CHAPTER TWO

Western Questions – The Projection of Power

FORMALITIES

The ultimate decisions concerning war, peace and major policy matters differed according to state structures. In England Parliament decided, which in practice meant the Cabinet or its core members. In the United States policy was under the president, declarations of war belonged to both Houses of Congress and peace treaties had to be ratified by the Senate. By 1852 President Louis-Napoleon could make foreign policy decisions, but his political instincts led him to treat public opinion very seriously. In theory only did the crowned heads of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Turkey control foreign policy. In Austria the Chancellor (Metternich, Schwarzenberg, Buol) was usually decisive, if somewhat weakened after 1852. In Prussia the irresolute king vacillated between court and ministerial factions. Sultan Abdulmecid conceded this power to the regular Council of Ministers or the Grand Council. Nicholas I of Russia, however, was free to initiate an act of armed diplomacy and continue on a course unchecked. He consulted a great deal, but made all important decisions in whatever manner he so chose.

Outside of decision-making, the five European Great Powers organized diplomacy in a similar fashion, with foreign offices or ministries responsible either to the Cabinet as a whole or to the chief of state, professional staffs, and regular diplomatic and consular services. London’s Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, H.H. Addington, France’s Chief of the Political Directorate Eduard Thouvenel, and Russia’s Assistant Foreign Minister and head of the Asiatic Department, Lev G. Seniavin, all contributed stability to policy. A foreign ministry was normally a premier service, attracting talented people who could move in high social circles.¹

Heads of foreign missions all had perfect command of French, were usually sympathetic to the country where posted, and tended to share a common European conservative culture with diplomats and high society throughout Europe. Russia’s Minister in London, Baron Philipp Brunnow since 1839 was on intimate terms with Lord (George Hamilton Gordon) Aberdeen, a leading Whig, who had been Foreign Secretary under Peel (1841–46). Britain’s Minister in Vienna as of 1851, John Fane, Earl of Westmorland, had been British Military Commissioner to the allied armies under Karl Philip Schwarzenberg in 1813–14 and also composed martial music. The gallophile Joseph Alexander Freiherr von Hübner of Austria, having begun his diplomatic career as attaché to Paris in 1837, returned there as ambassador in 1849. Baron Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, Prussian Minister in London since 1841, was a popular anglophile. Austria’s Chancellor Count Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein, a former ambassador to both St Petersburg (1848–50) and London (1850–52), was the brother-in-law of Baron Peter Meyendorff, russia’s minister in Vienna as of 1850. Nicholas I apparently used his close friend, General Theodor Rochus Freiherr von Rochow, the Prussian envoy as of 1845, to communicate to some top Russian officials.²

The semi-parvenu Louis-Napoleon utilized this system. An anglophile himself, in 1851 he sent to London his like-minded, Polish-born, illegitimate first cousin, Count Alexandre Walewski, a natural son of the great Napoleon. The prince-president also dispatched to St Petersburg in 1849 the Marquis de Castelbajac, a personal friend, general, veteran of 1812 and an admirer of Nicholas I.³ Certainly the necessary personal contacts existed to resolve conflicts and manage crises within Europe.

The methods of diplomacy of the European great powers were quite similar. There were well-worked-out norms for appointments and presentation of credentials by envoys, with uniform rankings within a country’s diplomatic service: ambassador, minister, chargé d’affaires, and first secretary of the legation, which allowed for relative standings of the envoys within the entire diplomatic corps accredited to a given court or chief of state. And there were similar procedures for the transmission in both directions of ostensible, reserved, confidential and secret dispatches, all carefully numbered. Communication among capitals and legations or between a country’s legations, either directly or via the foreign office at home, proceeded with regularity.

Diplomats often had access to the ostensible dispatches of other countries, so that in the working out of policy, statesmen could assume that their counterparts had a pool of common facts about all the major states. They also regularly used each others’ couriers. Loose talk, mistrust, bribery, disinformation and spying were also part of the game. So were special verbal communications, which are impossible for the historian to trace in the liminal realm of open diplomacy, where intrigues were launched and deals suggested. Disinformation and the misuse of verbal communications played a key role in exacerbating the triangular Russian-Turkish-French relationship in 1852.

