Very few people have heard of the 'Pig War,' since this episode in American history was overshadowed by the U.S. Civil War and the beginning of mass immigration from Europe. Yet this diplomatic conflict between the United States and Great Britain, resulting from the shooting of a single pig, lasted more than twenty years, and greatly impacted the relationship between the two nations. Scott Kaufman carefully examines, and places into both an American and an international context, the origins and the resolution of this tense stand-off over contested colonial territory. His story not only reveals a tense dispute between a burgeoning imperial power and a waning empire but also highlights the changing Reconstruction-era U.S. national ideology, foreign diplomacy, and control over foreign markets. The Pig War contributes greatly to nineteenth-century American and British diplomatic history and sheds new light on the emergence of the United States as an international superpower.

"Kaufman's book is workmanlike; his research is is very thorough in British and US sources. . . .Recommended." - CHOICE

"This review of the subject extends the research base into some little known archives. . .." - The Journal Of Military History

"The Pig War is useful as a compact treatment of a critical period in Anglo-American relations that offers a retelling of the 1859 incident in the context of an ongoing diplomatic question….A concise supplement to studies of nineteenth century Anglo-American relations." - Journal of American History