own approach to foreign relations, one on Lincoln-hating in the US South, and the essay mentioned above – the rest of the chapters, thirteen in all, fall into two types. The first four examine foreign perceptions of Lincoln the man – that is to say, views held by contemporaries during his own lifetime – while the other nine survey Lincoln the myth, the global resonance of the US President after his assassination in 1865. Not surprisingly, the man and the myth – Lincoln the politician and Lincoln the martyr – emerge as two very different men.

Lincoln as seen by Europeans in his own lifetime appears, in a word, unremarkable. For contemporary Europeans, it seems, the American Civil War was a remote, confusing, even quaint conflict, in which neither side appeared particularly admirable. Contemporary British views of the conflict and the man, we learn, were shaped largely by ignorance and misunderstanding. Germans and Italians may have been more interested and perhaps better informed than the British but still viewed Lincoln through the lens of their own politics of national unification. Interestingly, given the common later view of Lincoln as a man of lofty ideals, the contemporary Europeans who admired Lincoln, from Giuseppe Garibaldi to Karl Marx, did so for his pragmatism, while his critics, such as Giuseppe Mazzini, found his idealism lacking. This view of Lincoln as a moderate turned out to be his undoing in France, where royalists saw him as a dangerous radical while revolutionaries dismissed him as too conservative.

Such relative European disinterest in Lincoln in his lifetime is hardly surprising. After all, the United States was remote; its diplomatic apparatus was amateurish, if not downright incompetent; and Lincoln himself, despite his sense, most famously articulated at Gettysburg, that the American experiment was of universal import, was a provincial man who had never left North America and knew little of the wider world. More importantly, Lincoln, unlike other US Presidents of international stature – Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and practically every President after 1945 – did not actually wield or project US power globally, so his impact on foreign lands in his lifetime appeared minimal. Historians now know, of course, that his decisions to go to war against the South and then to free the slaves played a major role in transforming the global cotton industry and, as a result, in recasting global labor regimes.Footnote ² But this aspect of Lincoln's influence was, it seems, not apparent to his contemporaries in Europe, at least not in ways that shaped his image there.

It is in the chapters that cover Lincoln's posthumous impact abroad that the more familiar Lincoln – the myth and martyr – comes into view. Actually, as is most often the case with such things, there have been several mythical Lincolns, each deployed at different times and in different places and for different purposes. The first and least political Lincoln is the self-made, self-reliant man of the people, a common man of uncommon deeds, an icon of hard work and authenticity. Or, in the rather patronizing formulation of The Times of London, Lincoln was “a piece of that common useful clay out of which it delights American democracy to make great Republican personages” (112). Such projections of the “great man” as a model of self-improvement and patriotism seemed to have been popular with authoritarian regimes such as Franco's Spain or interwar Japan, where the Lincoln myth, shorn of any connection to subversive notions of democracy or liberty, was deployed to encourage loyalty to the state.

But some of the most interesting insights in the volume emerge from the discussions of the numerous and often disparate political uses of Lincoln's image abroad. Within the United States of the post-civil rights era, Lincoln is primarily commemorated as the Great Emancipator, the leader who set on track the historical process that culminated with the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1960s (perhaps the two historical figures most familiar to many US elementary schoolchildren today are Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King). And yet, in this volume we find one author after the other reminding us how little traction the image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator has had abroad, even in times and places, such as in sub-Saharan Africa in the era of decolonization, where one would have expected it to have substantial purchase.

Instead, even in decolonizing Africa, other Lincolns seemed to have greater resonance. The young Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa, we are told, learned of Lincoln as a martyr, as a man who took great risks for a cause and paid the ultimate price. For Desmond Tutu, Lincoln served in the post-apartheid era as an icon of national reconciliation after epic conflict. Kwame Nkrumah, on the other hand, invoked Lincoln as a great national unifier as he worked to construct a United States of Africa patterned after the American model. Other Africans saw Lincoln's spirit at work in Nigeria's General Gowon, who launched a brutal war of national unification from 1967 to 1970 to fend off the secession of Nigeria's eastern provinces. Perhaps, Gaines muses about the relative African disinterest in Lincoln the emancipator, the notion of acquiring freedom by white decree seemed unlikely, even unappealing, to Africans struggling mightily for theirs.

