ABSTRACT
Paskevich, Russia’s outstanding soldier of the day, in February 1854 stressed to the tsar that St Petersburg, not Sebastopol, was Russia’s most exposed point. For Sir Julian Corbett, as far Mahan, sea-power was not concerned with the control of the oceans, but with that of the narrow seas, and therefore the maintenance of sea-power — as specified in the principal casus belli for Britain, the control of the Straits — was the central object of British strategy in 1854. Born of a concern to rationalize the defence of Britain’s colonial and trading interests, overall ideas of national strategy had only really begun to grow in Grey’s tenure of the colonial office and by 1854 had yet to impinge on the military thinker’s circumscribed view of strategy.
