Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution

Preface

Preface T his is a book about books—the books that shaped the British army in the age of the American Revolution. Although historians have understood that books were important to the eighteenth-century British army and its officer corps, they have never studied comprehensively the books on war that mattered most to the army and its officers in the age of the American Revolution . This book attempts to do just that. It is based on the careers and preferences of some forty-two officers who served Britain between the wars of Louis XIV and the French Revolution and who left records of the books that they owned, bought, read, recommended, and wrote.These officers had literally hundreds of books on war to choose among: histories, biographies, and memoirs; treatises on artillery and military engineering; classics of the ancient world; and essays on the art of war—to say nothing of regulations for drill, lists of officers, compilations of maps and plans, and books on such disparate topics as the laws of war and military medicine. What then were our officers’ preferences? How did their preferences change across time? And what can their changing preferences tell us about the lives they led and the wars they waged? The books on war that our officers valued most can tell us about the eighteenth-century British army, its officer corps, and the history of warfare . Those books can help us understand not only how successive generations of British officers remembered the wars they had fought and prepared for wars to come but also how they shaped their careers in the army and adapted to shifting currents in warfare. How, for example, did they explain their failures in the War of the Austrian Succession? How did that explanation affect their preferences for books? And how, in turn, did books shape their attitudes toward themselves and their conduct in the ensuing Seven Years’ War and War for American Independence? In short, knowing what books British officers preferred from one era to another allows us to get a better understanding of the army, its officer corps, and the history of warfare —especially, the Military Revolution, the eighteenth-century military xii PREFACE Enlightenment, the beginnings of a profession of arms, and the development of the art of war in the age of the American Revolution. In studying these forty-two officers and identifying the books they preferred and neglected, I have had the help of many booksellers, cataloguers, soldiers, and scholars. The eighteenth-century booksellers who inventoried libraries often provided remarkably complete and accurate records of the books that officers owned: the author and title, the place and date of publication , and sometimes even the editor or translator. Such complete entries have helped not just in assembling a composite list of books that officers preferred but especially in deciphering fragmented references to books in other sources: in officers’ reading notes and manuscript lists, in their orders to booksellers, and in the footnotes and marginalia of books they wrote. Even so, many abbreviated references to books would have defied decryption without the help of such online databases as WorldCat and the British Library Public Catalogue, databases that have been developed over the past thirty years but have only recently become rich enough to sustain searches for the most obscure titles or fragments of titles. Beyond that, it would not have been possible to get an understanding of the books that our forty-two officers neglected—to explore systematically eighteenth-century advertisements for books on war—without the help of an exceptionally strong collection of early modern books on war, the kind of collection that exists in the United States only at the Anderson House Library of the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, D.C. Indeed, the Society of the Cincinnati has been indispensable to the preparation of this book. Scholars such as Alan C. Aimone, Mark Danley, Alan Guy, J. A. Houlding, Peter Paret, Clifford J. Rogers, Arlene and John Shy, John Tottenham, Samuel J. Watson, and the late Don Higginbotham and William L. Willcox have contributed to my understanding not only of the Military Revolution, military professionalism, and the eighteenth-century art of war but also of British officers and their libraries. So too have archivists and librarians—particularly, John Dann of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; Norman Higson of the Hull University Library; Melinda Flannery and Lee Pecht of the Fondren Library, Rice University; and Glenise Mathieson of the...