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SUMMARY:Class Conflict and Armed Conflict: Constructing The Crimean War an
 d the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the British middleclass press - Sebastian Pe
 nder (Peterhouse)
DTSTART:20120313T173000Z
DTEND:20120313T190000Z
UID:TALK35538@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Christian Schlaepfer
DESCRIPTION:Following Europe's 'long peace' of the nineteenth century\, wh
 ich extended from 1815 and the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo through to t
 he 1850s\, Victorian Britain found itself involved in two conflicts in qui
 ck succession which captured the public imagination and dominated popular 
 interest for much of the decade.\n\nWhilst the Crimean War was generally c
 onstrued as a failure for the British Army in which widespread military mi
 smanagement\, bungling senior officers and a lack of equipment conspired t
 o result in unnecessary deaths within the British ranks\, the British resp
 onse to the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 was celebrated as an unequivocal triumph 
 in the face of adversity. What makes the contrast between how these confli
 cts were constructed within the popular imagination all the more surprisin
 g is that the British military response to the Mutiny could be said to hav
 e suffered from all the deficiencies exposed during the Crimean War. Indee
 d\, if one considers the primary causes of death in each conflict\, it is 
 clear that in each case only between 10-20% of the British troops to die d
 id so as a result of actual fighting\, the rest died as a result of either
  illness\, primarily cholera and dysentery\, or due to the equally inhospi
 table\, but diametrically opposed climates of each war zone compounded by 
 a lack of suitable equipment for the conditions faced by the soldiers.\n\n
 Through an examination of the dominant narratives of these two conflicts w
 hich emerged within the British middle class press in general\, and The Ti
 mes in particular\, this paper will explore why these two conflicts were r
 epresented in such radically different ways. Further\, this paper will int
 errogate the ways in which the popular imagination of these conflicts impa
 cted upon how the British military was regarded during a period of intense
  class conflict in which the concept of war greatly underpinned the contin
 ued value to the country of an embattled Aristocracy and resulted in a dra
 matic re-imagination of the concept of war within Victorian Britain. 
LOCATION:Seminar Room N7\, Pembroke College
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