Click here to see it in Amazon The Crimean War
by Hugh Small

   Everything you know about the Crimean War is wrong

   "One of the most original and thought-provoking books on the Crimean War"
          - Journal of the Crimean War Research Society

What's new in The Crimean War?

Hugh Small spent ten years researching and writing his new history of the Crimean War, the most destructive conflict of Queen Victoria's reign.  His earlier research into Florence Nightingale had left him with the feeling that there was much unexplained on the military and political side of the war.  He was encouraged by the work of Andrew Lambert and Winfried Baumgart, scholars who had showed that there  important discoveries could be made 140 years after the war in the fields of naval strategy and European cooperation during the conflict.  Small believed that many other issues had been unexplored because of the authorities' desire to "let sleeping dogs lie" when the British public was so disappointed about the war's outcome.  He went back to basics, consulting all the primary sources; surprisingly, he found that some of the most important of them have been consistently misquoted since Victorian times.  For example, in 1863 Kinglake printed an expurgated version of the orders to attack Sebastopol, omitting paragraphs that laid down conditions that had to be satisfied for such an attack and the alternatives if they were not - as was the case.  Amazingly, all other historians have used this doctored version even though the original became available by the 1920s.  They all concluded, as Kinglake intended them to, that the Army High Command had no choice but to attack Sebastopol, and therefore could not be blamed for the result.

The result of Hugh Small's work is a succinct and highly readable account which makes sense of the key players' actions in a way not achieved before.  If it wasn't for his meticulously documented sources and his acclaimed earlier research on Florence Nightingale, it might be thought that some of his conclusions were fantasies.  Examples of his new revelations:

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