Turkey and Russia (Victorian Leatherbound Edition)

GOSSIP, Robert. Turkey and Russia: Their Races, History, and Wars. Embracing a Graphic Account of the Great Crimean War and of the Russo-Turkish War. Edinburgh: Thomas C. Jack, 1879.

Thick, large Quarto. Full brown leather. Covers and spine decorated and lettered in gilt and blind. xii, [ii], 798pp. First edition.

This substantial Victorian popular history addresses two of the defining nineteenth-century conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires: the Crimean War (1853–56), in which Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire combined to check Russian expansion into Ottoman territory, and the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), a subsequent and closely related conflict that saw Russia decisively defeat Ottoman forces, resulting in the establishment of an independent Bulgaria and significant territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire across the Balkans and Caucasus. These two conflicts, separated by little more than two decades, together represent one of the most consequential and closely watched chapters of nineteenth-century European geopolitics: a sustained contest over the fate of the declining Ottoman Empire, the balance of power in the Black Sea, and the treatment of Christian populations within Ottoman territory, all conducted against the backdrop of intense British public and political interest, given Britain's own direct military involvement in the Crimean conflict and its close diplomatic engagement with the second.

Gossip's account, produced for a general Victorian readership eager for accessible narrative history of these dramatic and still relatively recent conflicts, addresses the ethnographic background of the Turkish and Russian peoples alongside the military and political history of the wars themselves, in the substantial, richly bound format typical of ambitious popular history publishing of the period.

Very good. Some rubbing to leather edges, strongest at spine ends. Binding tight, hinges remain strong. Contents generally very good. Some foxing throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000739