The ambassador’s ostensible dispatch could become an important state document with the official version that committed a state to a certain version of events, unless a regime reversed a policy and backed down without losing face by blaming an envoy for exceeding his instructions. An envoy could be recalled at a pinch. A politic way of attacking another state’s policy was to attack the envoy instead, but this could backfire, if the home government, leaning on public opinion, supported him.

Envoys often tried to be major figures in international relations, and they are often portrayed as such in scholarship. In fact, when they were not adhering precisely to their instructions from home, they were usually representing the interest of their legation or an influential faction in the country where they were posted. Home governments made the key policy decisions, and the envoy’s opinion was simply one voice. Moreover, in Western Europe the press, with ad hoc couriers, telegraphs and fast steamers, was often ahead of the regular diplomatic service, sometimes with incorrect information which then influenced public opinion.

THE TERRESTRIAL BALANCE

In the middle of the nineteenth century the pen was indeed mighty, but political power still required swords as well as ploughshares to back it up. This meant, among other things, to organize some of the adventurous and some of the dregs of society as soldiers to follow orders, kill and die, and to recruit some of the seasoned troops and social elite as officers to lead these other men into battle. Every one of the Great Powers had to do this, and most statesmen respected the trained armies and up-to-date weapons of all the Great Powers.

Their armies and navies, like their foreign ministries and diplomatic corps, were structured in rather similar fashion and shared the same technologies, though at different rates of application. Everywhere officers were officers with similar educations, men were men, horse and foot were different species, artillery and engineering were the premier branches commanding special resources and talent, staffs tried to manage and record everything. Standard ships-of-the-line with eighty to 120 guns took precedent over frigates with forty to seventy and smaller craft. New technologies were only beginning to change the calculus of war.

The significant differences among the armies and navies of the Great Powers were due to national conditions and strategic needs. The West Europeans and Americans, followed by the Germans and Austrians, manufactured the best small arms and artillery. It did not matter who pioneered a weapon. A Swede (von Wahrendorff) and a Sardinian (Cavalli) developed breech-loading, rifled artillery; but the British, when they chose, gained the immediate lead in manufacture, and the French were not far behind. The Prussians secretly manufactured 45,000 needle rifles during 1841–47 and then increased production, but quality and quantity were below the French Minie model. By 1850, the French could arm most of their soldiers with rifles, while the Austrians had about twenty-seven rifle battalions (totalling maybe 15,000–16,000) of Jagers and Feldjagers, and the Russians barely had 6,200 rifles and a mere 1.3 muskets per soldier, and lacked the wealth to make up the shortfall with imports.⁴

Using manpower to compensate for technological lag, the Russian army conscripted about 80,000 men each year for a twenty-five-year term. There were also military colonies, where peasant-soldiers farmed, trained and begot more soldiers – a scheme devised during the Napoleonic wars to meet the new manpower requirements. A system of trained reserves was only in its infancy. In 1850 the army totalled about 1.1 million regulars, 118,000 irregulars (mostly Cossacks) and 730,000 reserves in military settlements, not all of whom could be called up. Over a million recruits had disappeared since 1828 as a result of harsh training, disease, desertion, the campaigns against Turkey (1828–29), Polish insurgents (1830–31), and Austria’s Hungarian rebels (1849), the continuous fighting against the Muslim tribesmen of the Caucasus, and a few Central Asian adventures; the supply of cannon fodder seemed limitless. The typical Russian soldier was tough, but neither his weaponry nor training were up to European standards: Russian officers tending to prefer the bayonet to firearms. Staff work was at a miserable level as maps were considered a state secret. Nevertheless, on paper, Russia did have about 500,000 troops near her Western frontiers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The French estimated in late 1852 that Russia could deploy 700,000 troops in European operations alone.⁵

