Although Romanticism has long been understood as a reaction to the political conflict of the French Revolution, it has only been more recently that Romantic texts have been read in close relation to the era’s wars.Footnote ¹ British Romanticism is now widely regarded as a body of writing that was deeply troubled by news of distant military violence and suffering.Footnote ² Britons lived during what Mary Favret defines as a modern wartime, the experience of those ‘living through but not in a war’.Footnote ³ This wartime experience was, therefore, primarily formed by the circulation of information within Britain’s daily journalism that reported on wars fought in distant locations. Each day brought fresh news of the conflicts that profoundly shaped the emotional life of the nation, whether through shared celebrations of victory, commiseration of defeat or, more commonly, the apprehensive or at times simply tedious activity of waiting for further clarity or confirmation of events. Romantic Britain was subject to what Dominick LaCapra describes as a ‘structural trauma’, in which war’s absent or remote violence came to be felt as an anxious disturbance of national history.Footnote ⁴

But, despite giving rise to a modern culture of war spectatorship, Romantic writing was nonetheless thoroughly entangled with the logistical and strategic requirements of conflicts that formed the first total wars of history.Footnote ⁵ In his wide-ranging analysis of war and its media technologies, Paul Virilio has argued that to wage war it is as vital to master and control perceptual fields as it is to conquer on fields of battle.Footnote ⁶ To fully understand Romantic literature as a body of wartime writing therefore means that we must pay attention to the vast military republic of letters that also formed in these years. The period from the 1760s to the 1830s gave rise to a wealth of books on modern military thought, from drill manuals to works of military history, strategy, policy and discipline, with an associated network of military authors, booksellers, publishers, journals and even a nascent imaginative war literature of military memoirs and novels.Footnote ⁷ One correspondent in The British Military Library; or Journal (1798–1800) responded to this outpouring of material by declaring that ‘the æra of military literature’ had taken hold of Britain.Footnote ⁸ Overturning long-established classical traditions of military thought, this material was critical to the formation of a modern security state with the capacity to mobilise its population for war. It formed a body of writing that enabled a nation to undertake, in the words of the military author Jacques Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert, ‘conquests upon itself’ through its prescriptions for the regulation of behaviours, habits, perceptions, bodies and actions that could militarise the very fabrics of daily life.Footnote ⁹

If a central focus of Romantic studies has been the ‘symbiotic relationship’ that formed in the period between literature and science (whether the natural or social sciences), there has nonetheless been almost no concern with the era’s military science.Footnote ¹⁰ This neglect of military thought is surprising given that war, empire, science and literature were fundamentally entangled in this era. Naval voyages and military campaigns not only attracted enormous public attention but also played a prominent role in the production of knowledge.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, military science was widely considered to be of immense significance, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica proposing that the study of war was not only ‘the most necessary and useful of all the sciences’, but the most complex and difficult to master.Footnote ¹² Yet the limited concern with the cultural status of this body of thought speaks to a continuing uncertainty surrounding the very idea that it is possible to fully conceptualise a coherent military science. A long tradition of Western thought has insisted that truth belongs to the realm of peace, not the brutality and chaos of war.Footnote ¹³ For cultural theorists of war such as Elaine Scarry, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, violence renders us speechless and so represents the antithesis of language, thought and rationality.Footnote ¹⁴ Language is debased by war, rendered into a tissue of lies that hover above and beyond physical bodies and the traumatic pain of combat. The peculiar difficulty in conceptualising military thought was compounded with the rise of a modern military science and the simultaneous appearance of a separate civilian sphere at the end of the eighteenth century, the term civilian first coming into its modern usage in the 1790s.Footnote ¹⁵ War’s status as a field of knowledge was left uncertain and fragmented, war seemingly remaining entirely aesthetic, absolute or sublime.Footnote ¹⁶ Arendt proposes that modern political and cultural theory has largely abandoned any serious consideration of war or military thought, leaving its analysis to be undertaken by mere military ‘technicians’ whose knowledge of war is inseparable from its practice.Footnote ¹⁷

