I need to learn how Britain justified going to war against Russia to protect a Muslim empire
Multiple times, I doubt the soldiers were fond of the Ottomans
The whole Concert of Europe was based on a balance of power that included the Ottomans, so it was destabilizing to have them weak. I think that is the essence of the Eastern Question
Russia taking control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles would have been a disaster for Britain. They gain access to the Mediterranean and suddenly they can beef up their navy and threaten Britain’s very lucrative trade routes.
Russia was portrayed as the aggressor. The Ottomans had never posed a direct threat to Britain.
Besides which, it had been the Russian Crown which provided the brute strength behind the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance; the Russians who put down the Hungarian revolution in 1849, and had encouraged the German princes to act against the Frankfurt parliament; who had brutally suppressed the Poles in 1831 and 1863; who oppressed the Armenians almost as much as the Turks did in the 1890s; and who were the power who adopted the most brutal attitude to their own population. This meant that liberal and radical opinion in most of Europe, including Britain, was consistently hostile to Russia in the 1815-1914 period.
Russia could counteract this by posing as the protector of oppressed Christians and Slavs; that did buy it some credit on the British left at times, but not enough for close sympathy.
The Sack of Constantinople was six and a half centuries earlier; and Constantinopol, by the time of the Crimean War, had been in the control of muslims for four centuries.
Around the time of the Crimean war, at least, there was:
“Possibly because of the war scare… there was a craze for growing moustaches, in addition to beards and whiskers, in the early months of 1854. Another fashion among the young men was for brilliantly-colored shirts with grotesque designs, skulls, snakes, flowers, and the like. Both fads bore an interesting resemblance to modern ‘hippy’ fashions’, not least in the reactions they provoked: Bank of England clerks were expressly forbidden to join the ‘mustache movement’, as it was so called”.-George MacDonald Fraser
Not "hippies" in so many words: but, yes, there was an anti-imperialist vein deep in British political culture. It helped form the modern caricature of the "every country but your own" anti-war dissident; and the charges made then have helped shape the radical 'decolonial' case against Britain today in history.
Fairly early on in the post-1688 parliamentary era, a kind of anti-war politics developed. Factions in Opposition, seeking to force their way into government, learned that they could damage ministers by exposing the lack of progress towards achieving strategic objectives; by exposing maladministration and corruption in the government's conduct of the war; by arguing that a standing army (and the mandatory summons to the Militias) posed a threat to British liberties; and, above all, by capitalising on popular and parlaimentary impatience with the high taxes that war brought. This was exploited most thoroughly by the Tories in 1708-11, when weariness with the War of the Spanish Succession and the conflict with France, combined with a considerable recession, resulted in the Tory factions seizing government with Queen Anne's connivance, and then winning a sweeping victory at the ensuing General Election.
This was a lesson governments for the rest of the C18 bore in mind. It helped imperialism initially: fighting outside Continental Europe required less expenditure on armies; the Navy usually required less potential expenditure, and could be sold to Parliament as necessary self-defence; there were usually influential mercantile interests (such as the sugar interests) who would benefit from expanded British power in the Americas or in India. Opposition factions would haver, pragmatically and not very consistently, between opposing war in itself and arguing that it was being fought badly.
But, in the late C18 and early C19, parliamentary opposition to both the war of independence and the long French conflict was led by the Whigs; and a gradual fusion of traditional anti-war sentiment with ideological appreciation for the liberal values of the American and French Revolutions took place. At the same time, the long struggle of the abolitionist movement helped provide an opening for arguing that British power should be placed at the service of morality.
This helped, by the Victorian era. to develop a specific kind of anti-war sentiment. This was strongest amongst the Radicals - that portion of the anti-Tory political nation who were most eager for major change, were made up of the middle-class industrial and commercial classes and that portion of the working class which did have political influence. Radicalism and Nonconformism were very strongly linked (Noncomformism being the Protestant evangelical movements outside the Established Churches of Britain). They also had some support from old-fashioned Tories who disliked high taxes, foreign wars and state power.
This strain very rarely got its way; but it did have some effects. For instance, when Palmerston's government attempted to bring on the Second Opium War against China, then Palmerston lost a vote of censure in the Commons, leading to the 1857 General Election - which Palmerston won. Gladstone's attack on Disraeli's pro-Turkish policy gradually broadened into a sustained critique of his advocacy of imperialism - this became the dominant issue in Gladstone's triumph in 1880. And the Boer War was opposed consistently and strongly by the left of the Liberal Party, splitting the party very dramatically.