Indeed, the image of Lincoln as nation-builder and national (re)unifier emerges as the one that has had the most enduring resonance abroad across time and space. Already in the later nineteenth century Lincoln was often linked with other national icons such as Bolívar, Garibaldi, Cavour, Bismarck, and Gladstone.Footnote ³ This image of Lincoln was not only durable but flexible; in Ireland, Lincoln as forceful opponent of secession has been used by Unionists to argue against the secession of Ireland from the United Kingdom and by Irish nationalists to protest the separation of Ulster from Ireland. As always with claims that the nation must remain undivided and the people must govern, much comes down to who gets to decide the central questions: where is the nation? Who are the people?

Americans, for their part, have, of course, preferred to see (and to advertise) Lincoln not simply as a nation-builder but as a leader who promoted national unity predicated on American democratic principles: government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It was this Lincoln that the US military occupation promoted in Japan after 1945 as it labored to mold Japan in America's image. It is also the image suggested in a World War II-era stamp produced by the US Postal Service that set Lincoln beside Chinese national hero Sun Yat-sen and equated Lincoln's famous tripartite formulation of popular government to Sun's Three Principles of the People (234).

Lincoln's legacy, not unusually for famous martyrs, had something for everyone: to German conservatives he was a Bismarck; to Weimar intellectuals, a symbol of democracy; and to Karl Liebknecht, following Marx's lead, a proto-socialist. This last characterization has more recently been adopted, less favorably, by activists on the radical libertarian right, for whom Lincoln is the fountainhead of all that is evil, a tyrant who concentrated power in the federal government and ran roughshod over states' rights and individual freedoms.

The one weakness of this otherwise well-compiled, illuminating collection is its Eurocentric coverage. Of the thirteen chapters that deal with perceptions of Lincoln in specific regions outside the US, fully nine cover countries or regions within Europe and only four look at the rest of the world. Thus, while we have four chapters devoted to the British Isles (one on Britain and three others on England, Ireland, and Wales, though not Scotland), the entirety of East Asia, Latin America, and Africa are covered in one chapter each. Moreover, there is nothing at all on anywhere in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or (perhaps most puzzlingly) Europe east of Germany. Only the introduction (and readers' imaginations) suggests how fascinating such coverage might have been. It notes Lincoln's resonance in the post-emancipation Russian Empire and the interest in him by Marx and other early socialists. It mentions the French censoring of a 1929 Vietnamese-language biography of Lincoln that exhorted young Vietnamese to follow his example and liberate their country from the slavery of French colonialism. And finally, it lists Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, as well as Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hungarian, and Slovak, among the thirty-something languages that have Lincoln biographies.

Granted, just as Lincoln knew to leaven his ideals with pragmatism, compiling a collection of essays must be an exercise in the art of the possible. Still, the necessary breadth of the extra-European chapters makes them at once some of the most interesting in the volume and also the ones that appear to provide the most fertile ground for further research. The chapter on East Asia, compelled to cover both China and Japan (though not Korea); the chapter on Africa, shifting gamely from Ghana to South Africa, Nigeria to Tanzania, and beyond; or the chapter on Latin America, covering Cuba, Mexico, Chile, and elsewhere (though not, understandably but regrettably, Haiti), offer us fascinating glimpses into the significance of Lincoln, and of the US image more broadly, in a panoply of colonial and postcolonial contexts, and they leave us wishing to know much more. We will not, one hopes, have to wait for the Lincoln sesquibicentennial to fulfill that wish.

We would like to thank Nicholas Guyatt, Erez Manela, and Anthony Hutchison for their constructive comments on our collaborative project. Thanks also to Bevan Sewell for bringing this to print.