This book argues that Romantic-era military literature is worthy of attention as more than a simply technical body of writing. Military thought influenced Romantic cultural life as extensively as nearly any of the other proto-scientific disciplines that formed in this period because it was pivotal to the violence that defined Romantic wartime culture. An anxiogenic age beset by the fear and alarm of imminent invasion and revolutionary upheaval, Britain in the Romantic period may have remained distant from war, but the nation nonetheless lived under the shadow of war’s perpetual threats and enduring obligations for national service. Jerome Christensen reminds us that for all British Romanticism was distant from war, it was also shaped by the far-reaching demands of national wartime mobilisation, meaning that Romantic literature ‘was written under the threat of imminent invasion, during the state’s emergency suspension of dailiness, amidst the din of official exhortations to unity, and in the face of brutal and systematic repression’.Footnote ¹⁸ Research into the rise of Britain’s fiscal-military state reveals how the nation’s extensive wartime military bureaucracy, administration and propaganda constituted a veritable revolution of social and political life almost as far reaching in its implications as the revolution in France.Footnote ¹⁹ For Michel Foucault, military disciplinary practices were foundational to a new, disciplinary society that found its ‘full blossoming’ at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote ²⁰ This was a time when Jane Austen delighted in the military policy of Captain Charles Pasley, while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were branded alongside Pasley as amongst the nation’s leading military authors.Footnote ²¹ Radicals from William Cobbett to Percy Bysshe Shelley were, conversely, united by their antipathy towards military disciplinary practices such as flogging and pressgangs.Footnote ²² Post-Waterloo Romantic culture was hardly free of its entanglements with militarised conflict, as is evident in Shelley’s response to Peterloo or Lord Byron’s involvement with the Greek War of Independence (1821–32).

Notwithstanding the demands of war, there has been little consideration of how such military elements permeated Romantic cultural life. This is in striking distinction to studies of early modern literature that have demonstrated a detailed understanding of the extensive associations between the era’s military books and its drama and poetry.Footnote ²³ Gert Geoffrey Langsam observes that the discourses on war originating in early modern military books extended into ‘every conceivable literary form of the day’.Footnote ²⁴ In stark contrast, Robert Gordon has observed that Ian Watt’s foundational The Rise of the Novel documents the emergence of modern literature as a demilitarisation of society or a veritable ‘civilian revolution’ that displaced an earlier culture concerned with martial conflict, Gordon concluding ‘[it] was in the eighteenth century that fictional man, like social man, abandoned the sword’.Footnote ²⁵ Romanticism is epistemologically distant from war because it is, fundamentally, a civilian body of writing. Given that the definition of the civilian dates from the 1790s, one of the defining characteristics of Romanticism is surely that it constitutes the first body of writing to be produced by authors who could conceptualise themselves as civilians. At the same time, however, a new and distinct body of military writing also acquired its modern form. This was a body of work formed out of military technical, professional, disciplinary and, notably, a fictional knowledge of war that assumed the task of documenting, interpreting and representing war for the modern nation. The demilitarisation of society or the civilian revolution that Watt documents went hand in hand with the ‘militarisation’ of war by the state’s military apparatus and an emergent military science.Footnote ²⁶ Encompassing hundreds of titles, this body of modern war writing admittedly constituted an enormous range of topics and approaches. Yet however much a ‘military literary world’ was composed of a diverse and distinct body of writing, it nonetheless emerged at the same moment and in parallel with its civilian wartime counterpart.Footnote ²⁷ As Nick Mansfield has proposed, war cannot be fixed into a stable identity but can only be thought through ‘aporetic entanglements’ with its ‘others’, however that other of war is conceived.Footnote ²⁸ This book proposes that the military thought of the Romantic era has just such a set of ‘aporetic entanglements’ with the broader wartime culture that we know as Romanticism.

Examining the cultural significance of military writing in Romantic-era Britain, this study is founded on Jacques Rancière’s theorisation of indisciplinarity.Footnote ²⁹ Adopting a radically new approach to the spectacular politics of modernity, Rancière has insisted that rather than unmask spectacle by revealing its basis in suffering we must seek to understand how politics is itself aesthetic. This means examining how politics operates through an underlying ‘distribution of the sensible’ concerned with questions of who can and cannot speak with authority. Rancière has thus enacted what Gabriel Rockhill terms a ‘Copernican revolution’ in approaches to the politics of aesthetics because he refuses to see politics and aesthetics as separate categories.Footnote ³⁰ All politics is aesthetic because all politics is intrinsically concerned with questions of how we can see and understand the world.Footnote ³¹ Rancière broadens our idea of literature from fiction to the operation of the sensible within any and all fields of knowledge.Footnote ³² He advances an idea of a ‘poetics of knowledge’ that is concerned with untangling the literary effects by which a science is able to develop itself as a science, with finding beneath the formation of a science the operation of writing and its quests for signification and meaning.Footnote ³³ He directs attention to a ‘new regime of writing’ and its formulation of a ‘symptomology of society’ that underpinned the human sciences as much as imaginative literary texts in the Romantic age.Footnote ³⁴

