First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book’s author, Orlando Figes, because I can’t see that it’s relevant.
First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book’s author, Orlando Figes, because I can’t see that it’s relevant. The history of the Crimean war is far removed in time and in space from contemporary literary politics, and I think we should keep it that way.
Second, an unexpected fact. Although the Crimean war is also far removed in time and space from contemporary American politics, while reading this excellent book I could not help but marvel at the many parallels with the present. Figes’s goal, in writing about the Crimean war, was to take the subject away from the military historians who have ‘constantly retold the same stories (the Charge of the Light Brigade, the bungling of the English commanders, Florence Nightingale)’ and to put it back into its political context. He is fascinated by, among other things, the Russophobia of the English, the messianism of the Russians, and the obsession everybody had with the complicated politics of Palestine. He argues that subsequent characterisations of the Crimean war as ‘senseless’ or ‘unnecessary’ don’t take into account the importance that these kinds of issues had at the time.
Above all, he paints the Crimean war as an early example of what we now call liberal interventionism. When Lord Palmerston announced he was sending warships to the Dardanelles to help the Turks stand up to the bullying Czar, the British public was delighted. The ‘readiness to intervene in any place around the world in defence of British liberal values’ was exactly what the middle classes expected from their government at that time.
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