About This Collection
The Duke of Wellington famously called the British soldiers of the Napoleonic Era the “scum of the earth,” yet popular nationalist literature celebrated them as paragons of heroic masculinity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the British military transformed from a rigidly stratified force — its officer class defined by wealth, its ranks drawn from society’s margins — into a professionalized institution capable of sustaining an empire. While many histories emphasize administrative and technological reform, these changes were also fundamental interventions in the culture of military manhood. The abolition of the purchase of commissions challenged the link between command and class privilege; the end of flogging rejected the brutalization of the common soldier’s body; and the rise of steam power in the Royal Navy forced a re-evaluation of what defined a seaman. Movements such as domesticity and “Muscular Christianity” further reshaped the soldier’s character along disciplined, middle-class lines. This two-volume collection of primary sources traces these contestations across the long nineteenth century, culminating in the emergence of the citizen-soldier ideal during the First World War, both at home and across the Empire.
Author’s Reflections
I was approached last year by my Ph.D. advisor, Charles Upchurch, about the possibility of contributing to Routledge’s Historical Resources: c19 Science, Technology, and Medicine primary sources collection. The project immediately appealed to me as a way to blend teaching and research — I could envision assigning material from this collection in a future British Imperialism or British history course. One of the challenges of working in a military college environment is encouraging my more conservative students to engage with gender and sexuality as a legitimate field of historical inquiry. I wanted to use this project to model what studying gender means in practice: not as an abstract theoretical exercise, but as a concrete method for reading primary sources. The collection aligns well with my pedagogical goals because it teaches students how to read the silences in primary sources — how to find evidence in what was left unsaid as much as in what was written down.