Rancière distances his thought from Walter Benjamin’s earlier theorisation of the ‘aestheticization of politics’, which, for Benjamin, was inextricably linked to war.Footnote ³⁵ Nonetheless, not only does Rancière carry forward Benjamin’s earlier concerns with modern media by elaborating the a priori forms of aesthetics, but there are also innumerable ways that Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetics of politics circles back to concerns with war, strategy and what he terms the ‘war machine’ of disciplinary thought.Footnote ³⁶ He has proposed with regards to the aesthetics of Romanticism that ‘the conditions for the creation of this new art world were first and foremost political – and even military’.Footnote ³⁷ Developing much further Foucault’s analysis of modern disciplinary societies, Rancière insists that discipline must be understood as encompassing more than simply the exercise and coercion of bodies because discipline also conditions the language and knowledge that surrounds bodies.Footnote ³⁸ For Rancière, indisciplinary thought means looking past disciplinary boundaries of knowledge to rethink the ‘context of the war’ by which bodies are made to conform to discourse.Footnote ³⁹ Hence, while this study is deeply informed by Foucault’s analysis of military disciplinary practices and their foundational role in the dawning of a disciplinary society during the Romantic era, it also follows Rancière’s efforts to read the aesthetic and political alongside one another in order to explore in more detail the full flourishing of military power as a vast discourse concerned with the force and power of life. This study offers a history or poetics of knowledge that examines how military thought developed out of the massive expansion of print of the latter half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the context of this study, an indisciplinary approach means seeing how, in the modern era, a new kind of military writing attained a privileged status for articulating what we can know and say about war.

The central argument of this book is that military writing was deeply informed by an elementary feature of Romantic wartime: the intensification of military disciplinary regimes in line with the period’s embryonic biopolitical thought.Footnote ⁴¹ Biopolitics has received considerable attention from a large and growing body of cultural theory as one of the most incisive ways of conceptualising modern power, but the concept has not been extensively examined in relation to Romantic culture.Footnote ⁴² The precise meaning of biopolitics is widely debated and there is little settled agreement beyond the obvious reference to the role of ‘life’ in modern political power and government. While the term can be traced back to the early twentieth century, the word biopolitics was coined by Rudolph Kjellén to refer to vitalist ideas of the state (Kjellén, not coincidentally, also coined the term geopolitics), the modern usage of the term is indebted to the work of Foucault.Footnote ⁴³ Foucault argues that biopolitics first emerged as a response of government to the demographic explosions of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁴ Where disciplines targeted the individual bodies of workers, prisoners or patients, thus developing as an anatamo-politics of the body, biopolitics developed as a means for acquiring power and knowledge over entire populations. Biopolitics arose from new conceptions of the population as a living entity, governed by its own laws and regularities, and so complements earlier disciplinary practices by targeting the collective life of the population. Taken in its entirety, however, a modern biopower encompasses these two poles of life, which it co-ordinates by imposing a series of norms that can align individual behaviour with the biological needs of the collective.Footnote ⁴⁵ Biopower targets life in its totality, from the individual through to the collective. Reflecting on these developments, Giorgio Agamben goes so far as to propose that the modern world can be defined by the failure of all ‘historical tasks’ for humanity so that only life, the animality or biological existence of the human, is able to still hold meaning and significance.Footnote ⁴⁶ Life is coming to be the most important and elementary source of modern power.

Theorists of biopolitics have insisted, however, that it is imperative to understand how the modern politics of life always risk reversion to racism, war and death.Footnote ⁴⁷ If the Romantic era gave rise to a biopolitics that sought to administer the health and productivity of a living population, this was nonetheless matched with what Foucault terms a ‘thanatopolitics’ that sought to marshal the population for war.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his classic study of military professional power, The Soldier and the State, Samuel Huntington adapted Harold Lasswell’s work on the modern ‘garrison state’ to encapsulate how war has today come to be waged through ideals of military professionalism and national service by the ‘managers of violence’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This study takes such thought further, however, by examining how military professionalism has been implicated with the disciplinary management and control of bodies and lives. The specialist knowledge of the professional soldier is inseparable from the forms of knowledge derived from military disciplinary power, as a new body of military literature transformed the mechanical approach of neo-classical military thought by cultivating quasi-medical concerns with the vitality of disciplinary subjects.Footnote ⁵⁰ A new disciplinary regime began to conceptualise the disciplined subject in terms of what Foucault describes as the ‘natural body’, a biopolitical body of vital, living forces, a body informed by inner depths and potentials that resist the imposition of ‘mechanical’ authority.Footnote ⁵¹ While modern military thought undoubtedly encompasses many diverse topics, at its heart it shares a new-found set of mechanisms for developing the basis of all military power in the living body. No longer was war fought as the basic right of the sovereign, war was fought to protect and foster the purity, health and vitality of the nation, meaning that an increasingly professionalised military began to wage wars not simply as the managers of violence, but as the ‘managers of life’.Footnote ⁵²

