In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Soldiers as Workers: Class, Employment, Conflict and the Nineteenth-Century Military by Nick Mansfield
  • Lynn MacKay
Nick Mansfield, Soldiers as Workers: Class, Employment, Conflict and the Nineteenth-Century Military (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016)

This book makes an important contribution to the field of 19th-century British labour history. For too long, soldiers have been disregarded as workers. Rather, they have been seen as the agents of government imposition of order (often against unions and working people), and consequently, as separate from the working class from which most enlisted men and non-commissioned officers (ncos) originally sprang. In this study, Mansfield intends to redress the balance. He argues that soldiers did not, for the most part, come from the poorest sector of the working class (the so-called "scum of the earth" in Wellington's famous phrase), but were drawn from a cross-section of the "respectable"' working class. Soldiers shared much with their civilian contemporaries, according to Mansfield, and retained key features of working-class culture: its values, aspirations, practices and strategies, and tactics for dealing with authority. As such, soldiers constitute a huge occupational group that has largely been ignored by historians, and which Mansfield is determined, paraphrasing E.P. Thompson, to rescue from the "condescension of most military and labour history." (25)

The structure of the book consists of an introduction, three long chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction sets out the historiography, and explains the somewhat convoluted structure of military service in 19th-century Britain. The men of the regular army, the militia, the East India Company army, and overseas military adventurers, are all Mansfield's subjects of investigation. Chapter 2 focuses on class structure in the army, which Mansfield says closely paralleled that of civilian society. Although there were some middle-class officers, in most branches of the army officers came principally from the aristocracy and gentry, of whom roughly two-thirds purchased their commissions. Mansfield investigates the working-class backgrounds of enlisted men and ncos, how they were treated by the military, and their very limited opportunities for social mobility. Few ncos were ever made officers even though, as he points out, it was the former "rather than the leisured officers who were responsible for most of the daily work and management of the regiment." (28) Mansfield concludes that soldiers "were not a separate semi-criminal caste, cut off from society, but a cross-section of working-class men, whose pre-enlistment backgrounds and outside links with family, friends and home localities influenced their behaviour in uniform." (69) [End Page 296] Given the relative lack of mobility to the officer class, ncos generally sided with the enlisted men in their companies during disputes, at times acting as "a combination of foremen and shop stewards," (157) and were part of a "rankers world" (69) impenetrable by officers.

In Chapter 3, Mansfield focuses on soldiers as workers, arguing that they "were proletarians with their military phase forming only part of their working lives." (70) Regiments required a wide range of skilled workers in order to function: schoolmasters, tailors, boot and shoemakers, butchers, musicians, clerks, cooks, blacksmiths, and armourers were all vitally necessary. The men who filled these roles often drew on pre-army training and experience. They were paid more than ordinary soldiers, and excused from most military duties. Whether tradesmen or not, soldiers often had a fair amount of leisure time, allowing them to turn handicraft or penny capitalist skills to their private financial advantage. Mansfield gives victualling, letter writing, and souvenir making as examples of the latter. Some soldiers also became officers' servants, which gave them access to various perqs, tips, and exemptions from duty. Finally, in India various administrative posts either in public service or in the provision of utilities were on offer. Mansfield shows that a range of similar conditions and behaviours existed between army tradesmen and civilian artisans: soldier-tradesmen like artisans were better paid, and their workshops "became strongholds of the alternative opaque world of the rankers." (71) Both groups enjoyed similar perqs, including waste materials they could use for private profit making endeavours. Mansfield does admit that there is little evidence that soldier-tradesmen formed unions...

pdf

Share