Politics and the Military, 1790–1832

The Military ◽

Political Radicalism

This chapter reviews the involvement of soldiers in conventional politics in the early nineteenth century. In contrast to the leeway which allowed officers to be involved in politics (both as voters and MPs), the rank and file were discouraged from taking part. It outlines military policies of Whigs and Tories in the early nineteenth century and profiles key individual officers. It discusses the emergent influence of political radicalism on both parties, with some Whig officers embracing the concept, in contrast to Tory anathema.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454193.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 112-139

Author(s):

Luis de Miranda

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Similar Model ◽

French Society ◽

National System ◽

Nation States ◽

Nineteenth Century France ◽

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

Representations ◽

10.1525/rep.2021.155.2.29 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 155 (1) ◽

pp. 29-54

Author(s):

SJ Zhang

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary History ◽

Victor Hugo ◽

William Wells Brown ◽

Colonial Authority ◽

Martin Delany ◽

Military Uniform ◽

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

The “Chiliasm of Despair” Reconsidered: Revivalism and Working-Class Agitation in County Durham

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/385924 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 28 (1) ◽

pp. 23-42 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

J. A. Jaffe

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Working Class ◽

Social History ◽

Wide Acceptance ◽

The Social ◽

History Of ◽

The One ◽

Political Radicalism

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.

A West African Cavalry State: the Kingdom of Oyo

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s0021853700014079 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 1-15 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Robin Law

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

Economic Burden ◽

West African ◽

Considerable Evidence ◽

Central Sudan ◽

Large Numbers ◽

Following an earlier article in this Journal, by Humphrey Fisher, dealing with the role of the horse in the Central Sudan, this article considers the role of cavalry in the kingdom of Oyo. It is suggested that the use of cavalry may have been adopted by Oyo during the sixteenth century. Oyo never became self-sufficient in horses, but remained dependent for its horses upon importation from the Central Sudan, while local mortality from trypanosomiasis was considerable. Evidence relating to the operations of Oyo armies supports the view that cavalry was of substantial military value, while at the same time illustrating the limitations of the military efficacy of cavalry. The acquisition and maintenance of large numbers of horses represented a considerable economic burden for Oyo, and the high cost of maintaining a large cavalry force may have inhibited the establishment of a royal autocracy in Oyo. The decline of the cavalry strength of Oyo in the early nineteenth century was due, it is suggested, to economic difficulties.

The Highland Society of London, material culture and the development of Scottish military identity, 1798–1817*

Historical Research ◽

10.1093/hisres/htab009 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Patrick Watt

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

National Identity ◽

Material Culture ◽

National Symbol ◽

Abstract The image of the Highland soldier as a brave, loyal warrior was central to nineteenth-century notions of Scottish national identity. This article uses material culture evidence alongside traditional archival sources to provide an interdisciplinary explanation of how the military dimension of Scottish identity was shaped in the early nineteenth century. It finds that it was the responses of the Highland Society of London to Scottish battlefield valour – rather than the actions themselves – that created the enduring popular perception of the Highland soldier as a desirable national symbol and as an icon of empire.

A Greek physician’s portrait in Windsor Castle

Journal of Medical Biography ◽

10.1177/0967772017702344 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 27 (3) ◽

pp. 168-172

Author(s):

Christos S Bartsocas

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Foreign Affairs ◽

Napoleon Bonaparte ◽

European Unity ◽

The Military ◽

Of Greece

To the visitor to Windsor Castle, the Thomas Lawrence portraits in the Waterloo Chamber represent the most important contributors to the military defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, by British, Prussian, Russian and Austrian forces at the Battle of Waterloo. Nevertheless, only few individuals realise that a Greek physician, Count Ioannis Capodistrias, a native of the island of Corfu, stands among these leading personalities as a diplomat, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who contributed remarkably to European unity in the early nineteenth century and as a statesman (‘Governor’ of Greece) with a tragic end to his life, after establishing a Greek State practically from ruins.

II. Class and Political Radicalism in London, 1831–2

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x00009079 ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 31-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

D. J. Rowe

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Working Class ◽

Class Consciousness ◽

Middle Classes ◽

Labour Movement ◽

Working Classes ◽

The Media ◽

The One ◽

Political Radicalism

Class has long been used as an analytical tool in the study of history and much has been written with regard to the formation of class-consciousness, which has to a considerable extent been related to the first half of the nineteenth century and especially to the events surrounding the passing of the first Reform Bill. Professor Briggs has noted the growing use of the term ‘class’ in the early nineteenth century and has postulated a middle-class consciousness created by the media of the Reform Bill and Anti-Corn Law agitations. ‘Sandwiched between an entrenched landed Parliament on the one hand and a bitter but still imperfectly integrated labour movement on the other, the middle classes were compelled to lay down their own postulates and programmes.’ More recently E. P. Thompson, in a brilliant and wide-ranging study of the working classes, has seen the formation of a working-class consciousness which involved ‘consciousness of identity of interests between working men of the most diverse occupations and levels of attainment’ and also ‘ consciousness of the identity of interest of the working class, or “productive classes”, as against those of other classes; and within this there was maturing the claim for an alternative system’.