Cultural and media theorists such as Christoph Menke and Friedrich Kittler have insisted, however, that the natural body revealed by Foucault stands at the intersection of both new kinds of disciplinary practices and new forms of aesthetics that governed Romanticism.Footnote ⁵³ As a growing number of studies have shown, it is far from a coincidence that biopolitics emerged at the same moment that an Aristotelian poetry of ‘action’ was superseded by a Romantic poetics grounded in the ordinary details of human life, a poetics ‘dedicated to the repetition and reproduction of unadorned life’.Footnote ⁵⁴ If Romantic aesthetics is underpinned by an organic model, a similar organicism was deeply implicated in the development of modern military thought. The eighteenth-century language of aesthetics paralleled the rise of a language of military discipline, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten theorised the cultivation of aesthetic taste by likening the practice to the exercises of soldiers.Footnote ⁵⁵ Harvie Ferguson observes that war can even be understood as ‘a kind of applied aesthetics’ because it is concerned with structuring, and deforming, the world of the senses.Footnote ⁵⁶ Virilio similarly contends that military command is essentially aesthetic in its operation, ‘[s]ince the battlefield has always been a field of perception, the war machine appears to the military commander as an instrument of representation, comparable to the painter’s palette and brush’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ferguson and Virilio echo and extend Azar Gat’s definitive study of how military thought is culture-bound and so always develops within a specific aesthetic milieu. No matter how much aesthetics developed in the Romantic era within its own, distinct terms, its development was paralleled by the growth of wide-ranging disciplinary practices that sought to govern and control life, modes of control that were intensely elaborated and informed by military thought.

Rancière places such tensions at the heart of the ‘new regime of writing’ that formed at the end of the eighteenth century as writing became detached from an earlier, neo-classical representative regime of art concerned with the living speech of aristocratic masters.Footnote ⁵⁸ Modern writing perpetually oscillates between freedom and materiality, producing either a ‘democratic literarity’ that lays the foundations for anyone to say anything, or else forming as the ‘war machine’ of human scientific, sociological or disciplinary knowledge that establishes coincidence between bodies and words.Footnote ⁵⁹ This tension within writing is reflected in the enormous expansion of war writing that grappled with the unprecedented power and political significance of mass armies. While modern war writing collapses the neo-classical military world, it also decisively reorients the vast democratic potential unleashed by mass armies into the theorisation and control of the biological. Menke, in a similar manner to Rancière, reads this tension in writing as a conflict between conceptions of life developed by aesthetics and bio-aesthetics.Footnote ⁶⁰ If the aesthetic attempts to liberate life by freeing it of any teleology or biological destiny, bio-aesthetics, conversely, perpetually seeks to conflate the aesthetic with the biological in efforts to foster and direct the productive forces of the natural body. This bio-aesthetic in effect constitutes disciplinary knowledge, the disciplinary imposition of discursive meanings and truth onto the senses, actions and self-understanding of bodies. Where democratic literarity is definitive of the emancipatory poetics of High Romanticism, a converse process of writing’s capacity to materialise itself into bodies is epitomised by modern forms of war writing.Footnote ⁶¹ There are striking yet inverted parallels, in other words, between Romantic concerns with the living body and the sublimity, genius, organicism, perceptions and force of war that place the state’s war machine in a strangely transposed relationship with Romantic aesthetics.

