The Crimean War (1853-56) was the biggest international conflict of the European powers in the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. Fought between Russia, Turkey, Britain, France and the Kingdom of Sardinia, it was a diplomatically preventable conflict for influence over the Balkans and an unstable Near East. When it was done, over 800,000 had died from combat and disease in a distant corner of the map in a war that need never have happened. How did it come about?

In this important study, David Goldfrank has examined the archives of a dozen countries, including Russia, to present a fresh account of the subject. He shows that the European diplomatic roots of the war stretch far beyond the `Eastern Question' itself, and are intimately linked to the domestic concerns of the participants. The result is a book that will be essential reading for students of modern European, Balkan and Middle Eastern history, nineteenth-century diplomatic and imperial history, and the study of International Relations.

It begins with the explosive revolutions and military interventions in continental Europe in 1848-49. It proceeds through the petty squabbles that led to the Russian Tsar's ill-conceived military mobilization against Turkey in early 1853. And it then details the fifteen months of intensive European diplomacy out of which Britain and France took up arms together, in a spiteful and mistrustful alliance born of necessity and opportunism, against the expansion of Russian influence in the east.

The causes of this 'eastern' war are to be found in London, Paris and Vienna, as well as St. Petersburg and Constantinople. Shuttling between them, David Goldfrank exposes the very heart of nineteenth-century Great Power politics. He probes the minds and motivations of his exceptionally colourful cast of actors, and he argues that responsibility for the war lies firmly with the individual political leaders, who heightened international tension throughout and then failed, or chose not, to find peaceful solutions to the crises they had exacerbated. But he also demonstrates how economic factors and the breakdown of the Concert of Europe after 1848 created a climate favourable to the outbreak of international conflict. He concludes with a fresh assessment of the impact of the Crimean War upon Europe, Asia and even America, and of the lessons learned, or not learned, by contemporaries in dealing with the Eastern and other 'Questions.'