The Origins of the Crimean War

David M. Goldfrank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317872290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Crimean War (1853-56) between Russia, Turkey, Britain, France and the Kingdom of Sardinia was a diplomatically preventable conflict for influence over an unstable Near and Middle East. It could have broken out in any decade between Napoleon and Wilhelm II; equally, it need never have occurred. In this masterly study, based on massive archival research, David Goldfrank argues that the European diplomatic roots of the war stretch far beyond the `Eastern Question' itself, and shows how the domestic concerns of the participants contributed to the outbreak of hostilities.

PART ONE

The Setting

CHAPTER ONE

Western Questions – The Home Fronts

EUROPE’S HEGEMONY

In the middle of the nineteenth century the world was much less inhabited and developed than today, but the differences among regions and culture zones were just as striking. Only about 1.2 billion people were alive. One-third lived in China, one-third in the rest of Asia, a twelfth in Africa, and a fortieth in Latin America – altogether about 950 million. On the other hand, 265 million Europeans and North Americans resided in the regions where international power was concentrated.

The population of Europe and North America was unevenly divided among the major states: about 60 million in the Russian Empire, 35 million in France, 33 million in the German states excluding Austria, 30 million in the conglomerate domains of the Austrian Emperor, 26 million in Great Britain, 19 million in the Italian states excluding Austrian Venetia and Lombardy, 15 million in Spain, and maybe 10 million in European Turkey. The United States had only about 23 million.¹

Europe as a whole and each of its major states were divided into regions of greater and lesser development in culture and in the organization of technology, economic life, administration, and politics. Great Britain had the highest level of industrialization and urbanization in the world and about 70 per cent male literacy, more than twice that of Japan, the most advanced non-Western society. The corresponding rates for France, Germany and the more advanced part of Austria were about 55 per cent, and for white males in the United States, 90 per cent. The backward parts of Austria were more like Russia, where less than 20 per cent of the men could read.

On the other hand, even within the most advanced parts of the non-Western world, traditionally educated upper classes, literate state officials, and religious leaders tried to limit intercultural contacts and innovations to what was militarily useful. In most of Latin America, native élites, sharing in a conservative European culture, by and large maintained the Iberian colonial administration. Specialization and production for the world market did not enable any of these societies to operate within the more advanced world as equal partners.

Indeed the European world bristled with zones of cultural and economic dynamism. The development of steam power and its application to mining, manufacture and transportation gave an overwhelming advantage to the developed sectors of the European world. Eventually, the non-Europeans were going to be compelled, as one East Asian put it, to adopt the Europeans’ ‘putrid’ calendar and wear their ‘filthy’ clothing.

The history of international competition from 1492, when Columbus sailed to Santo Domingo, until 1853, when the American Admiral Perry steamed to Japan, illustrates the political aspect of the Western Question for the non-Western world. In 1492 the imperialism of several Asian, African and American states flourished along with those of Europe. By 1853 five European and one North American state marched, rode or sailed off with the great prizes at the political expense of the others. When Europeans lost, it was to each other. Together, under Britain’s de facto leadership, the advanced countries presented the rest of the world with a political, legal, commercial, scientific and military culture, that, as the Japanese soon discovered, could be beaten only by being joined.

WAYS AND MEANS OF PRODUCTION

A materialist would argue that the key Western Question for the West and non-West alike lay in the technical and social organization of production. More effective circulation of money, instruments of credit, distribution of goods and capital formation went hand in hand with the more efficient tools. As is the case today, the qualitative contrasts among these forms of production and the quantitative differences among societies possessing these forms determined the economic and political ranking of states. In contrast to a century earlier, the most backward of the major European powers around 1850 was well advanced over any non-Western society, except Japan.²

Industrialization was the chief measure of advancement and the bearer of what made the West so different from its own past, not to say the rest of the world. The results could be seen in all sorts of machinery, railroads, steamships with first paddle wheels and then screw propellers, larger and stronger wrought-iron bridges, iron-frame buildings, increased newspaper circulation, the telegraph, mass production of rifles, breech-loading ordnance (artillery), and war steamers. The Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in a huge hall built of iron and glass (rebuilt as the Crystal Palace), was testimony to a new British-led industrial civilization.