On Russia’s defensive side the lessons of 1812 were still clear. No one in his right mind would dream of invading the interior, but still Russia might have to face the hostility of most of continental Europe, as in 1809–12, or a combined land and sea attack on the Baltic coast. The Tsar’s strategic thinking in this case far outran economic capabilities. With less railway than Belgium, he dreamed of a North-South system along the western frontier to enable the rapid deployment of overwhelming numbers at any sector.⁶

The Austrian army still used the Serb and Croat peasant-soldiers settled in the Military Frontier, but was less than one-third the size of Russia’s. Units were deployed around the realm, with regiments in Hungary, Lombardy, Bohemia and Galicia to deal with domestic as well as international eventualities. Austrian staff work and artillery then were excellent and use of railways more effective than Prussia’s. The biggest weaknesses were multi-ethnicity and limited human and financial resources in comparison to Russia and France respectively.⁷

The French army, with some seasoned troops in North Africa, had increased from 240,000 in 1847 to 450,000 due to the insecurities of the Revolution of 1848. It had a workable reserve system, was the best armed in the world, and was stationed chiefly in the north and east. Prussia, with only 130,000–200,000 regular soldiers, had an excellent staff and developed a superb reserve system to muster 430,000 in order to counter virtual encirclement by three larger major powers.⁸

England had only about 100,000 troops outside India. Many were stationed in colonies in the West Indies, Canada and Africa, or in Ireland, thus leaving very few for any European campaign or defence against the chimera of a French landing. The Indian Army was a peculiar hybrid, numbering a little more than 35,000 Europeans and 350,000 natives, each component, however, with the same amount of artillery pieces. The greatest force in Asia, its purpose was to defend and expand British India, not to supply reserves for England’s European needs.⁹ The United States army barely had 10,000 regulars, many guarding frontier posts against Plains Indians, and did not count at all in Great Power calculations.

The force structures created their own balance. The refurbished and feared French Armée de terre could march into Belgium and the Rhineland, or into North Italy as Piedmont-Sardinia’s ally, and might even attempt a surprise landing in Britain. The Prussian and Austrian armies were expected to spearhead a German response to any French attack in Europe or any hostile Russian move into Central Europe. Russia’s ability to overrun the Balkans was balanced by the Austria and Turkish armies and the British and French navies. Inside Germany, Austria and the smaller states together were more than a match for Prussia.

The uneven acquisition of newer technologies only started to have some effects by 1850. Awe of Russia’s quantity more than compensated for disdain for her overall quality. Neither the French advantage in rifles nor the Russian advantage in numbers tempted them to commence an aggressive war in Europe. On the other hand, Prussian worries about lack of rifles for their reserves and inexperience with their railroads helps to explain Prussia’s retreats in the international arena in 1848–50. Curiously, it appears as if the myth of French military prowess, as much as its reality, worked to France’s advantage in dealings with Austria, Prussia and England, and this contributed to the fear of a France led by the nephew of Napoleon I.

For now, however, the relative weakness of the railroad systems of even Western and Central Europe decreased the possibility of a Great Power war. They had yet to show that they could move men and materiel in sufficient numbers and with requisite speed for strategists to think in terms of the decisive battles and one-campaign victories that would justify initiating a land war.¹⁰ No leaders sought a repetition of the drawn-out carnage of 1792–1815.

THE MARITIME IMBALANCE

On the high seas things were different. The wide range of industrial advancement made for the crucial differential among Great Power fleets, where quantity could not transform itself into quality. It was England, France and Russia, in clear order, with the United States playing the role of a wildcard with advanced technology.