The concept of bio-aesthetics also elucidates the new aesthetics of imaginative war writing that came into being during the Romantic era. As much as other forms of military literature, this imaginative writing of military memoirs, biography and novels took shape in relation to a Romantic aesthetics of life that overturned earlier classical narratives concerned with the actions and speech of the great men of history. Instead, a new kind of story of the soldier’s personal experience came to the fore, giving rise to what Kate McLoughlin terms a ‘veteran poetics’ concerned with the suffering and trauma of war.Footnote ⁶² While this aesthetics of military service is characterised by a ‘democratic literarity’ as it allowed any and all soldiers to speak on war, there was nonetheless a concomitant reduction of war stories to the physical experiences and suffering of the body and its ‘revelation’ that life is constituted above all by our biological existence.Footnote ⁶³ A body of imaginative writing by military veterans, therefore, emerged in conjunction with other elements of the era’s military war writing concerned with understanding the violent forces surrounding the natural body in ways that perpetually conflate the aesthetic with the biological. Understood as a version of aesthetics, modern war writing can be associated as much with the counter-Enlightenment of Romanticism as with the other proto-sciences forming in the Romantic era, but it appears as a sombre shadow of counter-Enlightenment thought in its concerns with the manipulation and brutal suffering of the body.Footnote ⁶⁴

Manuel De Landa has described the transformations in military power during the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as a shift away from clockwork towards motorised warfare.Footnote ⁶⁵ Where the clockwork mechanism aligns with the early modern era’s neo-classical assumptions that soldiers should be treated as though they were clockwork automatons set in motion by their commander, the idea of a motor implies that the soldier possesses an internal mechanism of control and orientation, epitomised not by the wound-up clock but the internalised mechanisms of the steam engine.Footnote ⁶⁶ While agreeing with his general outline of a shift from a clockwork to an internally motivated soldier, this study offers a conception of motorisation less in strictly mechanical terms than in terms of living beings, of the vital interiorities and souls that a new regime of biopower inaugurated.Footnote ⁶⁷ The soldier ceases to be perceived merely as an automaton and appears instead as a living organism possessed of autonomous, inner forces and affects.Footnote ⁶⁸ What is more, this study shifts its focus away from De Landa’s stress on the materiality of machines to emphasise instead the mediality of writing, seeing the latter as essential to the formation of a new era of warfare.Footnote ⁶⁹ If a ‘new regime of writing’ was concerned with the historical forces that lie within domains of knowledge, those forces could be seen to reveal themselves as the living forces, the disciplinary lives that actually constituted military power. Catherine Gallagher has argued that life became a regulating principle of knowledge at this time – that political economy as much as literature was delineated as a ‘kind of life science’ concerned with understanding ‘vital human energy’.Footnote ⁷⁰ So too, however, military knowledge developed as a ‘kind of life science’ equally concerned with the vital powers of human lives and their energies.

Attending to the bio-aesthetics of military thought and teasing out its aporetic entanglement with Romantic wartime culture, this study reconceptualises the relationships between aesthetics, life, history, and warfare that formed in the Romantic era. It seeks to show how military thought shaped elementary questions about the visibility of political conflict and its suffering. Romanticism may have elided its violent contemporary history, but this was in large part because military literature, a modern war writing of military technicians, had become tasked with shaping a new understanding of history’s violence. Although largely ignored by Romantic studies, this writing nonetheless profoundly shaped how British culture approached war. Moreover, it established the intellectual foundations for our own contemporary perceptions of war and its strategies and violence. If war today is governed by complex entanglements of militarised entertainments, strategic power and modern media forms, whether defined as ‘the logistics of perception’, ‘the military-entertainment complex’, ‘virtuous war’, ‘netwar’, ‘militainment’ or even more broadly ‘the liberal way of war’, Rancière’s thought invites us to examine more foundational, even a priori, questions about the intersection of aesthetics and politics that can be seen to lie behind the militarisation of modern media technologies.Footnote ⁷¹ A study of the formation of modern war writing reveals a far longer and more complex history to war’s relationship to capitalist or liberal modernity and the militarised control over the productive forces of the living body. Foucault posits that by ‘elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies’, the writing of junior military officers played as central a role in the formation of modernity as the great work of Enlightenment jurists and philosophers, perhaps even poets.Footnote ⁷² If the modern episteme was inaugurated by the immense epistemological shocks of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, this rupture could also be seen as a result of military power’s discovery of the natural body.Footnote ⁷³ Yet if Romantic era military writing provided a decisively new discursive framework for representing war, so too the disciplinary instability of writing on war means that this material remains highly open to new readings. This study thus offers its own redistribution of the sensible as it examines the underlying generic forms and assumptions of military thought to reveal how they first established a hold over war knowledge in the Romantic era.

