This chapter considers a key change in the military spectacle of the West India Regiments in the mid-to-late 1850s when the uniform for all ranks below commissioned officer was altered to one inspired by France’s Zouave forces. Representing a form of martial rebranding, this was a dramatic shift that ended the policy of using the same basic uniforms as other British Foot Regiments. Two interpretive frames for this ‘Zouavisation’ of the West India Regiments are offered. First, there was a desire to emulate and replicate the picturesque valour that the French Zouaves had displayed in the Crimean War, a sentiment strongly expressed by Queen Victoria herself. Second, there was an effort to assign uniforms that were more sensitive to the local conditions in which British military units operated. In the case of the West India Regiments, this policy served to inscribe racial differences between troops, as demonstrated by the fact that the officers of the regiments were not required to wear Zouave-style uniforms. This change reflected shifting ideas about people of African descent, as well as about tropicality, in this period.

This chapter takes stock of the many consequences and conflicting legacies of the French invasion of Algiers. It analyses the effects of this climactic event in the fight against Mediterranean piracy. The invasion’s immediate consequences allow us to reflect upon the security goals French actors and their allies had attached to the expedition – and uncovers the long-term impact of those goals. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the two decades following 1830. These were the years in which French expansion commenced and soon posed international problems in Algeria’s environs. Lastly, I discuss how earlier European security efforts against piracy featured at the Congress of Paris that ended the Crimean War (1853–1856), particularly in the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856, which abolished privateering as a legitimate wartime practice. That text finalised the steady delegitimation of North African corsairing and the violent engagement with the Barbary Regencies. It served as a memorial, a recorded legacy of all the preceding negotiation, repression and destruction. It both marks a new era of international law and denotes, in the light of piracy repression, an ending to the old traditions of Mediterranean corsairing.

The conclusion to this book offers a perspective on Wordsworth’s cultural afterlife, finding in the postscript to Leigh Hunt’s pacificist polemic, Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835; revised 1849), and Thomas De Quincey’s pro-Crimean essay, ‘On War’ (1848; revised 1854), the resources for a reading of the politics and poetics of late Romanticism that responds to the contradiction in Wordsworth’s poetry revealed in these polarised works: the clash between the hope for perpetual peace and the grim satisfaction of eternal war. Whereas De Quincey, citing the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, remains obdurate in his support for the ‘dreadful doctrine’ that war is ‘amongst the evils that are salutary to man’, Hunt joins with those later generations of readers who, experiencing war at first hand, found solace in poems celebrating the life of rivers, mountains, and flowers. Though Wordsworth’s poems do not flinch from violent imaginings, for such readers it yet remains possible that peace will come.

The way in which major power wars have escalated into general or systemic wars is less straightforward than one might think. They start for various reasons and then become something else when other major powers join the fray and turn them into systemic wars. The initial grievances in these systemic wars may seem like acorns that become mighty trees. How, for example, does a bungled assassination of an Austrian archduke or even an attack on Poland mushroom into war on multiple continents? One answer is in the ways rivalries are linked. While it is true that the specifics of each systemic war have unique components, there are also some general features as well. One is that decision-makers do not tend to see general wars coming. They make decisions based on short-term considerations without necessarily seeing the big picture. That bigger picture includes linked or fused rivalries that blow up relatively local concerns into global wars. This chapter uses the Seven Years and Crimean Wars as examples. Rivalries like the Sino-Indian rivalry can be conduits to widening the local concerns that have the capability to become transformed into something far greater and more damaging.

During the Victorian era, current events were copiously represented in newspapers and in popular entertainments of all genres: they recirculated through both media in mutually reinforcing ways. As Frederick Chesson polished his capacity to articulate performance critique and launched his journalistic career, George Cruikshanks comet-shaped illustration of the events of 1853 represents exactly how these conjoint realms were experienced by the Victorian public. As a political organiser, Chesson was initially allied with the Manchester School, opposing the Crimean War and promoting free trade. First on the Empire then the Star and Daily News, his journalism represents a broad engagement with liberal causes, Garrisonian abolitionism, opposition to imperialism, and advocacy for Indigenous peoples self-determination. His work epitomises activism nearly a century before the concept was coined. The ability to envision complex dramaturgies at work around him and at great distances from London enabled Chesson to advocate and remonstrate on behalf of the dispossessed and disadvantaged in forms of observational citizenship that align historical forces, human actions, and the imperative to care.

