1 - Introduction

Summary

Subject matter

This book is the second part of a two-volume labour history concerning the rank-and-file soldiers of the British army in the nineteenth century. In common with its companion volume, Soldiers as Workers: Class, Employment, Conflict and the Nineteenth-Century Military (2016), this study argues that class is the primary means of understanding the topic. It also analyses the impact of class on employment and conflict within the army. The term ‘class’ is used in a simple standard socio-economic way, as outlined below.

The majority of pioneering labour historians, mainly writing from a Marxist perspective, have claimed that in the early years of the Industrial Revolution a distinct working class was formed thorough economic and political struggle. This was ‘the making of the English working class’, as in the title of the classic 1963 account by E.P. Thompson. Thompson's analysis has been contested by more recent scholars who have emphasised divisions within the working class. They have nuanced these conclusions by giving further consideration to issues of region, skills, religion, deference, gender and other factors. In the half-century since Thompson's work, there has also been much debate about the theory and framework of class amongst historians writing about Britain. The ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1980s, with its emphasis on culture, has been further explored by historians concerned with its ‘objective and ‘subjective’ aspects. Readers are referred to the footnote below for a discussion of this shifting historiography of the theory of class and its application to studies of work, culture and community in the nineteenth century.

The Industrial Revolution coincided with the mass mobilisation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (hereafter termed the French Wars). Most of the rank and file of the British army being recruited from amongst the poor, service life was probably more typical of working-class experience than, for example, working life in new urban textile factories. Yet the political opinions of soldiers as workers, and the continuation in the army of cultural attitudes held in civilian life, have largely been neglected by historians.