In his very informative book, Gregory Carleton examines the Crimean War and sees it as the first modern war. He rightly emphasizes the use of new weapons, which can be described as the industrialization of warfare, setting in motion a development that would continue in the American Civil War, the German wars of unification, both world wars and, finally, the Cold War. He emphasizes the technological and chemical innovations, such as the use of railways and the telegraph, but also the use of chlorine gas. Equally plausible is his emphasis on the new forms of war reporting which, in the Crimean War, demonstrated to domestic audiences that war could not be understood solely in terms of heroic tales, but often represented pure suffering. Carleton argues that the Crimean War had an ideological justification in the emphasis on exceptionalism on both the British and Russian sides, but that this was subordinated to the power rivalry between two empires, one land and one sea. It should not be underestimated, however, that in the political discourse each opponent was perceived as the other, especially Russia in the west. On the other hand, although the Crimean War was deliberately provoked, the reasons for it seemed rather marginal and the war ended with insignificant territorial changes, albeit with horrendous human losses. Lev Tolstoi, in particular, played an important role as a war correspondent and writer. His experiences and observations during the war were incorporated into his literary works. These works offered a realistic and critical view of the horrors of war and human suffering, which greatly influenced public perceptions of the war.

It is not always clear what Carleton considers to be specifically modern. Is it the industrialization of warfare leading to mass casualties, the coverage of war, or the quagmires that have plagued the great powers ever since, from the trenches of the First World War, to the jungles of Vietnam, to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine twenty years later? In recent decades, various characterizations of wars as modern have been emphasized: in addition to the terms explained by Carleton, we find such notions as the industrialization of warfare (especially Michael Geyer), the military revolutions of the seventeenth century that helped discipline soldiers and society (Michel Foucault), and finally the ideologization of war since the French Revolution (John Keegan). Although Carleton emphasizes in several places the internal fragility of the great empires that existed at the time and the fear of a repetition of the political revolutions that characterized the nineteenth century, he does not sufficiently incorporate this into the discussion of what was modern about the Crimean War. This war could also be seen as an attempt at a revolution from above, in which the actual opponent was not the English or Russian empires, but the dissolution of the European empires, which was to be countered by a revolution from above: the war waged against external enemies was intended to help overcome internal political problems and changes within society, especially after the experience of more than sixty years of almost permanent revolutions in Europe and the US. Ultimately, the question is whether war is waged more for domestic political reasons or because of foreign policy dynamics and the international system. As far as the latter is concerned, the Crimean War was not a modern war in the sense of modern ideologies, but an almost classical war of empires for spheres of influence, which was given its own dynamic by the simultaneous process of the dissolution of the Russian, Austrian, and Turkish empires, combined with the industrialization of warfare.

Gregory Carleton has succeeded in providing a historically very illuminating description of the Crimean War, which he rightly describes as the expression of a quagmire. He has also succeeded in vividly describing the internal dynamics of the war. The extent to which the Crimean War brought technological progress in certain areas, with devastating human losses, is not disputed, but whether it should therefore be regarded as the first truly modern war is likely to remain controversial. This is because some of the aspects he emphasizes had already existed before (loss of life in the Thirty Years’ War, artillery in the Napoleonic Wars) or, conversely, did not exist in the same form later on: the American Civil War, for example, which has also been called the first modern war, had very different ideological causes. In this respect, Carleton’s work is a very illuminating historical account, especially with regard to the current war in Ukraine, while the construction as the first modern war and the conclusions to be drawn from it would have required a more differentiated explanation.