The Center for Civil War Research awarded the Wiley-Silver Prize in Civil War History to Beau Cleland for Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy (University of Georgia Press). Dr. Cleland is an assistant professor of history at the University of Calgary and a research fellow at the Centre for Military, Strategic, and Security Studies. The prize honors the best first book by an author on the Civil War.
The Center for Civil War Research said that “The prize committee praised Dr. Cleland’s book as follows: “In recent years, scholarship on the transnational dimensions of the U.S. Civil War tended to highlight the southern reaches of the Gulf and Caribbean, joined by the vast western North American continent. Beau Cleland’s Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria redirects our attention northward and eastward to narrate a wholly original view of the hemispheric conflict. He navigates the grassroots and oceanic marriage between obscure but powerful Confederates and their British allies in Bermuda, Canada, and the Bahamas. From unlikely political alliances, to privateering and filibustering expeditions, to blockade running, Cleland unveils the robust Atlantic alliance between partnerships in the Confederacy and Great Britain. His is a riveting and groundbreaking book.””
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