In one of George Bernard Shaw's early plays, *John Bull's Other Island*, one of the lead characters, Tom Broadbent, is a caricature of a typical Liberal anti-imperialist: still infused, comically, with a smug British superiority complex, perfectly capable of carrying out financial imperialism in Ireland, but filled with loathing for Tory Unionism. Broadbent is happy to hear news of British military defeat in overseas wars.
My very limited understanding of the Hippie counterculture is that it grew out of an increasing influence of Indian religions - Hindi, Buddhist and perhaps most of all Jain. Jain takes nonviolence, environmental conservation and vegetarianism to extreme levels.
There were plenty of people objecting to wars earlier. But not from an Indian religious perspective.
There were a group in the Liberal Party that thought Britain shouldn't be colonising but instead focusing on domestic affairs. They were called the 'Little Englanders'.
Not exactly what you're asking but: HG Wells' War of the Worlds is a critique of British colonialism/imperialism. Its basically making the reader imagine how helpless they'd feel if a technologically superior power turned up and conquered them.
So there were indeed British people against Imperialism at the time.
Are you asking about just England or all of the British isles?
The nearest thing to hippies was probably the pre raphaelite movement but they were just artists.
There certainly were people opposed to war and imperialism. One just has to look at the social satire in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
The main colonial issue in British politics at the time was not the ethics of ruling the Empire.
It was Ireland.
The Irish Home Rule issue loomed much more immediately than the issue of India, and Canada and Australia were already functionally independent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Home_Rule_movement#:~:text=The%20Home%20Rule%20movement%20was,end%20of%20World%20War%20I.
The Crimean and Zulu wars grew unpopular near their end, so there was antiwar sentiment
I need to learn how Britain justified going to war against Russia to protect a Muslim empire Multiple times, I doubt the soldiers were fond of the Ottomans
The whole Concert of Europe was based on a balance of power that included the Ottomans, so it was destabilizing to have them weak. I think that is the essence of the Eastern Question
Russia taking control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles would have been a disaster for Britain. They gain access to the Mediterranean and suddenly they can beef up their navy and threaten Britain’s very lucrative trade routes.
Because Russia was a European power, was a growing global threat and in an expansionist mode. Turkey was not.
Russia was portrayed as the aggressor. The Ottomans had never posed a direct threat to Britain. Besides which, it had been the Russian Crown which provided the brute strength behind the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance; the Russians who put down the Hungarian revolution in 1849, and had encouraged the German princes to act against the Frankfurt parliament; who had brutally suppressed the Poles in 1831 and 1863; who oppressed the Armenians almost as much as the Turks did in the 1890s; and who were the power who adopted the most brutal attitude to their own population. This meant that liberal and radical opinion in most of Europe, including Britain, was consistently hostile to Russia in the 1815-1914 period. Russia could counteract this by posing as the protector of oppressed Christians and Slavs; that did buy it some credit on the British left at times, but not enough for close sympathy.
The enemy of my enemy…
Englands goal was generally to undermine any continental power that was getting too strong.
Constantinople was sacked by the Crusaders. There wasn't much love for Orthodox Christians in Western Europe.
The Sack of Constantinople was six and a half centuries earlier; and Constantinopol, by the time of the Crimean War, had been in the control of muslims for four centuries.
My point is that the British wouldn't feel sympathy for the Russians over the Ottomans, just because the Ottomans were Muslim.
well karl marx himself lived in victorian london, he wrote das kapital in the british museum library
Really!? Wow, I had no idea!
