Booknotes: Rebels and Regimes

New Arrival:

• Rebels and Regimes: The Nature of Violent Resistance in the Nineteenth Century edited by Andrew Fialka & Aaron Sheehan-Dean (LSU Press, 2026).

From the description: Rebels and Regimes "presents a global view of the nature of violent resistance throughout the nineteenth century. The volume’s breadth and scope reveal commonalities and differences among regimes and insurgents in their different contexts, offering a view that the participants themselves never had."

More from the description: "Using a comparative approach to show how established regimes fought rebels, the volume emphasizes the importance of race, political rhetoric, and historians’ paradigms in understanding nineteenth-century violence."

In pursuit of that, volume editors Andrew Fialka and Aaron Sheehan-Dean assembled ten essays "each focused on a specific conflict or period of colonial overreach: imperialist efforts against Caribbean maroons, the Peninsular War, the Second Seminole War, the Taiping Rebellion, the American Civil War, Russian imperial expansion, British imperial expansion in both India and South Africa, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the Dutch-Aceh War."

The American Civil War essay, from historian Joseph Beilein, offers a "short biography" of the irregular warfare aspect of the conflict. In it, Beilein "carefully tracks the origins of the regular/irregular dichotomy to one of the American conflict's chief thinkers, Henry W. Halleck." In documenting this part of the ACW, "participants crafted an archival record and a language of war to valorize or demonize, and later generations of historians adopted or ignored those labels at their own peril" (pg. 4).