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Author:   Kevin Linch (School of History, University of Leeds (United Kingdom)) ,  Matthew McCormack
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
Volume:   5
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 1.30cm , Length: 23.90cm
Weight:   0.476kg
ISBN:  

9781846319556

ISBN 10:   1846319552
Pages:   225
Publication Date:   07 March 2014
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of tables and figures Acknowledgements Notes on the contributors Introduction: Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack PART 1: Nationhood 1 ‘The eighteenth-century British army as a European institution’, Stephen Conway 2 ‘Soldiering abroad: the experience of living and fighting among aliens’, Graciela Iglesias Rogers PART 2: Hierarchy 3 ‘Effectiveness and the British Officer Corps, 1793-1815’, Bruce Collins 4 ‘Stamford standoff: honour, status and rivalry in the Georgian military’, Matthew McCormack PART 3: Discipline 5 ‘“The soldiers murmered much on Account of their usage”: military justice and negotiated authority in the eighteenth-century British army’, William P. Tatum III 6 ‘Discipline and control in eighteenth-century Gibraltar’, Ilya Berkovich PART 4: Gender 7 ‘Conflicts of conduct: British masculinity and military painting in the wake of the Siege of Gibraltar’, Cicely Robinson 8 ‘Scarlet fever: female enthusiasm for men in uniform, 1780-1815’, Louise Carter PART 5: Soldiers in Society 9 ‘Disability, fraud and medical experience at the Royal Hospital of Chelsea in the long eighteenth century’, Caroline Louise Nielsen 10 ‘Making new soldiers: legitimacy, identity and attitudes, c. 1740-1815’, Kevin Linch

Reviews

An interesting and well-balanced collection of essays on the experience of the combatant, where each chapter makes a distinctive contribution to the overall argument. -- Professor Alan Forrest

Britain's Soldiers succeeds in provoking thought on the British army as a product of a society and not an entity separate from it. Any analysis of the army from 1715-1815 must take into account this work and its central message. Journal of Military History, 78:4 Does the book achieve its stated aim and refocus the war and society approach? In many ways, it does. But it does so without losing sight of some now well-established lines of historical inquiry-particularly in the field of cultural history and gender studies-and this is perhaps its greatest strength. Each chapter has its own focus, but collectively the essays also challenge the view that war and soldiering was in any way remote from British society during the eighteenth century. -- Gerard Oram Journal of British Studies, 54:1 An interesting and well-balanced collection of essays on the experience of the combatant, where each chapter makes a distinctive contribution to the overall argument. -- Professor Alan Forrest The relationship between British society and its military has long been the subject of focus for historians and contemporary commentators alike. The conventional view has tended to favour the notion that a traditional mistrust of a standing army (not so much the navy, of course) resulted in an uneasy relationship, causing the army to remain isolated from society. It then follows that the military evolved organically and separately with its own law (enshrined in the military code), customs, and practices. The orthodox view of this relationship proved increasingly difficult to sustain once the spotlight was directed on the total wars of the twentieth century: the First World War, it has been argued by Marwick and by others, brought about changes in society at least in part because of mass participation in the war effort; and the Second World War has become a paradigm of the people's war. But can this model also be applied to earlier British society? As Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack, the editors of Britain's Soldiers, point out, the period 1715 to 1815 was one of almost continuous war for Britain. This meant that one in four British men passed through the nation's military forces (we might also add here that 22.11 percent of British men enlisted during the period of the First World War, according to figures compiled by the War Office in 1922). Many of these were not career soldiers but moved between civilian society and military service-and back again. What, then, was the impact of this on the relationship between society and the military? To answer this, the contributors to this volume invert the usual approach and give primacy in their analyses to the soldiers themselves. This, of course, can be problematic, because, unlike social and military elites, ordinary soldiers left behind few sources. This potential problem is acknowledged in the introduction and new ways and approaches have been adopted in an attempt to overcome this, including analysis of courts martial records, hospital admissions, pension records, and so on. The success of this approach is variable, however, and in some chapters the balance does swing back in favor of those who led rather than those who followed. Although anyone looking for a ground-up social history of the rank and file will therefore find some chapters to be less useful than others, it is important to consider that the army comprised officers and men, and it is the relationship between these as well as with wider British society that provides the basis for much discussion. For example, in his chapter on military discipline, William P. Tatum III argues that it was negotiation, rather than a blind obedience to inhumane coercion, that characterized relations between men and officers. In matters of discipline and procedure, military practice often reflected that of civilian society. The findings here appear to be consistent with work carried out on the military in later eras. The breadth of the contributions is wide. But Linch and McCormack have brought a good degree of cohesion to the collection by organizing the chapters thematically in five parts: nationhood, hierarchy, discipline, gender, and soldiers in society. This works well and provides a good structure on which the otherwise diverse contributions adhere together surprisingly well. The balance is also maintained with two chapters to each theme. This makes the collection more accessible to scholars with specific interests and to those from disciples other than the study of war and society. The book is not without some minor problems. For the most part these are beyond the control of the contributors, such as the small number of examples of British soldiers in other armies-though the chapter Soldiering Abroad, by Graciela Iglesia Rogers, remains a worthy one in spite of this limitation of available sources. Other issues might easily have been addressed, though. Take, for example, the chapter Conflicts of Conduct, on portrayals of masculinity in painting, by Cicely Robinson, which this reviewer found to be a particularly strong contribution. Robinson expertly handles the detailed analysis of two paintings. But the inclusion of two small monochrome prints of the paintings does nothing to assist writer or reader. With such a high price tag attached to the book, it is disappointing that the publisher did not include two full-page color plates to do justice to the accompanying analysis. Again, this is the fault of the neither author nor of the editors, but it does detract from an otherwise illuminating essay. Taken together, the chapters present a picture of soldiers of all ranks who were not passive but were active participants in shaping their own world: military and social. They also show how the brutalized soldier or veteran was accommodated within a society that considered itself civilized yet still managed to reconcile this apparent contradiction through various devices and means. Interaction between civilians and military was commonplace and could be initiated by either (epitomized by the women who sought out vantage points from which to gaze upon soldiers, discussed by Louise Carter in her chapter, Scarlet Fever ). Far from being marginalized, the military is shown to be an extension of British society often sharing its values, even at a time when these were seemingly at odds with the brutal reality of war and soldiering. Does the book achieve its stated aim and refocus the war and society approach? In many ways, it does. But it does so without losing sight of some now well-established lines of historical inquiry-particularly in the field of cultural history and gender studies-and this is perhaps its greatest strength. Each chapter has its own focus, but collectively the essays also challenge the view that war and soldiering was in any way remote from British society during the eighteenth century. However, without a clear conclusion to the diverse essays in the book, this broader argument is more implied than explicit. -- Gerard Oram Journal of British Studies, Volume 54 , Issue 01

