Abstract
The Crimean War played multiple roles in a larger drama unfolding in the Pacific world during the 1850s. Anglo-Russian conflict, or the threat thereof, took center stage in Russia’s nascent efforts to expand its territorial holdings in East Asia at the expense of Qing China. Likewise, linguistic and cultural misunderstandings among British and Japanese protagonists transformed an ostensibly European struggle into a catalyst of diplomatic relations between the two countries, much to the chagrin of British mercantile interests in China. Instead of interrupting a protracted series of negotiations over a broader range of issues than were at stake during Commodore Matthew Perry’s famous mission, wartime events actually facilitated these exchanges. The joint Anglo-French naval campaigns against Russia’s easternmost possessions in 1854 also foreshadowed subsequent developments, including the Hawaiian Islands’ loss of independence; Russia’s 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States; and the abandonment of time-honored practices from the waning “Age of Sail,” especially privateering. Such a multifaceted sequence of events involved far more than British naval actions constituting “the mainspring of events” and principal determinant of the far-reaching consequences that ensued.1
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Notes
John D. Grainger, The First Pacific War: Britain and Russia, 1854– 1856 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2008), I X.
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Ibid. The slightly more poetic version of Emperor Nicholas’ response is “let us wait until events lead us thither” and is found in sources such as: Zenone Vladimir (Volpicelli), Russia on the Pacific and the Siberian Railway (London, UK: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1899), 199.
See, for example, Ibid.; Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
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See, for example, Rosemary K. Quested, The Expansion of Russia in East Asia, 1857–1860 (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Oxford, UK; and New York: Oxford University Press for the University of Malaysia, 1968) and the Chinese-language compilation Ch’ou Pan I-Wu Shih -Mo, or IWSM.
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See, for example, Jiang Kao [Chinese language], “The Loss of the Northeast China Frontiers and the Enclosure Policy of the Qing Dynasty.” History Teaching, No. 5 (2004), 18–21.
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See, for example, Victor John Coatsworth Bulmer-Thomas and Roberto Conde, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 492.
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Later known as the “soul of the defense” for his role in helping repel the Allied assault. Boris P. Polevoi [Russian language], National Heroes: The Heroic Defence of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii in 1854: Collection of Memoirs, Articles, Letters, and Official Documents. (Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii: Dalipzdan, 1979), 224.
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George Alexander Lensen, The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 330.
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© 2015 Andrew C. Rath
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Rath, A.C. (2015). The Crimean War in the Pacific World, 1854. In: The Crimean War in Imperial Context, 1854–1856. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544537_7
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