The general adoption after 1837 of explosive artillery shell signalled the coming end of the era of the purely wooden warship. Functional ironclad naval armour against heavy shells existed more on paper than reality, so what mattered was the number of first-class ships equipped with the biggest and best guns and with the most effective shot. The paddle-wheel war steamer was not a tactical improvement over sail, but the development of screw propulsion threatened to replace seafaring prowess with industrial progress as the measure of maritime power. England still had the corner on both markets, but this could change since America and France had pioneered the new war steamer. One Yankee even sought a naval contract in the 1840s to build a ship with a super gun to decimate an entire enemy line. However, the French, who began a new arms race with their screw-propelled battleships, had to order high-quality coal from England, whose navy soon had far more of these craft too. The belated Russian entry into this race assumed British engines, which also powered the steamers in Austria’s small squadron.¹¹

The huge British numerical advantage on the high seas meant that the smaller French, American, Dutch and other fleets were virtual auxiliaries to the British around the coasts of the non-Western world, and dependent upon British naval stations. Theoretically, the French, and especially the Russians, might buy enough ships and guns from America or even Europe to make up for native backwardness, but this nightmare for the Admiralty never materialized. On the contrary, the British could bottle up the Russians or Prussians at the Danish Sound and Belts, the Austrians at the mouth of the Adriatic, or the French or even Americans, as well as everyone else, at their ports. Still, the British found themselves hustling to improve the defences of their home bases in the late 1840s and early 1850s.¹²

The French fleet was divided between Cherbourg and Toulon, which made it locally very impressive. Russia’s navy, the second largest in the world, was also divided. The slightly larger fleet was in the Baltic, which also had new fortifications at Bomarsund – one of the Aland Islands between Finland and Sweden – and seemingly impregnable defences, including the latest Paixhans cannon at Kronstadt off St Petersburg. Russia’s Black Sea fleet had better ships and crews, but a potentially vulnerable base at Sevastopol. These units assured Russian dominance of the Baltic and Black Seas, unless the British, or French with British backing, chose to mount a direct challenge. In that case, the Russians, with only two or three screw frigates, would most likely take a defensive stance.¹³

The Austrian Adriatic fleet was that of a second-rate Italian power, not yet a match for Naples or Piedmont, and much smaller than Turkey’s. All the same, Vienna unrealistically dreamed in 1850 of creating the fourth greatest navy in the world. Prussia at this time had a limited amount of coast and hardly any navy at all. The Americans, for their part, simply did not bother to have more than local parity with the British, total American naval ordnance being no greater than Holland’s or Sweden’s. Nevertheless, American naval potential and penchant for privateering were factors in Great Power thinking.¹⁴

In the case of the Baltic, the Danes theoretically controlled the Sound and the Belts, but had learned in 1800 and 1807, at the cost of two fleets and many fine Copenhagen buildings, not to oppose the British when they were determined to enter. The Swedish fleet, with about one half the ordnance of the two Russian Baltic squadrons, was barely a credible defensive force against Russia and certainly could not defend Norway (under Sweden’s crown since 1814) from British attacks. The Scandinavian states, in their own interest, could at best be benevolently neutral towards Britain in any crisis.¹⁵

The Black Sea was different. The Turks really did control their Straits, the key to Russia’s house, as Tsar Alexander I put it, and thereby hangs an important part of this tale. Since the early 1800s the Russians had feared a Franco-Turkish or Anglo-Turkish attack on Odessa or Sevastopol. On the other hand, Western experts assumed that the Russian fleet could land 16,000 troops at the poorly fortified Bosphorus in forty-eight hours, before any help from outside the Dardanelles could sail upwind and up-current. The Turkish navy was half the size of the Russian Black Sea fleet and of poorer quality. France, however, had two new, huge, untested screw battleships, the Charlemagne and the Napoleon, names signalling imperial and Mediterranean ambitions. Maintenance and coaling proved to be serious problems, but this was not suspected, and it looked as if the Toulon squadron – maybe by itself, definitely if combined with the Turkish fleet – would best the Russians. The Turks were also contemplating buying three screw battleships, which could grant them parity with Russia in the Black Sea, but bind them more to their Western supplier.¹⁶