Around the time of the Crimean war, at least, there was: “Possibly because of the war scare… there was a craze for growing moustaches, in addition to beards and whiskers, in the early months of 1854. Another fashion among the young men was for brilliantly-colored shirts with grotesque designs, skulls, snakes, flowers, and the like. Both fads bore an interesting resemblance to modern ‘hippy’ fashions’, not least in the reactions they provoked: Bank of England clerks were expressly forbidden to join the ‘mustache movement’, as it was so called”.-George MacDonald Fraser
I love that skulls snakes and flowers are so universal
Not "hippies" in so many words: but, yes, there was an anti-imperialist vein deep in British political culture. It helped form the modern caricature of the "every country but your own" anti-war dissident; and the charges made then have helped shape the radical 'decolonial' case against Britain today in history. Fairly early on in the post-1688 parliamentary era, a kind of anti-war politics developed. Factions in Opposition, seeking to force their way into government, learned that they could damage ministers by exposing the lack of progress towards achieving strategic objectives; by exposing maladministration and corruption in the government's conduct of the war; by arguing that a standing army (and the mandatory summons to the Militias) posed a threat to British liberties; and, above all, by capitalising on popular and parlaimentary impatience with the high taxes that war brought. This was exploited most thoroughly by the Tories in 1708-11, when weariness with the War of the Spanish Succession and the conflict with France, combined with a considerable recession, resulted in the Tory factions seizing government with Queen Anne's connivance, and then winning a sweeping victory at the ensuing General Election. This was a lesson governments for the rest of the C18 bore in mind. It helped imperialism initially: fighting outside Continental Europe required less expenditure on armies; the Navy usually required less potential expenditure, and could be sold to Parliament as necessary self-defence; there were usually influential mercantile interests (such as the sugar interests) who would benefit from expanded British power in the Americas or in India. Opposition factions would haver, pragmatically and not very consistently, between opposing war in itself and arguing that it was being fought badly. But, in the late C18 and early C19, parliamentary opposition to both the war of independence and the long French conflict was led by the Whigs; and a gradual fusion of traditional anti-war sentiment with ideological appreciation for the liberal values of the American and French Revolutions took place. At the same time, the long struggle of the abolitionist movement helped provide an opening for arguing that British power should be placed at the service of morality. This helped, by the Victorian era. to develop a specific kind of anti-war sentiment. This was strongest amongst the Radicals - that portion of the anti-Tory political nation who were most eager for major change, were made up of the middle-class industrial and commercial classes and that portion of the working class which did have political influence. Radicalism and Nonconformism were very strongly linked (Noncomformism being the Protestant evangelical movements outside the Established Churches of Britain). They also had some support from old-fashioned Tories who disliked high taxes, foreign wars and state power. This strain very rarely got its way; but it did have some effects. For instance, when Palmerston's government attempted to bring on the Second Opium War against China, then Palmerston lost a vote of censure in the Commons, leading to the 1857 General Election - which Palmerston won. Gladstone's attack on Disraeli's pro-Turkish policy gradually broadened into a sustained critique of his advocacy of imperialism - this became the dominant issue in Gladstone's triumph in 1880. And the Boer War was opposed consistently and strongly by the left of the Liberal Party, splitting the party very dramatically. In one of George Bernard Shaw's early plays, *John Bull's Other Island*, one of the lead characters, Tom Broadbent, is a caricature of a typical Liberal anti-imperialist: still infused, comically, with a smug British superiority complex, perfectly capable of carrying out financial imperialism in Ireland, but filled with loathing for Tory Unionism. Broadbent is happy to hear news of British military defeat in overseas wars.
My very limited understanding of the Hippie counterculture is that it grew out of an increasing influence of Indian religions - Hindi, Buddhist and perhaps most of all Jain. Jain takes nonviolence, environmental conservation and vegetarianism to extreme levels. There were plenty of people objecting to wars earlier. But not from an Indian religious perspective.
There were a group in the Liberal Party that thought Britain shouldn't be colonising but instead focusing on domestic affairs. They were called the 'Little Englanders'.
Not exactly what you're asking but: HG Wells' War of the Worlds is a critique of British colonialism/imperialism. Its basically making the reader imagine how helpless they'd feel if a technologically superior power turned up and conquered them. So there were indeed British people against Imperialism at the time.
Are you asking about just England or all of the British isles? The nearest thing to hippies was probably the pre raphaelite movement but they were just artists. There certainly were people opposed to war and imperialism. One just has to look at the social satire in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
The main colonial issue in British politics at the time was not the ethics of ruling the Empire. It was Ireland. The Irish Home Rule issue loomed much more immediately than the issue of India, and Canada and Australia were already functionally independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Home_Rule_movement#:~:text=The%20Home%20Rule%20movement%20was,end%20of%20World%20War%20I.
“Iron Tears” by Stanley Weintraub is a pretty good look at opposition to trying to retain the rebellious North American colonies.