Chapter 1 outlines the growth of military writing in Britain during the Romantic period. It does so by situating this growth in relation to the far more extensive expansion of print that occurred in the late eighteenth century and, in particular, the expansion of the era’s periodical writing. Periodicals were not only one of the main products of an expanding realm of print but were also central to the task of making sense of this expansion by reviewing, cataloguing and organising the burgeoning world of print. It is significant, then, that there was also a rapidly growing number of military journals. Seeking to develop an intellectual culture out of the increasingly daily experience of wartime, the military journals played a foundational role in the formation of a new kind of deep but narrow field of military disciplinary knowledge. The appearance of military journals reflects how knowledge in this era was undergoing what Michel Foucault terms a process of ‘disciplinarisation’, as the localised and fragmentary forms of earlier technical knowledges were variously disqualified or else centralised, normalised and hierarchicised into a set of modern disciplinary fields that formed the basis of modern science.Footnote ⁷⁴ The military journals were pivotal to this process because they supplied an institutional home and voice to the military that allowed modern military thought to first coalesce as a unified discipline of knowledge. The chapter reveals how an increasingly professionalised military acquired a totalising, scientific authority on war.Footnote ⁷⁵

This chapter also considers, however, how this disciplinarisation of knowledge gave rise to counter-histories of war’s sublime shock and brute force. There is a tension in military writing that can be traced to the formation of military disciplinary knowledge out of the corresponding military disciplinary control of bodies, actions and lives. Although studies of early modern war writing have built upon Foucault’s account of the formation of modern disciplinary practices, his thought has had little impact upon studies of modern war writing since the Romantic era.Footnote ⁷⁶ Studies of modern literature have shown a far greater concern with his work on sexuality while discounting his related concerns with war.Footnote ⁷⁷ Addressing the subjective side of disciplinarity, the formation of self-writing and what Ian Hacking has theorised as memoro-politics, this chapter concludes by examining how literature and science appear as twinned elements within the disciplinary knowledge of war. It details how we can read the full extent of military writing in relation to an emergent biopower or, in Thomas Lemke’s terms, a ‘vital politics’ that extended discipline ever more deeply into the control of life.Footnote ⁷⁸

The following two chapters examine the evolution of military thought during the Romantic era by delineating its relation to evolving military disciplinary practices. The two chapters are far from being exhaustive of this material, but concentrate on two foundational texts of a new military biopolitical thought. Chapter 2 looks at the formation of an exceedingly influential genre of modern war writing, the critical-military history that can be traced to the Welsh military officer Henry Lloyd and his History of the Late War in Germany, Between the King of Prussia, and the Empress of Germany and Her Allies (1766–90). Recent criticism has challenged traditional views of Lloyd as a merely neo-classical author with little relevance to modern conceptions of war, his work most notably encompassing the characteristically Romantic impulse of generic experimentation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Building on this new research, this chapter shows how Lloyd’s approach to military history not only helped introduce concerns with the aesthetics of genius and sublimity into military thought but that it also established a new way of conceptualising the historical conditions of war. His writing decisively broke with past efforts to teach history by example to instead conceptualise strategy around an emergent historical consciousness, a consciousness that Reinhart Koselleck associates with the momentous challenges to historical representation posed by the Seven Years War (1756–63).Footnote ⁸⁰

This chapter also argues that by turning military thought away from traditions of memoir and maxims, Lloyd’s writing was critical for breaking down a neo-classical view of the commander as a figure of authority, command and action. As it transformed the history of war from a storehouse of examples to an object to be studied, it simultaneously reimagined the commander in relation to the quasi-natural ‘life’ of the army. A new conception of strategy altogether emerges from Lloyd’s history as he attempts to comprehend the army as, in effect, an organism that lies outside the general’s complete control. Military science comes to focus on the ‘space of campaigns’ concerned with the strategic movements or circulation of the living collective of the army.Footnote ⁸¹ Although many of Lloyd’s ideas would be superseded by subsequent military thinkers, his thought operated in a similar fashion to Burke’s theorisation of the sublime because it enabled the study of war to branch into diverse yet hierarchically ordered areas of military knowledge, whether of strategy, tactics, military policy or the human passions.Footnote ⁸² His work signalled how war in the Romantic era was coming to be conceptualised as a human science concerned with understanding and harnessing the vital power and force of life, what Lloyd describes as a new and sublime philosophy of war.

