Soldiers and soldiering in Britain, c.1750 to 1815

Britain's relationship with its soldiers during the eighteenth century was a complex one. Georgians branded these men a danger to liberty, victims of oppression, and 'bloody backs', whilst also celebrating their victories and championing their generals, such as General Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. Britain's soldiers were both heroes and the 'scum of the earth', yet this dynamic and multifaceted connection has yet to be fully explored, largely because the scale of Britain's military mobilisation has not been recognised, nor its significance fully appreciated. This fraught relationship became more complicated with the increasing mobilisation of the male population into novel forms of military service beyond the full-time soldiering of the British Army. The militia, reformed during the Seven Years' War in 1757, and large-scale volunteer forces (part-time soldiers raised for home defence) in the American War of Independence and especially the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars created new types of soldier in Britain and new ways for men to be under arms. At its peak in the Napoleonic Wars, some 680,000 men were involved in some form of military service, yet the experiences of these men remains largely forgotten.

To better understand the concept of soldiering and explore the similarities and differences between the different forms of military service in Britain, this project will explore the language, broadly defined, in which the soldier was described by others and written about by themselves, thus contextualising shifts in attitudes towards soldiers and soldiering. Working from the premise that a 'soldier' was a particular category within society that was defined by contemporaries and by soldiers themselves, and therefore relational and contextual rather than being fixed, the project will be able to utilise methodological techniques more commonly seen in the social sciences and gender history when studying identity to create new knowledge on the topic. The project will involve extensive archival research and will form a network of scholars working in this period to cover the many different geographical, methodological and temporal angles to the topic. These will include regional differences, questions of citizenship and manliness, and the changes wrought by the almost permanent state of war against France between 1754 and 1815.

Alongside academic outputs, the project aims to make key documents available in an online repository for anyone interested in the subject of soldiers in this period. The aim is to distribute the findings of the project beyond academia, to users such as schools, local historians, military enthusiasts, and genealogists. A fundamental part of the project will be an interactive website allowing these interest groups not only to view what the network is doing, but to contribute their questions, expertise and knowledge. This will further assist us in our goal of promoting a better understanding of this crucial period in the making of the concept of 'soldiering' in Britain. Furthermore, these outputs will be well timed for the forthcoming 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.

The impact of the grant will be based around three areas:

Education
The research will underpin elements of the PI's MA teaching on 'Defending a Nation: Britain at War, 1793-1815' (which is available to students on the MAs in Modern History, Military History and Eighteenth-Century Studies) and primary source material from the project held in the publicly accessible Leeds University Digital Object Service will be integrated into the teaching of this module. Furthermore, the PI aims to develop a new 'learning unit' for the undergraduate HIST2520 Sources and Approaches to British History course. Both will be developed during the project, as part of the network / KT activity allocated time. Similarly, the CI will bring the project findings and source materials to bear upon his final year module 'Citizenship and Gender in Britain' and his MA module 'Men of Arms: Masculinity and War in Britain, 1750-1918'. Beyond Higher Education, the project will work with the British Militia and Volunteer Study Group of the Napoleonic Association and one of the aims of this collaboration is to develop educational materials for schools, museums, and archives about mass mobilisation during this period. As such, the project will provide new educational material at a variety of levels in an area that is not currently well covered, and which promises to be an innovative and stimulating angle on local history. In this regard, the School of History's links with the Royal Armouries at Leeds should provide a suitable pathway for the dissemination of this material.

Dissemination of Expertise
The website will be a fundamental element of the project and will provide useful information for a wider audience about the topic. In particular, brief summaries of the militia and volunteers will provide contextual information to those who have come across records relating to soldiers in this period but would like to know more about what these documents tell them, for example amateur historians, people looking into their family history, or archivists. This is particularly the case for genealogists as soldier records and militia lists often form key components in their investigations. The interactive elements of the website will also permit them to become engaged with the project: the PI / project group will be able to respond to their questions or observations, with the further benefit that these discussions will be readable by other users. To ensure maximum benefit under this heading, the project will be actively promoted by the PI via web links at other relevant webpages.

Knowledge Exchange
As the website goes beyond a didactic model of knowledge transfer and will aim to embrace existing communities of interest, both online / virtual and real, the project has a significant opportunity for knowledge exchange. Crucially, the work of the PI in publicising the project to relevant groups and individuals beyond academia presents significant areas where the project can work with others, including: providing local knowledge of significant archives / repositories which are currently not well catalogued; local / amateur historians submitting material for the project, thus broadening the range of material available to the PI / CI in the timescale available; and bringing together others working in the field, both from academia and outside it.