Baumgart , Winfried The Crimean War: 1853–1856 Tate , Trudi A Short History of the Crimean War (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 180 relations between the Polish nobility and imperial government, brings the volume to its conclusion. This last section would have benefited enormously from a map. Among several surprising omissions in the lists of references to published sources, the most regrettable is that of T. V. Andreeva’s compendious Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: pravitel´stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie (St Petersburg, 2009). This is such an enormously important contribution to the historiography of Alexander I’s reign that it is disappointing not one of this volume’s contributors deemed it worth consulting or citing. Equally regrettable is the plethora of typos, and errors in translation and transliteration scattered throughout the volume which somehow evaded timely correction. The main difficulty with the editors’ thesis that Alexander I’s reign was ‘a time of exploration and revision of empire and state-building’ (p. 11) is its implication that there was some kind of strategic development plan in place which, despite M. M. Speranskii’s best efforts, there clearly was not. There is, in any case, little in this collection of disparate articles which emerges in support of it. Moreover, it takes insufficient account of the manifest lack of political will and executive resolve crucially on the part of the only possible agent of change in the Russian empire at this time: the ‘Enigmatic Tsar’ himself. Durham University Patrick O’Meara Baumgart, Winfried. The Crimean War: 1853–1856. Second edition. Modern Wars. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2020. xiv + 297 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.95 (paperback). Tate, Trudi. A Short History of the Crimean War. I. B. Tauris Short Histories. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2019. xx + 203 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Further reading. Notes. Index. £10.99 (paperback). The number of modern conflicts caused by failures of diplomacy and statecraft is not very large. The Crimean War is one of them, argues Winfried Baumgart, professor emeritus at the University of Mainz and the leading authority on that conflict. Its causes were rooted in the so-called Eastern Question, the manifold problems thrown up by the slow and incipient decline and retreat of the Ottoman Empire since the late seventeenth century. But its more immediate origins are to be found in the folly and muddle, miscommunications and blunders of monarchs, foreign ministers and their diplomatists. It was a most curious historical event, curious in its slow gestation, curious in its vast REVIEWS 181 geographical spread (it was by no means confined to the Crimea), and curious in that it ultimately did not escalate into the mid-nineteenth-century world war into which it could so easily have turned. This second and enlarged edition of Baumgart’s The Crimean War offers a magisterial survey of the build-up to the war, the role of the belligerent and neutral powers, the conduct of the war on the Danube front, in the Black and Baltic Sea theatres of war, the Caucasus, the traditional secondary theatre of Russo-Turkish conflicts, and in the peripheral campaigns in the White Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is augmented now by an entirely new chapter on the medical services in both belligerent camps and by an updated bibliography. As the editor of the Austrian, British, French and Prussian documents on the Crimean War (some twelve volumes altogether) Baumgart is well placed to weave together the often involved story of diplomatic exchanges prior to and during the conflict and at the peace talks at Paris that followed it in 1856. Professor Baumgart’s mastery of the sources allows him to offer an analysis of the course of events that is nuanced and aware of the appropriate contexts. His judgment is always acute. Above all, his history of the Crimean War is free from national distortions, so frequently the result of sublimated national prejudices or, more frequently still, of over-reliance on one set of archival materials only. As with other wars, the aims of the belligerents grew with the fighting. This was more especially so in the case of Britain. Lord Palmerston, who became prime minister during the war, summed up his country’s ‘main and...