Democracy's Missing Arsenal

by Michael B. King, John M. Bredehoft (With)

A Nation Sundered - A World Engulfed is the first volume of a three-part work, Democracy's Missing Arsenal. DMA explores a world in which a Confederate victory in the Civil War has devastating effects on international and Great Power relations over the next century. This is not a novel; rather, it is an alternative history of a world in which there is no united United States to serve as FDR's "Arsenal of Democracy." It is a nightmare world -- one where slavery is neither stamped out nor fades away, and where the US cannot intervene decisively on the Western Front because it is enmeshed on the Potomac Front. Volume One begins in September 1862 not with the stalemate of the Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam, but with the collapse of the Army of the Potomac a few score miles at Gettysburg. This victory, denied to Lee in our world only by happenstance, prompts the shelving of the Emancipation Proclamation as well as Anglo-French diplomatic intervention. The rest is, well, alternate history, leading to the conclusion of Volume One at the negotiated end of the First World War -- in 1900. The result of almost two decades of research, study, and on-the-ground battlefield treks, DMA paints a realistic picture of what might have been, with a focus far different from other entries in the burgeoning "alternative history" genre. Northern defeat would have echoed in Bolivia and Brazil, in Persia and the Phillippines, in the debates on Irish Home Rule and in the crafting of the character of the redoubtable Georges Clemenceau. The overriding theme of DMA is that individual actions do matter, that history is not crafted solely by impersonal forces, and that nothing is truly inevitable. It should sound a clarion call for today's world - an markedly imperfect world, to be sure, but one that has at least avoided the fatal absence of Democracy's Missing Arsenal.

588 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 2013

Reviews

[Jim Rittenhouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY dense ah - reads like Sobel-line historical tome. Starts with Antietam ~> Gettysburg and shows step by step all the changes made. Pretty impressive so far; not far enough (1875 or so) to really get the hang of where it's going. Supposed to end in 1900.

So far, quite worthwhile book; be a shame if volume 2 is never printed. Conditionally recommended.

[Not HG · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF, for the second time in my life.
I can't take it any more. This book has a great premise, the South wins the American Civil War and that leads to a bunch of world wars. And at first it's well-paced and informative, but then it gets WAY too informative. This is almost the opposite of For Want of a Nail: whereas Nail was a book you couldn't stop reading because you were engrossed on the alternate history, this one you have to force yourself to keep going.
I think the problem is the scope. Nail focused on the two North American nations so it was small. Democracy's starts that way, focusing on the US, CSA and Mexico, but then it goes all over the world, slowing things down to a crawl. Even on the First World War, the climax of the novel (at least the three chapters of it I read) there's barely any fighting, it's all just backstory of even more countries.
I read everything at first, then started skipping pages, then chapters, then I just gave up.

It has a few things going on, though. It avoids many clichés of a CSA victory scenario, and the system of alliances is very clever and well thought out. But man is is over-descriptive.