Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99 (2021), 218-228

BOOK REVIEWS

SOLDIERS AS CITIZENS: POPULAR POLITICS AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH MILITARY, by Nick Mansfield. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781789620863, pp. 264, £80.00 In Soldiers as Citizens , Nick Mansfield follows on from his book Soldiers as Workers: Class, Employment, Conflict and the Nineteenth-Century Military (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016) and continues his project to combine political, social and military histories of nineteenth-century British soldiers. One of Mansfield’s key aims is to show that the Other Ranks of the army were not ‘the scum of the earth’—an outcast, hard-bitten, hard-drinking apolitical mass—as they are sometimes portrayed. Instead, he argues that working-class British soldiers brought their culture and politics with them when they joined the army. He also tracks the changing political tendencies of the officer class during the long nineteenth century. The shadow of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) looms over much of this book. The mass recruitment represented a broad cross- section of working-class men and, proportional to Britain’s population, the mobilisation and loss of life were both higher during this period than in the First World War (p. 6). Given the sheer size of the mobilisation, it is not surprising that some of these soldiers held radical political views, but Mansfield is interested in the continuing presence of radicalism in the army after 1815, especially in the case of officers who could find their careers hindered or even ended due to an association with radicalism. For the most part, the chapters take the form of brief biographies of officers and men, especially those who held radical politics. In this respect, the book is a database of soldiers, and the enquiring reader can use the prosopographical element of the book as a stepping-stone further to research individual soldiers and their social or political networks. These short biographies add colour and nuance to our understanding of the lived experiences of nineteenth-century British soldiers, especially the Other Ranks. These brief biographies represent a lot of research, but at times the repetitive structure of the chapters can become a bit wearing. The larger question is whether radical soldiers had any influence in their regiments. Mansfield notes that soldiers always did their duty. Though some might have had political sympathies with strikers, Chartists, or others whom they were called upon to confront, British soldiers did not refuse to follow orders. This could reflect the power of training, the fear of corporal punishment, loyalty to the regiment or the monarch, a lack of radical influence, or a combination of these and other factors. Mansfield discusses all of these ably, but the question of the influence of radicals within regiments, especially in the tumultuous period between 1815 and 1848, remains open. One of the most interesting chapters presents an examination of British men

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