‘Comic Map of the Seat of War, 1854’, by Rock Brothers and Payne.
‘Comic Map of the Seat of War, 1854’, a cartoon by Rock Brothers and Payne of London, illustrating the players in the Crimean War of 1853-56. On the right is the Russian bear, with ‘lies’ on his tongue, and labelled with such helpful indicators as ‘oppression’ and ‘slavery’; Cobden might have noted that the Irish leprechaun is not marked ‘starvation’ only four years after the Great Hunger. Poland is shown in chains. Denmark is using a bellows to blow the Tsar’s Baltic fleet back to port. Italy is crowned with a Papal tiara, reminding us that for the French this was a Catholic crusade. The Ottoman Empire in Europe is a great pink turkey. In the Balkans a two-headed eagle — representing the Vienna Congress of 1815 which had restored order after Napoleon — is torn between duty to Britain, Prussia and Austria, and gratitude to Russia as the fourth member of the hitherto stable Quadruple Alliance. The French cockerel does his cock-a-doodle-do, while a Frenchman mutters ‘Remember Moscow’, a reference to Napoleon’s humiliation in 1812. The British lion looks a little anxious. The Crimea is shown as one foot of the bear, thronged with French and British ships next to some snide remarks about the Russian fleet. In fact the war ended in a draw; the British public came round to Cobden’s view once Foreign Office propaganda was overturned by media reports from the front.
THE Russians are accused by us of being an aggrandising people! From the day of Poltawa* down to the time of the passage of the Balkan* — say the orators, journalists, reviewers, and authors — the government of St Petersburg* has been incessantly addicted to picking and stealing. But, in the meantime, has England been idle? If, during the last century, Russia has plundered Sweden, Poland, Turkey and Persia, until she has grown unwieldy with the extent of her spoils, Great Britain has, in the same period, robbed, — no, that would be an unpolite phrase, — “has enlarged the bounds of his majesty’s dominions”* at the expense of France, Holland, and Spain.
It would be false logic, and just as unsound morality, to allow the Muscovite to justify his derelictions of honesty by an appeal to our example;* but, surely, we, who are staggering under the embarrassing weight of our colonies, with one foot upon the rock of Gibraltar and the other at the Cape of Good Hope, — with Canada, Australia, and the peninsula of India, forming, Cerberus-like, the heads of our monstrous empire, — and with the hundred minor acquisitions scattered so widely over the earth’s surface as to present an unanswerable proof of our wholesome appetite for boundless dominion, surely, we are not exactly the nation to preach homilies to other people in favour of the national observance of the eighth commandment!*
* The Russian Empire’s emphatic victory over Sweden at Poltava in 1709 ended the Great Northern War and established Russia as one of Europe’s Great Powers. See The Great Northern War.
* The event that triggered The Crimean War.
* At this time, the capital of the Russian Empire was at St Petersburg in the far northwest. The Emperor was Nicholas I (r. 1825-55). He was succeeded by Alexander II, who moved quickly to bring the Crimean War to an end.
* Despite Cobden’s use of the pronoun ‘his’, the monarch of the United Kingdom at this time was Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901). He was recalling British imperial expansion over the previous hundred years, which had been dominated by the reign of King George III (1760-1820).
* That is, Emperor Nicholas I should not argue that because Britain acquires territories under deceitful claims of ‘protecting the weak’ or ‘advancing our interests’, Russia can do the same. Cobden refused to justify bullying foreign policy on such grounds: see ‘Nobody Wants to Invade You’.
* The Eighth Commandment is “Thou shalt not steal”. See Exodus 20:1-17.
Précis
In 1854, early in the Crimean War, Richard Cobden expressed amazement that politicians and journalists in Britain were upbraiding the Russians for their ‘imperialism’. He did not deny that the Russians had been meddling in eastern Europe and in Asia; but he reminded his listeners that in that same period, Britain had added to her own vast empire just as aggressively. (60 / 60 words)