Turkey’s normal alignment with a Western power presented a peculiar potential danger to Russia’s southern exports and Black Sea establishments. As of the 1830s, Russian and British naval planning considered seizing one or both Straits as a preventive measure. Some British and French thought about a preemptive strike into the Black Sea against Sevastopol as well.¹⁷

THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF IMPERIALISM

Whatever their real or apparent weaknesses, any Great Power army or navy with moderately modern weapons and proper preparations and staffing could make mincemeat out of the forces of a more backward country armed with obsolete ordnance, muskets, and wooden ships and fortresses that were firetraps. The Russians showed this against the Persians and the Turks, especially on the Transcaucasian front, in 1826–29. The British were continuously demonstrating this principle in India; they did so too in southern China in 1840–42 and in Burma in 1826 and 1852. The Americans levied a mere 20,000 and relieved the Mexicans of more than half of their territory in 1846–48, even though the latter had purchased a couple of iron warships from England and pretended to organize armies on European models. Redoubtable local leaders, such as Abd-al-Qadir in Algeria and Shamyl in the Caucasus might hold the French and Russians respectively at bay for years, but eventually had to submit, as did the Sikhs in India.¹⁸ The last time that a European power had lost ground to a non-European one was in 1739, when the overextended Austrians retroceded to Turkey their Balkan conquests of 1718.

With all of this unchecked force at their disposal, the Great Powers could force the rest of the world to follow accepted European diplomatic practice, including unequal de jure Western treatment of non-Western polities. The smaller European states fitted into the European system without any difficulty, as did the Latin Americans, given the European culture of their elites. Nevertheless, such common culture did not prevent the Great Powers from intervening in the domestic affairs of an unstable European or Latin American state, even one so eminent as Spain.¹⁹ As for the rest of the world, the Great Powers took the moral high ground, considered only Western practices to be civilized and exacted reparations and juridical extraterritoriality at the barrel of the gun.

The most spectacular example of how the advanced states of Europe and North America dealt with the non-Western world is the origin of the First Anglo-Chinese War in 1839 over Chinese attempts to outlaw traffic in narcotics. Heeding the people directly involved in the China trade and even in smuggling opium, Foreign Secretary Palmerston felt that force was necessary so that ‘our future relations with China be placed on a secure footing’. He authorized military measures and then informed Parliament. Actual encounters were few and Anglo-Indian battle casualties meagre. The war itself was no more than protracted and costly gunboat diplomacy, against some concrete fortifications and primitive firearms, to obtain the lease of Hong Kong and the opening of five treaty ports.²⁰ One more such ‘Opium’ War at the end of the 1850s, and the land of Confucius would learn the hard way how to conduct relations with the West.

THE EUROPEAN SYSTEM

In Europe, on the other hand, a peculiarly stable structure of interstate relations held after 1818, when post-Napoleonic France was admitted as an equal member to the Concert of Europe. As usual, some powers were ‘more equal’ than others. England and Russia made up a big two within the five; at some point in the later 1820s, France replaced Austria as the third; Prussia was always fifth. After 1848, France, with a Bonaparte at the top, was ready to bid to become number two or one.

The fundamental goal of this system was to provide for order, though this was interpreted one way in London and Paris, where liberalizing changes were generally welcome, and another in Vienna and St Petersburg, where such developments were anathema. Each of the five great European powers had a particular place within Europe’s balance of power.²¹ The British needed to prevent any single power, usually Russia, from gaining too much influence on the continent or a hostile maritime combination from being formed between the French and either the Russians or Americans. A strong France represented everybody’s insurance against British, Russian, or some kind of German hegemony, while the other four shared a basic, conservative commitment to prevent the recrudescence of an expansionist France. Austrian dominance of the German Confederation and Italy was tolerated by the other four precisely because this supremacy was loose, and Austria lacked the dynamism to threaten the other great powers. At the same time the totality of Germany still balanced France and Russia defensively. The United States, like France, had to learn to live with permanent British maritime supremacy and with the prevalence of conservative monarchism in Europe, and then served as a reserve, either to help limit British maritime hegemony or strengthen Britain against a continental combination.

