Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

A substantial collection of sources indicates that women constituted a considerable part of the travelers in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, a period in which traveling became increasingly popular with various social classes. These travelers have left traces of their experiences en route in personal letters on papyri and ostraca, in graffiti and on votive inscriptions. Classical scholarship has long ignored these sources, even though they offer us a unique insight into female experiences and self-representation. Recent excavations on and near the trade routes in the Eastern and Western Desert of Egypt, along which units of the Roman army were positioned in military outposts, protecting and controlling the area, have uncovered letters in which women – most of them of lower rank – discussed their concerns about traveling from and to the military camps of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. When combined with other sources such as papyri and graffiti, these documents give insight into the mobility of the female relatives of soldiers in Roman Egypt. They tell us something about the reasons why they decided to undertake journeys, the distance they covered (some while being heavily pregnant), where they stayed, and the dangers they encountered during the trip.

The role of women in the religious sphere of the military world has been underserved. This chapter turns to the epigraphic record to illuminate the role of women in military households and communities in both public and private contexts. Visual and epigraphic material is a rich source of information for our understanding of women’s roles in public military settings and private military households, and especially how women expressed religiosity on behalf of themselves, their soldier-husbands, and their households broadly. The evidence is not overwhelming, but there is enough to start building an image of the religious aspects of the lives of women associated with the army. With this aim in mind, this chapter illuminates the lives of women in military communities through the lens of religion as one aspect of daily life. By investigating precisely what women were doing in the military community, this contribution addresses the increasing trend to see the families of soldiers – whether living in the fort or extramural settlement – as a direct part of the military community, rather than a “civilian” counterpart that has often been discussed in pejorative terms or as an appendage population that is located there only by chance.

Recent research is demonstrating that other women and children, besides those in senior officers’ families, lived inside Roman military bases during the Principate; however, such women are rarely discussed in written sources. Also, the archaeological remains of military bases essentially lack the types of evidence for sexed bodies and gendered practices that can be found in burial contexts and figurative representations. This chapter discusses how more material-cultural approaches to artifactual remains from such sites can be used to investigate gendered identities and lived socio-spatial practices, and to develop better understanding of the place of such women in these hypermasculine spaces. This chapter is concerned with developing approaches to the artifactual remains from these sites, and the potential range of people and activities they represent, to investigate the presence of women within the fortification walls of these bases, and the roles that they may have played here. It demonstrates how an integrated approach to “gendering” artifacts can be used to explore the probabilities, rather than the certainties, of artifacts as gender attributes and how analyses of artifact distribution patterns can be used to identify women who often are not identified through other media, and so seeks solutions to identifying gendered behaviors.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

This chapter introduces five families whose histories each exemplify parts of the British non-elite experience of India. The Keen and Wonnacott families experienced opposing forms of social mobility in India where their social status, bolstered by the presence of native labor and constrained by the strictures of military hierarchy, changed dramatically. John Brand waited with his regiment for a conflict to fight in, experiencing India, like many other soldiers, as a place of stasis and sickness. Ned Crawford, who came to India as his search for work along the east coast of Britain failed and expanded to the empire, sought to maintain connections to both his brother and British political culture. And George and Lucy Cole, whose marriage suffered when George sought employment in India, reveal the effects Indian service could have on family units across imperial distance. These themes of upward and downward mobility, attempts to create community, both local and intraimperial, and the fallout of Indian and imperial separation on intimate relationships recur throughout the book.

