An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army, 1585-1702 (review)

Roger B. Manning's study of the origins of the British Army argues that military professionalism developed from the public discourse and collective consciousness of Britain's "swordsmen." The book appears amid a general debate that accords printed "public" sources greater usefulness and insight than "archival" historians have begrudged previously. Discourse generated in the public sphere by manuals, news-books, treatises, and pamphlets, it is argued, illuminates in a way that archival sources, generally grounded in bureaucracy and private discourse, do not.

Using such printed materials, the author claims that while operational failure characterized the apprenticeship of late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart military officers, by 1702 British officers had become "more committed to the court, the government and the state . . . . and shared a sense of belonging to one profession and one military organization" (p. 431). For Manning, the establishment of a British Army is at the heart a transformation of the consciousness and behavior of individuals.

In this book there is little or no mention of logistics, victualling, the Ordnance Office, the Exchequer, the arms trade, military finance, institutionalized transport, and related sinews of war. Oblique references to organizational transformation (pp. 202–3, 255, 440) appear, but generally within the context of morale, discipline, and manifestations of mentalité. The latter ephemeral phenomena, however, would not have been achieved without the physical underpinnings of bureaucratic institutions. Unqualified concentration upon the utterances of prominent theorists and celebrated commanders minimizes the absolutely essential roles of organizational development and fiscal institutionalization in creating a professional army.

An army's collective consciousness and will are inseparable from the institutions that sustain it. A well-run commissariat works wonders for esprit de corps. Modern armies were not brought into being because officers changed their attitudes and thinking. Rather, standing forces coalesced when states accumulated sufficient revenue to master logistics and pay for large armies supported by artillery. A modern officer corps based upon merit and professional skill only emerged when the state had sufficient money to pay such men. Aristocratic (and amateur) leadership had been consequences of the state's fiscal immaturity, and thus recruitment was greatly supplemented by privatized sources because would-be commanders could afford to raise troops.

Does the study of the evolution of the British Army require archival research, or will printed sources suffice? For example, Manning rightly points out that recruiting patterns reflected family and kinship connections. These affinities, however, are best documented by private papers, regimental accounts, muster rolls, and licenses to go beyond the seas. The printed sources have been worked and reworked, and it is in less familiar collections, such as declared accounts and unpublished family manuscripts that patronage and kinship networks will be laid bare.

Disproportionate reliance on one type of historical evidence, and well-known evidence at that, can skew analysis. Theorists, commanders, and politicians often publish their thoughts. Institutions only express themselves historically through painstaking investigation of unpublished (and often unwieldy) records. Manning's overdependence upon the public sphere, the published literature of the swordsmen, yields a flawed historical reconstruction of the origins of the British Army. Causality appears reversed. Centralized nation-states fostered cultures of military professionalism, not the other way round.