In actual practice, Russia had helped restore France’s Great Power status as a check on the Anglo-Austrian combination of 1814–15. A threat in 1823–24 that France and Russia together would restore the Spanish Empire in the New World led to temporary Anglo-American cooperation, yielding the non-operational, programmatic Monroe Doctrine for American hegemony in the New World. The moderate French Revolution of 1830 and French support of Belgium’s liberal revolt against Dutch rule created something of an East-West political split in Europe. Russia, Austria and Prussia were already linked as co-partitioners of Poland, whose Tsarist section attempted armed rebellion in 1830–31. The recrudescence of Anglo-French rivalry in the Mediterranean in 1838–41 led to a new shift of alignments, with both Russia and Austria aiming to see that France did not lose too badly and become revolutionary or aggressive on the rebound.

The revolutions of 1848 reawakened Prussia’s dynamism and assertiveness for the first time since 1817, set Piedmont and Italian nationalists against Austria, and also resulted in a Bonaparte as France’s president, elected by universal male suffrage, and an implicitly more dynamic and assertive France. Moreover, the popular movements threatened to render Austria asunder and reorganize Central and East-Central Europe according to national principles, which found favour in British and French public opinion. In their own turn, Austria and Russia became aggressively counter-revolutionary. The dynamics of the balance of power were still the same, but the Concert was more fragile.

On the other hand, the new technologies created a different set of parameters within the maritime imbalance of power. France faced the danger that England might find an excuse to make a preventive strike in order to pre-empt the bogeyman of a French landing. French policy was clever enough to avoid such a strike by making it more feasible and hence utterly unnecessary – an implicit guarantee under normal circumstances of policies consistent with London’s interests. Louis-Napoleon decreased expenditures and concentrated on the Mediterranean squadron at the expense of the Atlantic, while in 1852 and 1853 alone the British launched eleven new screw battleships and large frigates with a total of 927 guns.²²

The danger for Russia lay in increased qualitative lag resulting from the post-1840 Anglo-French naval arms race. Under certain conditions both might combine against her and test their overwhelming maritime superiority in local theatres outside the European core, while in Europe proper the terrestrial balance of power still held. Russian diplomacy proved clumsy enough to allow this – whereby hangs the greater part of this tale, and leads us from the West over to the Eastern Question.

NOTES

1.Cf. Lynn M. Case. Edouard Thouvenel et la diplomatic du Second Empire (Paris 1976), pp. 17–33; W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, p. 15; Helmut Rumpler, ‘Die rechtlich-organisatorischen und sozialen Rahmenbedingungen fur die Aussenpolitik der Hapsburgermonarchie 1848–1918’, HMVI. 1: 15.

2.Schiemann IV: 421–3 (citing Seym, to Mlm. 4. Dec. 1852).

3.Monnier: 9–10, 46.

4.Gunther Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette 1976), p. 43; John Shelton Curtiss, The Russian Army under Nicholas I, 1825–1855 (Durham NC 1965), p. 126.

5.A.L. Beskrovnyi, Russkaia armiia i flot v XIX veke (Moscow 1973), pp. 19–34; John L.H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar. Army and Society in Russia 1462–1874 (Oxford 1985), pp. 323–50; Fuller: 238–43; AAT Russie, Mem. et doc, 1831–1852, pp. 360–6 (16 Oct. 1852).

6.Fuller: 252–60; Richard M. Haywood, personal communication, June 1990.

7.Dennis E. Showaiter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology and the Unification of Germany (Hamden CT 1975), p. 36; GJ, 1843–53; Walter Wagner, Die k.(u.)k. ‘Armée – Gliederung und Aufgabenstellung’, HM V: 300.

