Erica Charters

THE CARING FISCAL-MILITARY STATE DURING THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756–1763

This article re-examines the concept of the fiscal-military state in the context of the British armed forces during the Seven Years War (1756–63). This war, characteristic of British warfare during the eighteenth century, demonstrates that British victory depended on the state caring about the wellbeing of its troops, as well as being perceived to care. At the practical level, disease among troops led to manpower shortages and hence likely defeat, especially during sieges and colonial campaigns. During the 1762–3 Portuguese campaign, disease was regarded as a sign of ill-discipline, and jeopardized military and political alliances. At Havana in 1762, the fear, reports, and actual outbreaks of disease threatened American colonial support and recruitment for British campaigns. Throughout the controversial campaigns in the German states, disease was interpreted as a symptom of bad governance, and used in partisan criticisms concerning the conduct of the war. Military victory was not only about strategy, command, and technology, but nor was it solely a question of money. Manpower could not simply be bought, but needed to be nurtured in the long term through a demonstration that the British state cared about the welfare of its armies.

Disease, Wilderness Warfare, and Imperial Relations: The Battle for Quebec, 1759-1760

During the siege at Quebec, 1759—60, which followed the battle on the Plains of Abraham, high rates of disease contributed to the British defeat by French forces in April 1760. While historians have not previously discussed military medical preventative measures, a detailed examination of the siege demonstrates sophisticated attempts to adapt to a foreign environment and its disease, as well as how disease contributed to the development of American provincial and British antagonism and perceptions of difference.

Marriage & the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century: ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’

beneficial social and ethical values that differ from today’s interpretation of the word. As well as moral integrity and health-promoting sociability, cheerfulness represented a calm symmetry of body and mind that fostered longevity. As such, it had a direct function in the control of bodily decay through what we might call positive thinking. Related to this, Haller identified that the aging ‘machine’ responded well to slowness, particularly intellectual slowness, and Yallop writes that mental exertion was perceived as detrimental to longevity. The same notion of cheerfulness filtered through to contemporary poetry with writers like Mark Akenside, who had studied medicine at university, writing of cheerfulness as an effective antidote to emotional tension. while Akenside explored both the therapeutic and social worth of cheerfulness in his poems, william Godwin took a political view, seeing cheerfulness as a force for societal good and aging as a matter of mental control. Yallop points out that virtually all scholastic discourse of the period treated age as a non-gendered subject, referring to the ‘old man’ as the figure for aging society. The definition of a ‘person’ in the eighteenth century comes under scrutiny in the final chapter. Here, Yallop questions how eighteenth-century writers observed the effects of age on the ‘character’ or ‘person’. Unlike today, where identity tends to dwell within, the eighteenth-century character was very much a physical self and the theatre and actors’ character transformation illustrates contemporary metaphors about the fluidity of corporeal changes throughout life. The physical temperament, writes Yallop, was responsible for forming a person’s character and acting manuals and performance theory relied on the current medical ideas of the temperament and constitution. Actors like David Garrick possessed a protean ability to characterize through the changes to ‘temper’ and ‘habit’ with which his audience empathized and Yallop suggests that these character changes implicitly reference the body changes of age. Yallop’s book opens up much thought-provoking material for scholars of the eighteenth-century and the history of medical and socio-cultural science. Her closing remarks that contemporary social theory on aging has many reference points with eighteenth-century perceptions of age and identity and that today’s theorists might benefit from a historical analysis are particularly apt.

The Myth of the Press Gang: Volunteers, impressment and the naval manpower problem in the late eighteenth century

empires too. By the 1720s, then, the business of slavery was very closely entangled with the wider British Atlantic political economy. Swingen’s skilful integration of politics, social concerns, economics and military history across a seventy year period — one that can fairly be described as a complex and tumultuous era in English (and early British) history — marks one of the great contributions of this work. Connecting the sometimes-competing goals and ideals of the military, merchants, planters, colonial governments (among other figures) in shaping imperial policies, demonstrating why and how the negotiation of these agendas was instrumental in the making of England’s overseas empire’s political economy, is another major achievement of this book. In short then, Competing Visions of Empire is a lucid and scholarly work; and one which makes a major contribution to the political history of slavery and the British Empire. richard hall swansea university http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2015.1097148