{"id":1303,"date":"2014-02-08T21:27:42","date_gmt":"2014-02-08T20:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.florence-nightingale-avenging-angel.co.uk\/blog\/?page_id=1303"},"modified":"2025-03-14T11:21:03","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T10:21:03","slug":"the-crimean-war-book","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.florence-nightingale-avenging-angel.co.uk\/blog\/the-crimean-war-book\/","title":{"rendered":"The Crimean War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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The Crimean War<\/strong><\/h1>\n

by Hugh Small<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everything you know about the Crimean War is wrong<\/em><\/p>\n

‘One of the most original and thought-provoking books on the Crimean War … He has shaken the foundations of “accepted knowledge” on the war’<\/p>\n

– Journal of the Crimean War Research Society<\/em><\/p>\n

“Hugh Small’s book made me change my mind in many ways”<\/p>\n

– <\/em>Prof. Orlando Figes\u00a0in The Crimean War: A History<\/em><\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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Read Hugh Small’s prediction in 2016 that large-scale conflict would soon break out in Ukraine<\/a>, on History and Policy\u00a0<\/em>website<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read Hugh Small’s comment on\u00a0the ‘frozen war’ in Ukraine<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

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What’s new in\u00a0The Crimean War<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hugh Small spent ten years researching and writing The Crimean War<\/em>.\u00a0 His goal was to make sense of this, 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.\u00a0 He was encouraged by the work of Andrew Lambert and Winfried Baumgart, scholars who made important discoveries 140 years after the war in the fields of naval strategy and European cooperation during the conflict.\u00a0 Small believed that many other issues remained unexplored, due to the government’s “let sleeping dogs lie” policy in the face of public\u00a0disappointment about the war’s outcome.\u00a0 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. \u00a0For example, in 1863 the government allowed publication of an expurgated version of the orders to attack Sebastopol, omitting the paragraphs that laid down conditions that had to be satisfied for such an attack and the alternatives if they were not. \u00a0Many historians have used this doctored version even though the original became available by the 1920s.\u00a0 They concluded, mistakenly, that the Army High Command had no choice but to attack Sebastopol, and therefore could not be held responsible for the result.<\/p>\n

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, and explains why the Ukraine is so divided today. His final conclusion is that Europe’s mistaken choice of a military solution to Russia’s tyrannical expansion not only failed to resolve the problem in 1854, but ensured that it would persist through our time.<\/p>\n

Click\u00a0here<\/a> to read a summary of the book in History Today (April 2014).<\/span><\/p>\n

Click image above to see the book at Amazon<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Examples of his new revelations:<\/p>\n