The chapter asks why an avowed pacifist wrote so many works, not all completely negative, about war. It begins with Tolstoy’s personal connection to the military, through both his family background and his own service. It describes the two wars in which he fought: the Long Caucasian War (1817–64) and the Crimean War of 1853–6, and it explains how he came to write War and Peace about the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. It then turns to other conflicts (the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War and the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War) and military alliances (among others, the 1891–1917 Franco-Russian Alliance) in which Russia was involved during Tolstoy’s lifetime. Russia had been an empire since the conquest of Kazan in 1552, and all its external wars during Tolstoy’s lifetime were related to imperialism. Tensions with Germany simmered over many years. Finally, the failure after emancipation in 1861 to integrate the peasants into a new, just society created conditions for civil war that intensified in the late 1870s and led to the assassination, in 1881, of Alexander II and the revolution of 1905. The essay summarizes Tolstoy’s reactions to all these different kinds of war and warlike conditions.

Chapter 5 shows that the claim that the Greek Bavarian-led state was undermining the formation of the nation was further radicalised when scholars, and in particular Nikolaos Saripolos, took on international law and addressed directly the curtailed sovereignty that the Great Powers had imposed on Greece. The chapter argues that if we want to understand the Greek discussions on international law, we need to consider two things: first, the place of the Greek kingdom within the regional legal order that had been formed in the Eastern Mediterranean since the 1830s; and second, the ways in which from the late 1840s onwards (and especially during the Crimean War) this order was being redefined by European powers and in particular by Great Britain. In this context, a number of interventions in the domestic affairs of the state by the guarantor powers made people like Saripolos realise that the fictions on which the international position of Greece was based had to be revised. They also led to claims that the monarchical policies were jeopardising the already precarious place of Greece in the geography of civilisation, and possibly its very political existence.

The growth of the state during the 1840s provoked fierce criticism of fiscal irresponsibility from the government’s opponents. Consequently, a series of spending cuts followed the overthrow of the July Monarchy in 1848, focusing most heavily on public works, which were to be delegated to the private sector to a greater degree than under the Orleanists. The expansion of public works continued apace in the 1850s, but with less government investment than in the 1840s. Indeed, the pressure for public amenities was made all the more intense by the advent of universal suffrage in 1848, which increased the need for the government to promote widespread prosperity. At the same time, the government continued to pursue the enhancement of French prestige abroad, participating in the Crimean War in 1854–6. Financing the war relied heavily on credit, prompting an overhaul of government borrowing as the state issued loans by public subscription, realising on a large scale what previous regimes had only envisioned and reshaping the way that the government contracted loans in subsequent years.

This chapter traces the United States’ status concerns from the early nineteenth century leading up to the 1856 Declaration of Paris. It examines the US approach to the maritime laws of war during this period and derives expectations for how the United States would react to an international agreement such as the Declaration of Paris from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account of the US approach to the international maritime order from the 1820s, when the United States began rising, to 1856, when the Declaration of Paris became the first universal instrument of international law; as well as in the opening stages of the Civil War when the Union government strongly considered signing the Declaration. It finds that contrary to the commercial interests and status aspirations that influenced initial US support for the maritime laws of war, the country’s leaders rejected the Declaration of Paris and sought to undermine it through an alternative (failed) treaty, because the United States was excluded from the deliberations leading to the Declaration and US leaders viewed the Declaration as relegating America to the status of a second-rate power.

Introduced in 1856 as the highest award for British military valor, the Victoria Cross is a product of the Crimean War. Instituted by Royal Warrant, the honor sought to unite public opinion in the face of wartime discontent. The award celebrated military masculinity, honoring those few who had had performed exemplary acts of bravery in battle. Battle technologies have changed across centuries, but the award remains Britain’s rarest military honor, with fewer than 1400 crosses granted to date. The Cross has bestowed fame and fortune on many recipients. Across the ages, it has thus been an object of desire for veterans, regiments, and families. Even today, museums and collectors seek out Crosses to buy and display. The award never carried the talismanic power that its champions hoped, however. The Cross could not quell radical critique during the Crimean War. It did not upend the disillusionment that came with World War I. Nor did it allay the discontent of the colonized in their pushes for independence across the twentieth century. While the honor has sated appetites for heroism, its fetishistic promises have remained unanswered, from Crimean times to our own.

