Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War. By David G. Surdam. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 286. $34.95

The contribution of the blockade to Union victory during the American Civil War has long been controversial. Among those historians who have questioned the blockade's efficacy are Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, William N. Still Jr., Raimondo Luraghi, Frank Lawrence Owsley, and Stephen R. Wise. They note that, until the war's last year, the blockade remained a leaky sieve and that the agrarian South never lost a major battle for lack of arms and ammunition. The blockade's scholarly advocates, including Edwin B. Coddington, Bern Anderson, and Stanley Lebergott, stress in contrast such indirect impacts as the disruption of internal trade, the over-taxing of southern rail-roads, and the dislocation of the Confederate economy overall.