Chapter 3 considers in more detail the evolution of military disciplinary practices as military thought became ever more akin to a human science. It does so by focussing on a key work in the theorisation of military discipline, Robert Jackson’s A Systematic View of the Formation, Discipline, and Economy of Armies (1804). Described by the military theorist J. F. C. Fuller as the first scientific account of war, with a status comparable to the writing of Antoine-Henri Jomini and Clausewitz, Jackson’s ideas also informed Sir John Moore’s revolutionary experiments in military training that are today seen as having inaugurated the first truly modern soldiers.Footnote ⁸³ Undoubtedly prompted by the mass volunteering of early nineteenth-century Britain, while developing much further ideas first adumbrated by Guibert, exemplified by Foucault as a founder of the modern disciplinary society, Jackson’s book elaborates the enormous military and political power of the revolutionary era soldier.Footnote ⁸⁴ An overlooked text, it nonetheless represents the first fully realised expression of the modern disciplinary regime in relation to war and offers a set of crucial correctives to Foucault’s account of the development of modern military disciplinary practices.

With Jackson drawing on his extensive experience as a surgeon in the British army, Systematic View places the medicalised body at the heart of military discipline. Jackson insisted that the soldier must be viewed as a living organism, possessed of a complex and self-governing interiority that determines how tactics operate, in which ‘instinctive movements and innate energy … overturn the calculations of systematic tacticians, and humble the pride of the disciples of the mechanical school’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Jackson’s conception, the soldier appears as a self-governing figure who functions independently and at a distance from disciplinary sites, a figure who more closely resembles the modern subject than the mechanical automatons associated with Frederick the Great’s military drill practices. More than this, however, Jackson’s book reveals how an emergent Romantic aesthetics penetrated deeply into the era’s military thought to reconceptualise how the soldier functioned within the field. The military’s concern with the imagination was undoubtedly a ‘shock’ to poets, Clausewitz surmised, but was nonetheless central to emergent aesthetic concerns with perception and interiority that suggest an unexplored context of wartime media surrounding a Romantic poetics and its formation of subjectivity.Footnote ⁸⁶ Jackson’s book represents a key shift in the conceptualisation of military discipline.

The final two chapters of the book consider the formation of new genres of military literature that were written by military authors for a predominantly non-military reading public. Reflecting a thoroughgoing militarisation of writing about war in this period, the two chapters examine the emergence of new forms of aesthetic expression surrounding war that were fundamentally concerned with the vigour, health and organicism of the nation and the individual soldier. Chapter 4 examines one of the most politically influential books to appear in Britain during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810).Footnote ⁸⁷ One of the first titular uses of the phrase ‘military policy’, Pasley’s Essay concerns itself with the military capacities of Britain in ways that carry striking echoes of Lloyd’s conception of a philosophy of war concerned with the management of collective, living forces. Many political commentators held the Essay to be decisive in bringing the wars to a conclusion, and it was even considered at the time to have had an impact on the political life of the nation second only to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Pasley also received a surprisingly positive reception from his contemporary poets and novelists, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, all of whom applauded his manly and inspiring writing even as they recoiled from his call for imperial conquest.Footnote ⁸⁸

As Pasley imagines the expansion of a British empire of liberty, so he argues the need for aggressive conquest to be brought home to Europe if Britain is to resist Napoleonic France. He outlines a programme of endocolonisation, or a return of the military-colonial project to the metropole, that seeks to remodel Britain itself in relation to far reaching demands of military security. He thereby shifts concerns with national identity away from the warlike relations that might prevail between nations and into the institutional management of the population and its potentiality, what Pasley calls its inherent ‘vigour’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Pasley’s writing stands at the roots not only of new conception of empire but equally of what Hannah Arendt saw as the most dangerous idea in political theory – the organic view of the nation that links killing to the necessary preservation and expansion of life.Footnote ⁹⁰ Considering, finally, why he was so widely praised as a writer, more a poet than a statesman in Wordsworth’s view, this chapter draws on work into the relation between culture and the state to propose that military policy can be conceptualised as the aesthetic realisation of the nation as a living organism. In Pasley’s writing, the military author displaces and reorients the traditional patriotic functions of the poetic bard to establish a new kind of national wartime narrative, a sublime liberal epic founded on the nation’s traumatic confrontation with war.