This chapter focuses on the cantonment of Rawalpindi and its associated hill station of Murree, where we see working-class and elite ideas about family, respectability, sexuality, and race collide. Across British India, men, women, and children of different classes and races were thrown together in army cantonments. Military policy coded the physical spaces that comprised the cantonment – the Army barracks and civil lines, mess halls and married soldiers’ quarters, bazaars, and red-light districts – as sites of potential dissolution, destructive to British prestige. Thousands of soldiers, officers, camp followers, and army wives passed through these installations. As they did so, they created domestic worlds within militarized spaces. Domestication of military space did not, however, assuage official fears about the destructive potential of a population of non-elite whites, but rather expanded those fears to encompass not only single men but also families and children.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

By the late eighteenth century, it was cliché to observe that the British East India Company ruled India “by the sword.” Scholarship on the colonial state, though, has tended to pay more attention to the Company’s civil infrastructure. This chapter argues that the army was in fact an influential part of this empire, at times approaching a “stratocracy” – a state ruled by its army. It situates the Company’s armies simultaneously within India’s political landscape and British imperial networks and provides a brief overview of these contexts. It further explores what it means to bring soldiers to the forefront of historical analysis. Such an approach requires acknowledging the sharp inequities in the Company’s military, most dramatically between its white officer corps and the Indian sepoys (soldiers) and officers who made up the bulk of its forces. Such inequities pose difficulties for historical research, since the former group is far more visible in the archive, but also points to a key historical process. White officers used the systemic inequity to their own advantage – not just to assert power over sepoys but to claim influence in the colonial project.

One of the primary functions of war-time print culture was to bring the home to the front and the front to the home, thereby connecting soldiers with the loved ones they had left behind and bolstering the war effort in both places. On the pages of newspapers that circulated in army camps and in northern cities and towns, the campfire and the fireside were paired emblems of the Union cause. As a hallmark of antebellum conceptions of family and home, the fireside served as inspiration for mobilization and military endeavor. In turn, the campfire—a utilitarian necessity of army life—provided a substitute fireside for the soldiers gathered around it, connecting them to distant homes and uniting them in a shared cause. As flexible symbols, the campfire and the fireside blurred racial and gendered boundaries, equating the work of women at home with the efforts of soldiers at the front and providing a place of communion for Black and white soldiers.

Britain’s miseries and inequalities after the 1815 Peace provoked popular unrest and upper-class anxiety on an uprecedented scale, but not a revolutionary situation. The centre held firm. Repressive laws, imprisonments, and executions counted as much as popular deference and loyalism in preserving order. These inflictions were backed by an efficient spy system and the multiplication of military barracks across London and the rest of the country.As one military commander wrote, ‘Fools! We have the physical force, not they.’Plebeian radicals were akin to peasants armed with pitchforks, and were as innocent as peasants about the disciplinary forces that faced them.

Some 100,000 people were said to have watched Thistlewood, Brunt, Ings, Tidd, and Davidson die.Soldiers controlled them. It’s an open question which of the spectators were the more ‘barbaric’ – the plebeian crowd, the aristocrats attending the condemned with the sheriffs, or the gentlefolk who rented windows overlooking the scaffold. It was the plebeian crowd, not the polite, that shouted in protest as the five were hanged and decapitated. The men’s behaviour was closely watched and reported. The era’s alleged capacity for a refined sensibility was not widely evident among the polite people. Only radical London seethed with anger and resentment, until the Queen Caroline affair provided it with a new target.

The chapter covers the arrests and detention of the conspirators, the coercion used to force some to testify against their colleagues, preparations for the trials and the selection of the juries, public reactions to the news, identities of the men freed without prosecution.

Chapter 1, “Building the Nation and Modern Manhood,” examines the tense negotiations over different types of men, manhoods, and masculinities – spanning the early processes of nation-state formation and empire-building, through defeat and democratization, to the current challenges of a globalizing society and straining economy. Following the empire’s defeat in 1945, the soldier almost immediately lost his status as a hegemonic icon of masculinity. That role was taken on by a dramatically different kind of man: the white-collar, middle-class worker – who for decades was hailed not as the successor of the Imperial Army soldier but as the “modern samurai.” Two generations of men strove to embody that ideal manhood, but the heyday of the salaryman came to a crushing end in 1992. A new sense of vulnerability in the wake of the March 11, 2011 triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown – has fed into the processes of a rapid diversification of masculinity that continues to this day.