Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815 by Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack (review)

Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack introduce this essay collection as a “holistic” study of the soldier as a combatant. They express their intent to move beyond such binaries as “war and peace,” “soldier and civilian,” and even “British and non-British.” The resulting collection is a suitably diverse set of studies that explores everything from martial masculinities to the mechanics of the pension system. The authors and editors are to be congratulated for the variety of intersections between the essays and the book’s breadth. It not only gives space to both officers and enlisted men, but it also includes significant research on both regular and part-time or auxiliary forces. It is methodologically diverse, displaying the applicability of microhistorical approaches and the value of sources such as images and court records.

Stephen Conway underscores the commonalities of structure, function, composition, and soldierly attitude among European armies. He points out that historians have been falsely nationalistic in their approach to armies, but that in fact a shared understanding of military rules and tactics combined with the movement of personnel across Europe to homogenize soldiers’ experiences of war. Graciela Iglesias Rogers continues this transnational emphasis with her investigation of British volunteers in the Spanish and French armies of the Napoleonic wars. She highlights the political fervor behind their actions and argues that this illustrates a growing tendency after 1776 for men to fight “for a cause not a monarch” (41). Thus, though Iglesias notes the similar European characteristics observed by Conway, she stresses the growing nationalism behind military service in the age of Napoleon.

Existing notions of the ineffectiveness of the British officer corps in the Napoleonic wars are systematically questioned in the next essay. Bruce Collins looks at regular, East India Company, and militia forces to show that most officers had on-the-job training and benefitted from a good supply network, and that lineage did not routinely outweigh merit in promotional decisions. Four officers — two each from the army and militia respectively — receive detailed scrutiny in Matthew McCormack’s insightful chapter. Disputes between officers of the Lincolnshire Militia and regular army in 1761 show the tensions that could arise between these two branches of the service, and the dominance of polite masculinity in the culture of the latter.

Tensions between soldiers continue to inform the next two essays, which focus on discipline directed at men in the ranks. The volume draws strong parallels between military and civilian criminal sources, both of which have great potential for writing history from below. It is important to recognize, however, that officers primarily brought complaints to military courts, while civilian courts were open to a much broader cross-section of plaintiffs. This is particularly true of the “summary justice” level of the civilian system. Regardless, both William Tatum and Ilya Berkovich make compelling arguments about common soldiers’ agency. Tatum argues for the negotiated power dynamic between officers and their men, and Berkovich uses order books to show the inconsistent and ineffective use of authority in Gibraltar, an arguably much more fertile context for military autocracy than elsewhere in Europe.

Cicely Robinson and Louise Carter focus on depictions of masculinity in visual sources. The former argues that paintings of the Siege of Gibraltar eschewed death-of-a-hero themes because of a need for scenes of strength following the defeat in America. This point would have been stronger had Robinson been able to establish that an officer of the calibre of Wolfe, Pierson, or Nelson had actually been killed at Gibraltar. The essay is nonetheless valuable in thoroughly examining the production and reception of two paintings of the Siege and furthering McCormack’s assertion that polite masculinity governed officers. Louise Carter explores women’s weakness for the uniform in the Napoleonic era. Carter’s observations could have drawn sharper distinction between the militia — for whom the uniform was more likely to signify...