What this book is about

An understanding of working-class people is a key factor in the analysis of the British army in the period of industrialisation and Empire. Yet, despite an immense military literature, we know little about what the huge occupational group of common soldiers did all day. This book provides an account of common soldiers pursuing pre-enlistment employment within the army itself in specialised trades, as servants or as ‘penny capitalists’. It discusses how soldiers exhibited pre-enlistment attitudes and engaged in class conflict at various levels, including asserting a strong contract culture. It shows how class pervaded the structure of the army at every level, with the rank and file being consistently treated less well than officers. Together with a future companion volume on popular politics, it offers new insights into major issues which shaped Victorian society, like class, politics, nationhood, racism and imperialism.

This research on the army and its place in British society comes mainly from the long nineteenth century: 1790 to 1914. It is coterminus with the momentous and influential events of industrial development and maturity and with wars of nationhood and imperialism. It concentrates on working-class professional soldiers, rather than the unpaid and part-time volunteers formed during the Napoleonic period and later from the mid-Victorian period. Professionals are distinguished between regulars, who could be sent anywhere, and the county militia, only mobilised in wartime, whose contracts specified home service only. In addition, during the French Wars, other professional soldiers served in the short-lived ‘fencibles’ (again only for service in the UK), plus garrison, veterans and some colonial regiments. The French Wars also saw the creation of small professional staffs in unpaid volunteer units. The study considers the white soldiers of the private army of the East India Company, who only signed on for Indian service. It also covers overseas military adventurers who contracted to serve in British private armies fighting on the nationalist or liberal side in early-nineteenth-century wars in South America, Greece, Portugal and Spain. The terms and conditions of enlistment of all these soldiers are analysed in relation to formal and informal contract cultures, which had many similarities with civilian employment. Wartime compulsion existed, both officially, in terms of balloting for the militia and reserve units, and unofficially, with crimping, trickery by recruiting sergeants and mistreatment of home service troops refusing to volunteer for the front line.