The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (review)

Michael Snape has set out to "recover and rewrite the religious history of the British soldier during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" and has admirably succeeded. Scholars outside of British military history may not be alert to the intrinsic value of such a study, so it is worthwhile to make clear just what Snape has achieved. Ever since Linda Colley's masterly Britons: Forging the Nation (1992), historians have had to come to terms with the role of war and the military in the making of modern British national consciousness. They have not done as well in understanding the actual lives of the men of the British military. Indeed, though a confessional identity for the army exercised much state concern in the nineteenth century, scholars have not given this topic due attention. Historians of British religion have missed the military and historians of the military, notably the army, have missed religion except as a tool of empire or when applied to problems of soldierly disorder. In writing the history of a nation that created a formidable global empire replete with stations dominated by the military presence, this situation constitutes a serious gap. Thus historians interested in imperial culture and imperial societies stand in need of a work precisely like this one.

Secondly, though this work will prove invaluable to scholars of imperial culture, The Redcoat and Religion is nonetheless a seminal contribution to British military history. Snape's treatment of the army takes us beyond both the confines of official administrative doings among the government and the various squabbles of the chaplains. His analysis is a sophisticated blend of gender studies and class history revisionism. He transcends older works, including some of my own, which too casually bought into assumptions about gender and religion. Snape is at pains to refute stereotypes of brutish, drunken soldiers whipped into order by their officers or seduced into sentimental religion by the ministrations of motherly missionaries. His findings include surprises regarding the longevity and autonomy of soldierly religious practice and association, soldiers' own appropriation of dissenting forms of Christianity, and his conclusion that increased official interest and organization of soldier religion may actually have occurred only shortly before increasing trends towards secularization made them moot. In short, Michael Snape has recaptured something of the British army as the little society that it actually was and has returned the main actors, the soldiers, to the center stage.