In the post-Waterloo era, a large body of military tales were published in Britain that recounted veterans’ experiences of the Napoleonic Wars for the general reading public.Footnote ⁹¹ Chapter 5 examines Thomas Hamilton’s The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (1827), a fictionalised treatment of the author’s military service in the Peninsular War (1808–14) and a book for which the Quarterly Review first coined the term ‘military novel’.Footnote ⁹² Henry Crabb Robinson described it as one of the most lifelike novels he had read, one that contained ‘much Wordsworthism’.Footnote ⁹³ Hamilton himself was a key writer for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and a close associate of Scott, from whose Waverley (1814) Hamilton clearly took inspiration. This chapter argues for the central importance of Cyril Thornton not only in inaugurating the genre of military novel, but equally for its formative role in the rise of modern war novels and, indeed, modern war literature more broadly. While war novels are traditionally associated with soldier-authors of the First World War, Hamilton’s novel was nonetheless the first to offer what Paul Fussell views as the basis of all modern war stories – the reformulation of the romance of war around the physical survival of the soldier.Footnote ⁹⁴ By mapping contemporary war onto the framework of the historical romance, with its capacity to align individual Bildung and national growth, so Hamilton’s novel established a key generic form by which war is rendered accessible to the modern nation.

This study also contextualises Cyril Thornton in relation to the focus of previous chapters by demonstrating how it participates in the biopolitics that invests other forms of military writing of this period. The novel overturns a traditional association of the aristocracy with war by aligning the military officer not only with an emergent discourse of sexuality but also with a related set of concerns around wounding, patriotism and military honour. By following Menke and Rancière’s concerns with the critical role of the aesthetic in the completion of the disciplinary subject, this chapter also suggests that the aesthetic rendition of the body in the military novel represents the culmination of military discipline’s transformation into a form of biopower.Footnote ⁹⁵ It reconceptualises the trauma of war literature by revealing how the novel enacts a fundamentally biopolitical operation of bringing bare life, the death in life of trauma, into the centre of British politics. By narrating the traumatic tale of the junior military officer, the novel may have quite literally enabled a subaltern to speak, but the novel also simultaneously reduces the officer to a suffering body in ways that reveal the total hold of a militarised biopower over discourses of war, a bio-aesthetics that has continued to reverberate across modern war writing.

By investigating the development of a proto-disciplinary field of military thought, this book documents the rise of militarism as a sombre shadow across British Romantic culture. It concludes, however, by taking a different perspective on the potentialities and instabilities that can also be located within this field of thought. Fredric Jameson has recently offered a strikingly original view of the emancipatory potential of the military when he argues for a universal military enlistment that could establish the military as a dual power alongside the state. The military, he proposes, could form what amounts to a counter-government to act as a source of national solidarity and welfare in an age of globalised, financial capitalism.Footnote ⁹⁶ Although his apparent support for militarism has attracted considerable criticism, Jameson nonetheless reflects a broader turn to war and the military in recent critiques of the historical origins and progress of capitalist modernity. Drawing on Foucault’s work on biopolitics and war, Jacques Bidet has observed that while war and class struggle cannot simply be equated, neither can they be isolated from one another. Although considerable work has been undertaken on populations in relation to modes of production, far more remains to be done to understand their relationship to territory and the biopolitics of war.Footnote ⁹⁷ Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato have, in a related manner, proposed a new critique of capitalism in which military conflict and its biopolitical practices play a central role, and in which they argue that not only are we engaged in real wars but that we must also respond to these wars by drawing on the counter-strategic thought of French theory.Footnote ⁹⁸

Taking inspiration from this emergent work on the relationship between capitalist modernity, war and emancipation, this book ends with a short afterword to consider how the ‘wartime poetry’ of Romanticism could itself be seen to align with the counter-strategic thought of French theory. Indeed, where Marx developed his ideas in response to the earlier political economy of thinkers such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, French theorists such as Foucault, Raymond Aron, Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau constructed their thought out of a very real recovery of Clausewitz.Footnote ⁹⁹ But the enormous interest in the history of political economy that spreads out past Smith, Malthus and Ricardo has not been met with a similar level of critical interest in Clausewitz, and, as discussed here, the vast body of military thought that surrounds, informs and enables Clausewitz. Read in relation to modern war writing, Romantic wartime literature could be understood not simply through theories of trauma, therefore, but as representing an earlier version of this counter-strategic thought that finds its roots in the Romantic era.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Romantic counter-strategic thought can be seen to turn strategic military thought back against itself as it obstructs, problematises and renders inoperative the strategic modes for ordering and managing life that we have inherited from the Napoleonic era.