Author Information

Notes on the contributors Kevin Linch is a Principal Teaching Fellow in History at the University of Leeds and works on the military in Georgian Britain. His monograph, Britain and Wellington's Army: Recruitment, Society, and Tradition 1807-15, was published in 2011 and other recent publications include a chapter in Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790-1820. Further contributions are forthcoming in Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1850: Men of Arms and Fighting someone else's war? Transnational mercenaries, adventurers and volunteers in modern conflicts. Matthew McCormack is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton. He works on Georgian Britain and has published widely on the role of masculinity in politics and warfare. He has published articles in British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Historical Journal, Gender & History and Cultural & Social History, and has also contributed chapters to a number of edited collections. His monograph The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England was reissued in paperback in 2012, and he edited the collection Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain for Palgrave. Ilya Berkovich completed his MA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before moving to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he was a recipient of a research studentship. He is currently working toward the completion of his Ph.D. thesis entitled 'Motivation in Armies of Old Regime Europe'. It is a comparative study based primarily on the personal recollections of over one hundred individual common soldiers who served in a number of eighteenth-century armies. Louise Carter is Lecturer in History at University Campus Suffolk. She gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge and her research interests are in war, gender and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published in Gender & History and is currently working on a monograph. Bruce Collins, Professor of Modern History at Sheffield Hallam University, has published widely on mid-nineteenth century America, including The Origins of America's Civil War (1981). More recently, he has been working on British power-projection from the 1780s to 1902 and has published 'Siege Warfare in the Age of Wellington' in Wellington Studies IV (2008) and War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain 1790-1830 (Longman Pearson, 2010). Stephen Conway is a professor of history at University College London. His publications include The War of American Independence, 1775-1783 (1995); The British Isles and the War of American Independence (2000); War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2006); and Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities (2011). Graciela Iglesias Rogers is a journalist and historian, who was recently awarded her DPhil from the University of Oxford, entitled 'British Liberators: The Role of Spanish Forces in the Peninsular War (1808-1814)'. She is a research assistant on the project 'Re-imagining Democracy in Europe and the Americas from 1750 to 1860'. Caroline Louise Nielsen is currently working on a PhD in Historical Studies at the University of Newcastle, where she also teaches. This project is entitled 'The Chelsea Out-Pensioners: Image and Reality in Eighteenth-Century Social Care' and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Cicely Robinson completed a BA and MA in History of Art at the University of Bristol. She is now part way through an AHRC funded collaborative PhD in History of Art with the University of York and the National Maritime Museum. Entitled 'The National Gallery of Naval Art, Greenwich Hospital', this research project investigates the display and reception of martial portraiture and action painting within Britain's first 'national' gallery, founded in 1823. William P. Tatum III hails from North Carolina, received his BA in History and Anthropology from the College of William & Mary in 2003 and his MA in History from Brown University in 2004. He is completing his PhD at Brown and serving as the Sol Feinstone Scholar at the David Library of the American Revolution. His dissertation examines the eighteenth-century British military justice system as a civilian-influenced imperial institution.

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