Catherine M. Ashcraft

This study is the first environmental history of the Crimean War. Departing from the high-level military and diplomatic approaches that have dominated scholarship of the Crimean War, this project angles an analytical lens downward to what was happening on the ground—literally in the loamy soil and brackish rivers. This book will showcase key encounters between people and their surroundings: how men tried to dominate the environment and how it acted upon them, transforming their bodies and mentalities. Soldiers polluted waterways and denuded forests, vineyards and agricultural fields, while the environment transformed them altering their bodies through diet, severe weather, microbes, and the like. This violent clash of human and non-human actors profoundly shaped the war’s outcomes and impacts.