The Crimean War 1853-1856 (review)
2001; Indiana University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/vic.2001.0132
ISSN1527-2052
Autores Tópico(s)European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies
ResumoThe Crimean War is badly named and full of paradoxes. It was fought on six fronts, not simply one in the Crimea. These fronts--Crimea, the Caucasus, the lower Danube, the Baltic and White Seas, and the North-West Pacific--were all literally peripheral to Europe; and yet as Winfried Baumgart argues, it had the potential to become a World War sixty years before 1914. The democratic United States sympathised with autocratic Russia (and American non-combatant volunteers went to help the Russians), while Britain and the US came close to fighting each other. In a war which revealed the growing strength of nationalism in mid-century Europe, Britain trawled the continent to hire foreign mercenaries, eventually recruiting (among others) 10,000 Germans, who promptly and consequently lost their own rights of citizenship and had to be settled in British South Africa. This classic example of a "limited" war caused over half a million deaths, putting it in the same league as the horrific American Civil War. Still regarded as very "British" because of the two national icons it produced, the charge of the Light Brigade and the saga of Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War was in fact fought by two to three times as many French soldiers as British. [End Page 165]
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