8.Manfred Messerschmidt, ‘Die politische Geschichte der preussisch-deutschen Armée’, Handbuch zur Deutschen Militdrgeschichte, 1648–1939 (2 vols, Gerhard Papke and Wolfgang Petter (eds), Munich 1979), II: 18; Ludovic Jablonsky, L’Armée francaise a travers les ages (Paris n.d.); Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology and the Unification of Germany, pp. 91–6.

9.Hew Strachan, Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–1854 (Manchester UK 1984), pp. 180–99; EB 1911 II: 615.

10.Hajo Holborn, ‘The Prusso-German School: Moltke and the Rise of the General Staff’, Makers of Modern Strategy From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret, Gordon Craig, Felix Gilbert, (2nd edn, Princeton 1986), p. 287.

11.James Phinney Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship (Cambridge MA 1933), p. 52; cf. Edward L. Beach, The United States Navy, 200 Years (New York 1986), pp. 196–22; Beskrovnyi, Russkaia armiia i flot v XIX veke, p. 496; Lawrence Sondhaus, The Habsburg Empire and the Sea. Austrian Naval Policy, 1797–1866 (West Lafayette IND 1989), pp. 149, 163.

12.Strachan, Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–1854, pp. 196–211; C.I. Hamilton, ‘The Diplomatic and Naval Effects of Prince de Joinville’s Notes sur des forces navales de France of 1844’, Hf 32.3 (1989): 686–7.

13.ZP 1.192, 196, 201, 211 (Russian Admiralty reports, 1853).

14.Sondhaus, The Hapsburg Empire and the Sea, pp. 149–64; GJ for 1848–55; C.I. Hamilton ‘The Royal Navy, La Roy ale, and the Militarization of Naval Warfare, 1840–1870’, Journal of Strategic Studies VI (1983): 183–94.

15.Halicz: 22; R.C. Anderson, Naval Wars in the Baltic, 1522–1850 (2nd edn, Robert Stockwell, 1969), pp. 350–1.

16.AAT, Russie, Mem. et doc, 1831–1852, p. 357 (dated Nov. 1852); Rose to Mlm., 28 Dec. 1852 (PRO FO 78/895); Lambert CW: 4.

17.Art Crawley, ‘Anglo-Russian Relations, 1815–1840’, CHJ 3 (1929): 61; Puryear ERSQ: 110–15; Ingle: 102.

18.John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London 1908), pp. 152–482; W.AJ. Archbold, ‘The Conquest of Sind and the Panjab’, and G.E. Harvey, ‘Burma, 1782–1852’, The Cambridge History of India, vol. V. British India, ed. H.H. Dodwell (Cambridge UK 1929), pp. 522–62, passim; Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship p. 34; Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War. A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (London 1973), pp. 71–6; John Ruedy, Modern Algeria. The Origin and Development of a Nation (Bloomington IN 1992), pp. 58–64.

19.Webster, Palmerston I: 416–78.

20.Graham, The China Station. War and Diplomacy, 1830–1860, pp. 102–229; Hsin Pao Chang Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge MA 1964), pp. 141–60, 194.

21.See, inter alia, Gordon Craig, ‘The System of Alliances and the Balance of Power’, The New Cambridge Modern History 14 vols, ed. J.T.B. Bury et al. (Cambridge UK 1957–70), X: 248–260; also see Paul W. Schroeder, Enno E. Kraehe, Robert Jervis, and Wolf D. Gruner, ‘AHR Forum’, AHR 97.3 (June 1992): 683–733, for a recent discussion of the applicability of ‘balance of power’ and ‘Great Power hegemony’ at this time.

22.C.J. Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power (Oxford 1963), p. 342.

23.In addition to sources listed so far, Const. Memos, 17/29 Jan. 1853–26 Feb./lO Mar. 1854 (TsGAVMF 224/1/241); Mnsh. to Nes. No. 34, 14/26 April 1853 (AVPR K 19); Lac. to Dr., 5 June, 4 Nov. 1853, AMAE CP Turq. 313, 316; M.A. Ubicini, Izobrazhenie sovremmenago sostava Turtsii (St Petersburg 1854).