Confecting a British Identity

Abstract

The distinctively British form of nationalism that did much to impel that country into the First World War has its origins 70 years earlier, in the Crimean War. Like the First World War, the Crimean conflict was one into which Great Britain entered for reasons of national prestige that were questioned at the time and never adequately explained. Unlike the First World War, the scale of the Crimean conflict was not sufficiently large to affect a majority of individual British lives, and most of those affected directly, the soldiers and their families, were illiterate, meaning that little writing about the Crimean War by direct participants was produced. The near-monopoly of public discourse in the 1850s held by those responsible for Great Britain’s participation in and conduct of the Crimean War allowed the failings of leadership and organization the war had revealed to be obscured by and even justified in evasive and obscurantist language. The spread of this language, one incapable of engaging with particulars, gave British history in the latter part of the nineteenth century its distinctive character. It was the language in which a new and rather mindless nationalism was expressed.