Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years’ War by Erica Charters (review)

In his Treatise of the Scurvy published in 1753, James Lind remarked that disease generally “proved a more destructive enemy, and cut off more valuable lives, than the unified efforts of the French and Spanish arms” (p. 22). That eighteenth-century armies and navies lost more of their men to sickness than to the sword is the powerful central motif running through this excellent study of the Seven Years War by Erica Charters. Lind’s insight, together with the evidence and analysis presented here, has important implications for our understanding not just of this war but of eighteenth-century warfare in general and, more broadly, for the development of the British state and empire in the period.

The British state was deeply concerned with the welfare of its armed forces. Manpower was one of the most highly valued natural resources for eighteenth-century European powers. Semantics also offer a clue here. Disease was equated with disorder and disordered constitutions. Thus, the leadership of military commanders was reflected not only in martial victories but also in their ability to keep their soldiers and sailors hale and hearty. And keeping troops healthy was accomplished by applying medical knowledge and adapting to local conditions around the globe. In doing so, Charters argues, the state played a more important role in the development of medicine, medical research, and scientific innovation than has been traditionally ascribed to it in a scholarly literature that has often privileged private and public philanthropic bodies in this effort.

Charters’s research offers new and refreshingly provocative insights into a number of the most famous battles of the war. Her book offers a corrective to triumphalist histories of the conflict and the inevitability of British victory. Two examples will suffice here. The triumph of James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in September 1759 has often been regarded as the crowning glory of the miraculous ‘Year of Victories.’ Historians have long known, however, that this victory did not necessarily ensure British control over North America. By examining the ‘returns’ of the army over the course of the following eight months, Charters has established just how precarious the British hold over Quebec was and how vital a role sickness and illness played in this. By December 1759, for example, twenty-eight percent of the British garrison at Quebec, numbering some 7300 soldiers, had fallen ill. The Battle of Sainte-Foy, the following April, was fought between “starved, scorbutic skeletons” on the British side and a French “army of all healthy, strong, young men” (p. 32). James Murray, in command of the British forces, lamented that the battle was lost because of “the most inveterate Scurvy” (p. 33). Elsewhere, British successes were achieved in spite of sickening troops. This was particularly the case in the Caribbean. The British capture of Havana in October 1762, for instance, was all the more surprising as only 900 men (out of 7225) were still fit. Even after their successful capture of this strategically important entrepôt, the health of the troops meant that the conquest was always in doubt. One soldier reported a plot among the vanquished Spaniards “to rise and put us all to death, as our garrison was so much weakened by sickness” (p. 76).

Disease, War, and the Imperial State is a significant addition to the literature on the Seven Years War. On one level, through its ambitious global scope, it reminds us of the worldwide reach and implications of the conflict. But it also has consequences for our interpretation of the eighteenth-century British state. Often regarded as the archetypal fiscal-military state, Charters asks us to consider how far it was also a caring state. And her work reminds us that the innovations developed to keep troops healthy in the middle of the eighteenth century were vital for...