From begums and bibis to abandoned females and idle women

The Indian Economic & Social History Review ◽

10.1177/001946460804600102 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 5-25 ◽

Cited By ~ 23

Author(s):

Erica Wald

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Venereal Disease ◽

Indian Women ◽

Colonial India ◽

Contagious Diseases ◽

The Social ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a proliferation of laws in colonial India which targeted women deemed to be prostitutes. As the number of laws grew, so too did the category of ‘prostitute’. Yet, before the nineteenth century, it would have been difficult to identify many of these women or their activities as criminal, or even immoral. This article examines how such legal boundaries and conceptualisations came to be formulated. It suggests that the ‘prostitute’ category in India was shaped by the repeated failure of the East India Company's surgeons and officers to control venereal disease among the European soldiery. Such attempts at disease control were experimented with from the late eighteenth century and, as this article argues, were keys in the later formulation of the Contagious Diseases Acts. This article traces the decline of long-term, monogamous relationships between European men and Indian women, and the corresponding rise in shorter-term sexual transactions in and around military cantonments. By grounding later legal shifts within the military medical context, we can clearly see the forces behind the social and moral changes surrounding this group of women in the early nineteenth century.

Slavery and Fanompoana: the Structure of Forced Labour in Imerina (Madagascar), 1790–1861

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s0021853700030589 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 29 (3) ◽

pp. 463-486 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Gwyn Campbell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

East Coast ◽

Subsistence Agriculture ◽

Root Cause ◽

Great Decline ◽

Forced Labour ◽

The Military ◽

Commercial Organization

A recent school of historical thought has emerged, centred around the writings of Maurice Bloch, which asserts that the imperial Merina economy from the early nineteenth century became totally dependent upon slave labour. It claims that there was such an influx of slaves into Imerina that slave numbers rose dramatically and all free Merina were relieved from productive work to engage in essentially non-productive occupations, notably the military, imperial administration and commerce. This article, which traces the development of forced labour in Madagascar and examines the structure of labour under autarky, takes issue with this viewpoint. It emphasises not only that the slave population of Imerina in the nineteenth century was lower than asserted, but that Bloch misunderstands the nature offanompoanawhich, from the adoption of autarky in the mid-1820s, formed the organizing principle of most sectors of the imperial Merina economy outside subsistence agriculture. The impoverishment of the Merina economy which was a root cause of autarky led to a great decline in slave-holding amongst peasants who were in consequence largely obliged to work their own ricefields, either alone, or alongside the few slaves they managed to retain. By contrast, the Merina elite increasingly monopolized available labour resources, slave andfanompoana. Fanompoana, traditionally a limited form of prestation to the crown, was radically restructured under autarky between 1825 and 1861. Far from being ‘unproductive’, the imperial army, the largestfanompoanainstitution, constituted a huge and elaborate commercial organization which was used to exploit the empire's resources and channel them to the imperial heartland. At the same time,fanompoanaunits comprising Merina soldiers and colonists established farms and engaged in commerce in the provinces. Finally,fanompoanalabour was widely used on the east coast plantations, and especially in the attempt to forge an industrial revolution in Imerina. In sum, this article argues thatfanompoanarather than slavery formed the basis of the imperial Merina economy under autarky, ad was a major factor contributing to the failure of autarkic policies.

The Mir and the Military Draft

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2498186 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 47 (4) ◽

pp. 652-666 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Rodney D. Bohac

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Family Member ◽

Peasant Communities ◽

Military Draft ◽

The Military ◽

The Village ◽

Selection Of

Early nineteenth century military drafts severely tested the cohesiveness of Russia’s peasant communities. Because a conscript served for twenty-five years, he rarely returned to his community. His household lost a family member, a worker, and often part of its land allotment. The threat of such losses heightened the potential for abuse of community rules determining the selection of conscripts. A serf owner observed this problem when visiting his new estate in 1837: “The draft duties were determined by some sort of calculation, that, in spite of all my desire and mental exercises, I could not master. I only knew that it worked to the profit of the village head and to the loss of the peasants”.