Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution by John Gilbert McCurdy (review)

We understand that the United States is a military empire through reading newspapers and watching the news. That American soldiers disturb civilian lives in war-torn regions, that they require supplies like cooking utensils or alcohol, or that they behave in undisciplined ways seems obvious and yet, at the same time, distant. This is because we do not see soldiers or soldiers’ barracks or soldiers’ taverns in our most populated US cities. We are not affected by the disturbances or the noise and smells their presence may cause. The military is concealed from civilians and hidden from civilian space. Since our view of the military is determined by a very specific “military geography,” we tend to view the military positively. In his ambitious Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution, McCurdy argues that our favorable attitude about the military emerges from our day-to-day experience of living in nonmilitarized civilian space—a feature that is not common in other parts of the world and a peculiarity that came out of the Revolutionary era.

What distinguishes McCurdy’s work from other texts about quartering and its relationship to the coming of the American Revolution is its continental scope. Quarters explores how the “old” thirteen colonies variously responded to quartering during the Seven Years’ War and roughly the decade following it, to the start of the Revolutionary War. But it also discusses the reactions to quartering troops in newly colonized spaces at the edges of the British empire, such as Nova Scotia and Florida. McCurdy skillfully shows that the “old” colonies became distinguishable from the “new” by their gradual unwillingness to pay for the support of British troops. By 1774, as “new” colonies sought British military protection to secure their liberties, the old thirteen had grown their own military and saw British troops as an infringement. Hence, Quarters implicitly argues that early American patriotism grew out of a sense of home as civilian space that ought to be protected from military outsiders. Like Allan Greer’s recent Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America, which argues that the debates around Indian “savagery” served to define Europeans as rightfully entitled to American land, Quarters shows that the opposition to quartering British soldiers led colonists to construct a sacrosanct American space and eventually to imagine a nation. The political struggle for American independence hence was a spatial issue, one inextricably tied to quartering British soldiers.

Quarters shows how various colonies in the “old” thirteen made concessions to quartering orders and how their voices became increasingly uncompromising after the Seven Years’ War, when the French no longer posed a threat to their safety or an obstruction to westward expansion. Many colonists who had voluntarily built barracks to house British troops during the Seven Years’ War saw no reason to sustain the expense of maintaining them after the war. Those who had welcomed British soldiers as protectors saw no need to pay for their keep by 1770, if not earlier. According to McCurdy, the colonists’ opposition to supplying troops was not strictly driven by financial and opportunistic motives. Rather, the colonists had come to define themselves as spatially separate and as protectors of their own future. As the Revolutionary War began, American colonists were not against quartering troops, only against quartering British troops.

British victory during the Seven Years’ War gave white colonists access to western territories formerly claimed by the French. McCurdy takes this familiar issue of westward expansion and shows how the issue of quartering lent it a particular dynamic. As much as describing the reaction to quartering of various US cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Charleston, McCurdy also pays attention to “borderland” regions, places such as Detroit where Indians clashed with white settlers seeking claims to western lands. In these backcountry regions, two visions of empire collided. The...