Florence Nightingale was the indisputable heroine of the Crimean War during the conflict and after. Though she treated the cholera, her greatest success came in the realm of public opinion. The press bathed Nightingale, an unusually capable and energetic professional, in sentiment. Vaulted to celebrity, the Lady with the Lamp found her place in poems and on porcelain. Postwar labors in public health, nursing, and statistics across her long life had farther reaching effects. Yet, the image of the young Nightingale endured. She was the subject of statues, pageants, and radio shows; she became the emblem of the nursing profession. Complex and malleable, Nightingale was an icon of Englishness and a global heroine. She was an embodiment of Victorianism and a modernizing force. She inspired loyal proponents and fierce detractors. Nightingale bedeviled the army’s medical men in her lifetime; she attracted ire from modernist critics after her death. The greatest rebuke came from the British nursing profession; it discarded Nightingale as its emblem in favor of more current role models in 1989. This most enduring Victorian heroine was ultimately out of step with contemporary Britain.

The Crimean War was not the first time Britons made their ways to the Black Sea peninsula, but it was the decisive occasion to place the land in the national consciousness, giving rise to travel narratives in newspapers, diaries, and letters. These accounts by wartime adventurers provided ways of understanding the Crimea, cosmopolitan and foreign in British eyes, during the conflict and after. Even while showcasing far-away lands, they showed Britons, the English especially, to be reluctant travelers, glad to head homeward at war’s end. After the troops exited the peninsula and across the Victorian age, return narratives cast the Crimea as a place of memory and self-discovery. During the twentieth century, global politics made the peninsula a stage for world wars and for international diplomacy, culminating in the Yalta Conference of 1945. In the postwar era and until the 2014 Russian invasion, the peninsula became a tourist destination, giving Britons a view behind the Iron Curtain and a glimpse of a post-Soviet Age. Across these changes, Crimean War narratives provided frameworks that allowed Britons to understand history, apprehend travel, and assess themselves.

The year 2020 provides evidence of the Crimea’s continued relevance in troubled times. In Britain, 2020 marks the moment that Brexit was finally done. Several critics found resonance in the Charge of the Light Brigade and the cult around it, which valorized heroic failure. Like the officers of the Light Brigade, the Tory leadership blundered as it led the nation into the abyss. In Britain and beyond, 2020 will be remembered as the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. Like the battle against the cholera in the Crimea, the British struggle against the virus was marred by mismanagement. In response, the names of Nightingale and Seacole found their ways onto makeshift hospitals and rehabilitation centers. And, as in the Crimea, military men – here, centenarians whose youths overlapped with the longest-lived of the Victorian generation – captured the hearts of the public. Most notable was Captain Tom Moore, whose compassion and particular variety of courage spurred him, at the age of 100, to raise money for the NHS before dying a celebrity in 2021. Even now, the Crimean War’s long afterlife provides touchstones for success, failure, and hope.

The culmination of the Battle of Balaklava, the Charge of the Light Brigade occurred over fifteen minutes of tragic and action-packed drama during October 1854. In the Crimean moment and beyond, the occasion has epitomized the war’s tragedy and blunder. Its persistence in national memory derives especially from the poem that immortalized it: Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Celebrating the Chargers as the paragons of duty, Tennyson’s verses gave them a corporate identity across their lifetimes, as they sought glory and fended off poverty. Long after the Victorian era, patriotic Britons clung to the Charge, using it as a tool for military recruiting, taking pride in its relics, and finding consolation in its lessons. Its persistence notwithstanding, the Charge had a changing meaning: the duty that it epitomized became an antiquated value in the twentieth century, as antiwar crusades, comic parodies, and even epic films suggest. Moreover, Tennyson’s verses were no static monument: their complexity has allowed, time and again, for the event’s reworking so that it does not anymore suggest glorious duty as much as it symbolizes heroic failure.