To grasp the ‘modern’ world of c. 1850 and its mechanisms more accurately, however, one should also bear in mind the degree to which animal, human and wind power still prevailed and improved. For example, in 1852, Britain’s 25,000 sail carried 143 tons per craft, while the 1,270 steamers could ferry only 14 per cent more per ship. In France, the 1830s and the 1840s were the most intense decades ever for the construction of canals. Mountainous Austria witnessed a massive expansion of her primary road system for horse-drawn vehicles from the latter eighteenth century onward.³

A variety of pre-modern modes of production still flourished in the great states of Europe and North America of 1850. Small-scale agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishing, crafts and the putting-out system were everywhere. Serf labour powered much of Russia’s agriculture, industry, and mining; agrarian slavery prevailed in the US South; tenant-farming was widespread in British ruled Ireland; and large scale agriculture with free labour was practised on many English and Prussian estates, as well as in Austria, where former serfs were hit with additional payments for their recently acquired freedom.⁴

The immensely contrasting incidence of advancement was a crucial factor in the power potential of various states. Britain’s 14,150 power-looms and 240,000 handlooms of 1820 had changed to 250,000 and 40,000 respectively in 1850, by which time there were 4.5 million industrial workers, nine times more than in Russia.⁵ In 1850 Britain probably had more than half of the world’s steam power and produced more than half the world’s pig iron, even though the railroad system of the United States was almost one-third longer. This speaks for Britain’s all-round development. Russia, by contrast, even when the St Petersburg-Moscow line was completed in 1851, had only 25 per cent the gross and 3 per cent the per capita amount of railways found in the agrarian American South, and no more mechanized industry than tiny Belgium. Russia thus possessed a very weak technical basis for its reputedly greatest army in the world.

Standards of living, even in advanced countries, were low in contrast to today. Although in England and the United States they were roughly twice what an average person needed to feed and house himself adequately according to 1850 standards, many working people lived well below the ‘poverty line’, especially on the European continent.⁶ The seasonal or semi-employed reserve proletariat, very poor rural and urban labourers, were ubiquitous figures, but indispensable to the functioning of the economies. Widespread low standards of living for the majority explain why predatory, expansionist ventures normally generated more support than opposition. Life was still quite cheap. On the other hand, the civilization of industrialization was one of periodic food shortages and hardship, Utopian nostalgia and rising expectations for working people, so even the advanced states were sitting on potential social powder kegs.⁷

COMMERCE AND ITS AMBITIONS

Industrial and financial power translated into commercial power, Great Britain being by far the greatest trading nation, especially for suppliers of raw materials, foodstuffs and specialized craft products. In turn, the Russian, Ottoman and Chinese Empires, India, Latin America and the United States, respectively accounted for 3.5, 5.5, 5, 11.75, 15.5 and 20 per cent of British external commerce. This extra-European ‘lion’s share’ of trade created for Britain a world-wide ‘empire in all but name’.⁸ As foreign trade constituted about 35 per cent of GNP, the British were very touchy about anything, including other states’ armies, fleets or fiscal and industrial policies that might disrupt or threaten this commerce.

Britain was also by far the leading foreign investor, overseas credit holdings having mushroomed from £24.6 million (12 per cent of GNP) in 1816 to £218 million (41.5 per cent of GNP) in 1851. The French, in contrast, held only about £25 million (5 per cent of GNP), most of it in neighbouring Spain, Belgium and Italy. The United States, in greater contrast, owed a net £44 million (10.5 per cent of GNP).⁹

Almost all of Britain’s foreign wars had been connected with commerce. As rivals raised tariffs to develop their industries, though, Britain turned to an ‘imperialism of free trade’, which accommodated competitors, forged ahead with better production techniques, and forced open the markets of backward states, sometimes with gunboats and landing parties.¹⁰ The predominance and utility of the British fleet for all trading powers, the commercial and financial dependence of the United States upon Britain, and the unwillingness of the French after Napoleon to risk any more maritime disasters all contributed to the remarkable fact that 1815 was the last year that any rivalries among the three great North Atlantic powers led to war. The residue of self-righteous hostility among them had ceded to enlightened self-interest, and a spiteful co-imperialism prevailed, whereby the maritime powers supported each other’s commercially inspired gunboat diplomacy.

France, Prussia and Austria avoided Britain’s commercial clutch and had their own special trading zones, French and Prussian industry also benefiting from Britain’s relative free trade policies. Prussia’s chief commercial concern was developing the German Zollverein or Customs Union, which also dominated Holland’s commerce (32 per cent), and...