Centering on the relations between Austria and the Western powers, this study is a major reappraisal of the diplomacy of the Crimean War. It also proposes a view of the nineteenth-century European international system that differs sharply from the prevalent Anglo-centered view. The author argues that the war was the result of a clash between two conflicting diplomatic approaches -- Austria's traditional diplomacy and Great Britain's new tactics of confrontation. -- Taken from book jacket.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject History of Europe - Modern Times, Absolutism, Industrialization, grade: A (=1,0), Vrije University Brussel (Vesalius College Brussels), course: British History of the 19th and 20th Centuries, language: English, abstract: Historians consider the Crimean War from 1854 to 1856 as the turning point in the politics of the great European powers in the 19th century. This research paper examines why and how this war happened and what the consequences were for Europe and especially for the foreign policy of Britain. It is driven by the thesis that the Crimean War was changing the policies of the European powers significantly to a new aggressive behaviour. Therefore it is divided into three chapters. The first chapter deals with the question why the Crimean War broke out and how Britain became involved. Chapter II discusses the main events in the war. It does not look only on Britain’s policies, but also focuses on Austria-Hungary which played a key role in the war. The third and last chapter shows how the war affected the policies of the European powers. Especially the impacts on the British Empire are pointed out. This research paper is based on a comprehensive bibliography containing primary and secondary sources and a scientific article on the topic. The majors works used for this paper are David Wetzel’s The Crimean War and Paul W. Schroeder’s Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War. 1 David Wetzel. The Crimean War: A Diplomatic History. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. v. 2 Paul W. Schroeder. Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. xi. 3 This research paper is written in the course „British History of the 19th and 20th Centuries” at Vesalius College Brussels. Therefore it will have a focus in all chapters on British opinion, policy and impacts of the British Empire.

The Crimean War was the most destructive conflict of Queen Victoria's reign, the outcome of which was indecisive; most historians regard it as an irrelevant and unnecessary conflict despite its fame for Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Here Hugh Small shows how the history of the Crimean War has been manipulated to conceal Britain's – and Europe's – failure. The war governments and early historians combined to withhold the truth from an already disappointed nation in a deception that lasted over a century. Accounts of battles, still widely believed, gave fictitious leadership roles to senior officers. Careful analysis of the fighting shows that most of Britain's military successes in the war were achieved by the common soldiers, who understood tactics far better than the officer class and who acted usually without orders and often in contravention of them. Hugh Small's mixture of politics and battlefield narrative identifies a turning point in history, and raises disturbing questions about the utility of war.

The Crimean War (1853-56) between Russia, Turkey, Britain, France and the Kingdom of Sardinia was a diplomatically preventable conflict for influence over an unstable Near and Middle East. It could have broken out in any decade between Napoleon and Wilhelm II; equally, it need never have occurred. In this masterly study, based on massive archival research, David Goldfrank argues that the European diplomatic roots of the war stretch far beyond the `Eastern Question' itself, and shows how the domestic concerns of the participants contributed to the outbreak of hostilities.

In contrast to every other book about the conflict Andrew Lambert's ground-breaking study The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853-1856 is neither an operational history of the armies in the Crimea, nor a study of the diplomacy of the conflict. The core concern is with grand strategy, the development and implementation of national policy and strategy. The key concepts are strategic, derived from the works of Carl von Clausewitz and Sir Julian Corbett, and the main focus is on naval, not military operations. This original approach rejected the 'Continentalist' orthodoxy that dominated contemporary writing about the history of war, reflecting an era when British security policy was dominated by Inner German Frontier, the British Army of the Rhine and Air Force Germany. Originally published in 1990 the book appeared just as the Cold War ended; the strategic landscape for Britain began shifting away from the continent, and new commitments were emerging that heralded a return to maritime strategy, as adumbrated in the defence policy papers of the 1990s. With a new introduction that contextualises the 1990 text and situates it in the developing historiography of the Crimean War the new edition makes this essential book available to a new generation of scholars.

Please note that the maps available in the print edition do not appear in the ebook. From "the great storyteller of modern Russian historians," (Financial Times) the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale—these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empires—the British, French, Turkish, and Russian—in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come. In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jerusalem; from the young Tolstoy reporting in Sevastopol to Tsar Nicolas, haunted by dreams of religious salvation; from the ordinary soldiers and nurses on the battlefields to the women and children in towns under siege.. Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is a historical tour de force whose depiction of ethnic cleansing and the West's relations with the Muslim world resonates with contemporary overtones. At once a rigorous, original study and a sweeping, panoramic narrative, The Crimean War is the definitive account of the war that mapped the terrain for today's world..