Death is a shared experience across wars, but the cultures of mourning and conditions of burial that accompany it vary across conflicts. Combatants in the Crimea held to a Victorian ideal of death that imagined a peaceful passing and a proper burial. War at a distance made the good death impossible. Yet, priests and medical men, as well as soldiers and officers, ensured that their brethren passed away as comfortably as possible. Men of compassion and feeling, they expressed grief among themselves and with loved ones at home. They buried the war dead in scattershot graves and in organized cemeteries like Cathcart’s Hill. When the war was over, the graves remained a concern on the home front. The wars of the twentieth century and the Cold War, too, followed on the neglect of the nineteenth century. A twenty-first-century campaign to restore British graves in the Crimea reinvigorated Victorian sentimentality, yet ended abruptly with Russia’s 2014 invasion. Across decades and centuries, the poor upkeep of Crimean graves was an emotional flashpoint. It served as a referendum on the War itself and on the place of the mid-Victorian conflict in British history and consciousness.

The Crimean War bequeathed to Great Britain the Charge of the Light Brigade, a military disaster, and Florence Nightingale, a long-adored heroine. These epitomes of the conflict are not static emblems of Victorian England. They are lodestones for writing the nation’s past, forging its future, and assessing its annals. Other innovations and personages to emerge from the War also continue to exert their hold on ordinary Britons. The War inspired the Victoria Cross, a military award for valor, which holds its allure even today. More recently, Mary Seacole, a Caribbean-born hotelier and healer, has come to the fore as a Crimean heroine. Beyond the names of battles, heroes, and institutions, the Crimean War offered immaterial legacies. It engendered forms of masculinity and models of femininity, as well as practices of burial and structures of feeling. The notion of afterlife allows us to apprehend the longstanding, varied, and elusive effects of this mid-Victorian conflict. The six chapters of this book trace facets of the war and its legacies as they demonstrate the persistence of an overlooked conflict in the making of modern Britain.

The newest addition to the pantheon of Crimean worthies is the Caribbean healer and hotelier Mary Seacole, who ministered to the troops at the war front. In 1857, Seacole released her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. The book was an effort to safeguard her livelihood and secure her place in Crimean history. The latter goal was realized with the rediscovery of the autobiography in the later twentieth century. Black British activists and health care providers found an inspiration in Seacole’s story, sharing it in their communities and building on its legacy. By the millennium, their labors had transformed Seacole into a national icon, with a place in the National Curriculum and the National Gallery. A magisterial statue of Seacole now stands on the South Bank of the Thames, where Florence Nightingale spearheaded efforts in nursing education. Touted in the past as the “Black Nightingale,” Seacole was another unconventional woman with a long legacy. Yet, she is a Crimean protagonist in her own right, known for warmth, humor, and ingenuity. An embodiment of distinctive virtues, Seacole has become a Crimean role model for the twenty-first century.

This chapter is the first of three which attempts to question the assertion according to which the justifications brought forth by States when they resort to force were political and moral and had not legal content or reverberations. It focuses on instance of intervention in the 'centre', i.e., between so-called civilized nations. Five precedents are more particularly analysed in this Chapter: the Austrian intervention in Naples (1821), the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the Spanish-American War (1898), and the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia (July 1914). It shows how, in each of these instances, States took care to develop legal arguments to explain and justify their actions, sometimes even engaging in thorough debates about the legality of their respective behaviours.

Florence Nightingale – widely known as the Lady with the Lamp – is internationally celebrated as the founder of modern nursing. Indeed, Nightingale instituted revolutionary hygienic reforms both during and after the calamitous Crimean War, in which more British troops died from infectious disease than from battle wounds. Far less appreciated is Nightingale’s pivotal role as an innovator in data visualization – a groundbreaking rhetorical system permitting data “to speak for themselves.” How Nightingale evolved from her privileged upbringing as the daughter of a wealthy landed family to a champion of progressive health care reform is an astonishing story – one involving a host of influential collaborators and acquaintances at the highest levels of mathematics and government. Nightingale’s passionate and persuasive powers proved highly successful in contrast to the clumsy efforts of another hygienic reformer, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. Nightingale’s success confirms Louis Pasteur’s quotation: “chance favors only the prepared mind.”