In The Crimean War in Imperial Context, 1854–1856, Andrew Rath claims that more than a million works mention the Crimean War by name and that thousands more devote their entire focus to it. This statement is certainly correct. The war produces an unending flow of books and hundreds of articles on special subjects. Rath's second claim, that the war had significant theatres outside the Crimea—the Baltic and White Seas, the China Sea (the Caucasus and the Balkans are, curiously, never mentioned)—is, of course correct, too. But Rath overshoots the mark by stating that the war can be sufficiently understood only when its global context—Northern Europe and the Far East—is included in an overall assessment. The Baltic was certainly an important theater of the war, and if the war had continued in 1856, the fate of the Russian capital of St. Petersburg would certainly have been sealed, threatening the entire Russian Empire. But the bombardment of the Soloveckij monastery on the coast of the White Sea by a flotilla of British warships, for example, the ignominious failure to drive the Russians out of Petropavlovsk on Kamčatka Peninsula, was a mere pinprick in comparison with the enormous number of casualties in the Danube region, the Crimea, and the Caucasus. Russia's advance towards the mouth of the Amur River was going on anyway by the middle of the nineteenth century and was part of the Great Game between Britain and Russia, not directly caused (although probably accelerated) by the Crimean War.

Rath's somewhat inflated claims aside, his study has its great merits. Books on the Crimean War normally focus on one of the war's participants. Rath's, however, has a double perspective: the view of the two Western belligerents (Britain and France) on one side and that of Russia on the other. This approach is due to a masterful use of not only English, French, and Russian sources but also Finnish sources (the bombardment of the Finnish coast in the summer of 1854) and Chinese and Japanese documents (events in the Far East). Rath devotes three fourths of the book to the summer campaign of 1854, both in Northern Europe and the Far East; one fourth tells the equivalent story of 1855. Besides the great events in those theaters of war, which the reader can also find discussed in other books, Rath addresses lesser-known details, such as the use of sulfuric fumes by British ships in the Baltic or an imaginative plan to dam the river Neva and thereby flood northern Russia from St. Petersburg to the White Sea. Rath also devotes many pages to the suicide of Rear Admiral Price, commander of the small British squadron that anchored off the Russian fortress of Patropavlovsk on Kamčatka Peninsula. His suicide produced many rumors among the crews (and among nineteenth-century historians, both Allied and Russian). It was responsible, Rath argues, for the weak coordination between the English and French landing parties, resulting in the failure of the attack on the Russian stronghold. But would coordination have been better with the weak and incompetent admiral still alive? Obviously, he was the wrong choice for the difficult task.

Rath's use of both published and archival sources is remarkable. Nothing seems to have been missed by his watchful eye, whether it is a study on Australia's fear, in 1854, of an invasion by Russian troops; a master's thesis of Åbo University of 1947 about public opinion in Finland during the Crimean War; a collection of Russian memoirs on the Kamčatka affair published at Petropavlovsk in 2010; or research on the situation of the Falkland Islands in the Crimean War. Yet sometimes the expert reader has the impression that Rath got himself entangled in the mass of his material and lost sight of which documents are published and which are not. Although he makes use of the Akten zur Geschichte des Krimkriegs (12 volumes comprising some ten thousand printed pages, edited by the reviewer), he sometimes quotes passages from the archival source when clearly they are readily accessible in the Akten. For example, on page 39 at least half a dozen quotes and references are from the French archives, when all of them are printed in the Akten; a similar example occurs on page 108. On the other hand, it is puzzling why the Graham or Clarendon papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford should have eluded Rath since they are of prime importance for any study, diplomatic or military, of the Crimean War. Apart from such minor flaws, this multifaceted study on the theaters of war outside the Black Sea shows that a great war should be reenacted and rewritten by focusing on both sides of the conflict, not just on one.