The Crimean War was fought far from its namesake peninsula in Ukraine. Until now, accounts of Britain's and France's naval campaigns against Czarist Russia in the Baltic, White Sea, and Pacific have remained fragmented, minimized, or thinly-referenced. This book considers each campaign from an imperial perspective extending from South America to Finland. Ultimately, this regionally-focused approach reveals that even the smallest Anglo-French naval campaigns in the remote White Sea had significant consequences in fields ranging from medical advances to international maritime law. Considering the perspectives of neutral powers including China, Japan, and Sweden-Norway, allows Rath to examine the Crimean conflict's impact on major historical events ranging from the 'opening' of Tokugawa Japan to Russia's annexation of large swaths of Chinese territory. Complete with customized maps and an extensive reference section, this will become essential reading for a varied audience.

The Routledge Handbook of the Crimean War is an edited collection of articles on the various aspects of the Crimean War written by distinguished historians from various countries. Part I focuses on diplomatic, military and regional perspectives. Part II includes contributions on social, cultural and international issues around the war. All contributions are based upon findings of the latest research. While not pretending to be an exhaustive encyclopaedia of this first modern war, the present volume captures the most important topics and the least researched areas in the historiography of the war. The book incorporates new approaches in national historiographies to the war and is intended to be the most up-to-date reference book on the subject. Chapters are devoted to each of the belligerent powers and to other peripheral states that were involved in one way or another in the war. The volume also gives more attention to the Ottoman Empire, which is generally neglected in European books on the war. Both the general public and students of history will find the book useful, balanced and up-to-date.

Winfried Baumgart's masterful history of the Crimean War has been expanded and fully updated to reflect advances made in the field since the book's first publication. It convincingly argues that if the war had continued after 1856, the First World War would have taken place 60 years earlier, but that fighting ultimately ceased because diplomacy never lost its control over the use of war as an instrument in power politics. With 19 images, 13 maps and additional tables as well as a brand new chapters on 'the medical services', this expanded and fully-updated 2nd edition explores * The origins and diplomacy of the Crimean War * The war aims and general attitudes of the belligerent powers (Russia, France, and Britain), non-belligerent German powers (Austria and Prussia) and a selected number of neutral powers, including the United States * The characteristics and capabilities of the armies involved * The nature of the fighting itself The Crimean War: 1853-1856 examines the conflict in both its Europe-wide and global contexts, moving beyond the five great European powers to consider the role and importance of smaller states and theatres of war that have otherwise been under-served. To this end, it looks at fighting on the Danube front, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caucasian battlefield, as well as the White Sea and the Pacific, with final chapters devoted to the Paris peace congress of 1856, the end of the war and its legacy. This book remains the definitive study of one of the most important wars in modern history.

"[Gough's] research...has been thorough, his presentation is scholarly, and his case fully sustained."--The Times Literary Supplement The influence of the Royal Navy on the development of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest was both effective and extensive. Yet all too frequently, its impact has been ignored by historians, who instead focus on the influence of explorers, fur traders, settlers, and railway builders. In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition of his classic 1972 work, naval historian Barry Gough examines the contest for the Columbia country during the War of 1812, the 1844 British response to President Polk's manifest destiny and cries of "Fifty-four forty or fight," the gold-rush invasion of 30, 000 outsiders, and the jurisdictional dispute in the San Juan Islands that spawned the Pig War. The author looks at the Esquimalt-based fleet in the decade before British Columbia joined Canada and the Navy's relationship with coastal First Nation over the five decades that preceded the Great War.

Britain has historically been seen as an upholder of international norms, at least in its relations with western powers. This has often been contrasted with the violence perpetrated in colonial contexts on other continents. What is often missed, however, is the extent to which the state with its capital in London--first England, then Great Britain--inflicted extreme violence on its European neighbors, even when still using the rhetoric of neighborliness and friendship. This book comprises eleven case-studies of Anglo-British strategic violence, from the siege of Harfleur in 1415 to the fire-bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Chapters examine actions that were top-down and directed, and perpetrated for specific geopolitical reasons--many of them at, or well beyond, the bounds of what was sanctioned by prevailing international norms at the time. The contributors look at how these actions were conceived, executed and perceived by the English/British public, by the international legal community of the time, and by the victims. This history of English violence in Europe complicates not only easy notions of England/Britain as a champion of the "standards of civilisation" or of the "liberal international order", but also of the supposed distinction between "European" and "extra-European" warfare.

A comprehensive overview of the activities of the British navy in the Mediterranean from the earliest times until the present.

Now in its second edition, Bourgeois Europe, 1850–1914 is a general history of Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War, a successor to Revolutionary Europe: 1780–1850, also available from Routledge. The book offers wide geographic coverage of the European continent, from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Urals. Topical coverage is equally broad, including major trends and events in international relations and domestic politics, in social and gender structures, in the economy, and in the natural and social sciences, the humanities, religion and the arts. For this second edition, the text has been completely revised, the latest directions in historical research considered, the further reading brought up to date and special attention has been paid to Europe’s global interactions with the rest of the world and the structures and norms of gender relations. Tables, charts, maps and other explanatory features help students explore further in the areas that interest them. Written in sprightly, jargon-free clear prose, the book is ideal for use as a text in secondary school or university courses, as well as for general readers wishing to gain an overview of a crucial era of modern European history.

War, Law and Humanity tells the story of the transatlantic campaign to either mitigate the destructive forces of the battlefield, or prevent wars from being waged altogether, in the decades prior to the disastrous summer of 1914. Starting with the Crimean War of the 1850s, James Crossland traces this campaign to control warfare from the scandalous barracks of Scutari to the shambolic hospitals of the American Civil War, from the bloody sieges of Paris and Erzurum to the combative conference halls of Geneva and The Hague, uncovering the intertwined histories of a generation of humanitarians, surgeons, pacifists and utopians who were shocked into action by the barbarism and depravities of war. By examining the fascinating personal accounts of these figures, Crossland illuminates the complex motivations and influential actions of those committed to the campaign to control war, demonstrating how their labours built the foundation for the ideas – enshrined in our own times as international norms – that soldiers need caring for, weapons need restricting and wars need rules.

This volume brings together ten essays focusing on the diversity of operatic institutions, their protagonists, and historical fortunes in Europe from 1730 to 1917. Its aim is not to understand operatic institutions as locally distinct and isolated organizations, but rather to perceive them as a part of a historically fluctuating, transnational network: a network that was shaped among other things by individual professionals and groups in the opera business (and beyond), as well as by specific socio-cultural and political surroundings. The volume offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics, including networks of cultural exchange, singers as agents in shaping institutional structures, and the influence of socio-cultural, diplomatic, and political factors on operatic production across international borders.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation. Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires. Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.