The reviews all situate The Global Lincoln within the recent trend of globalizing the history of the United States. We certainly hoped that the application of this approach would cast new light on the significance of a US statesman who is almost exclusively understood in national terms. We also hoped that the project would make a methodological intervention. The range of knowledge and languages required to pursue global history lends itself to collaborative scholarship. This meant finding scholars who specialized in areas other than the United States, not just calling upon the legion of Americanists who are now eager to take part in a transnational enterprise. The greatest challenge in this project was assembling a team of scholars who worked in fields far removed from our own. We were fortunate to complete the very strong roster that we did, for the assignment we presented to the contributors in an email that they received out of the blue one day in 2006 was a substantial one. We invited them to pursue time-consuming primary research on a topic that in almost all cases was not related to their current research agenda.

Erez Manela notes the disproportionate coverage given to Western Europe in the volume. We join him in hoping that our volume will prompt more work on the reception and appropriation of American symbols in areas outside Europe. That said, the volume's focus on British views of Lincoln was not without justification. It should come as no surprise that here was to be found the richest discussion of Lincoln. Furthermore, as the communications hub of a global, imperial network, Britain often served as a filter and transmitter of views of Lincoln around the world. We found, for example, that British biographies of Lincoln ended up scattered across the empire, in some cases eclipsing those exported from the United States. Charting the plural story of English, Welsh, and Irish views of Lincoln thus was important to understand the more general “Global Lincoln.”

Anthony Hutchison contends that the volume is too centered on nation-states and suggests that more attention could have been given to the transnational networks and movements whose invocations and appropriations of Lincoln did not correspond to national borders. Again, we hope our volume will prompt research of this nature (and Hutchison's suggestions helpfully provide possible starting points). That said, the contributions to The Global Lincoln do make an effort to map out some such transnational links, even while having a chapter structure premised upon the building blocks of nation-states. Demin Tao, for example, explores the connections between Japanese and Chinese admirers of Lincoln whose main preoccupation was national development and economic modernization. Nicola Miller demonstrates how much of the Latin American discussion of Lincoln in the late nineteenth century stemmed from Sarmiento's biography – a biography in which Lincoln's signature speeches were inaccurately translated so as to promote Sarmiento's own vision of Latin American nation-building. The Lincoln that circulated in Latin America, in other words, was the product of transnational exchange amongst Latin American nation-builders.

In nearly every case, our contributors found that the image of Lincoln was inextricably linked to the construction of the modern nation-state. It is no coincidence that the height of Lincoln's global celebrity coincided with the apogee of liberal nationalism. Lincoln both represented the successful consolidation of the American Union and inspired national unification and development abroad. The book connects foreign images of Lincoln to globalization, but at its heart are the nationalist appropriations of him in foreign lands. Nicholas Guyatt raises a very interesting question on this point: to what extent have foreign assessments of Lincoln crossed back to the United States? The volume touches on this in relation to diplomatic history, but we only scratched the surface. The broader point here that Guyatt raises is a reminder that transnational connections move in both directions.

The reviewers all note the surprising lack of the “Great Emancipator” theme in foreign images of Lincoln. We too were surprised by this finding. Indeed, our initial letter to the contributors specifically encouraged them to seek out foreign versions of the “Great Emancipator” theme. Fortunately, the contributors let the evidence, rather than their editors, determine their findings. There is a larger point to be drawn from this. As we proceed with the project on the globalization of US history, we must be careful not to project assumptions and frameworks that have emerged from national historiographies onto foreign ones. We call this danger “historiographical imperialism” in the preface. It is the kind of imperialism that derives more from absent-mindedness than from calculated design, but it is nonetheless a danger lurking within the global/transnational turn, particularly for Americanists.

Finally, Manela is right to note the irony that our conference and project is itself a part of the history of “Global Lincoln.” Historians have played a key role in formulating and propagating Lincoln's image abroad. In the course of our research, we came across a document from the USIA records from the 1959 sesquicentennial that referenced the scholarship of a young British historian named J. R. Pole, a scholar who will need no introduction to readers of this journal.