Abstract
Delving into the writings of British and German soldiers, one constant uniting all periods and authors is that commentaries regarding their foreign allies are almost always couched in terms of their national or ethnic origin. Indeed, whenever descriptions are made of allied or auxiliary forces, be they regiments, armies or merely one or a handful of individuals, they are simply referred to as a collective: as ‘Germans’ or ‘English’. The usage of this language reveals the degree to which men in these multinational armies saw the respective components with regard to their nationality, and in doing so used terms that carried with them not only an indication of their national origin, but a collection of characterizations and stereotypes prevalent in popular discourse. This chapter seeks to examine some of these popular conceptions, with the goal of providing a background and a point of comparison for the personal writings and opinions of soldier-authors. The focus here is on stereotypes and, particularly, the discourse concerning ‘national character’, a term common among the writings of soldiers through which their accounts of foreign soldiery were often filtered and which entailed a set of theories about a polity’s collective psychology and innate traits. This emphasis on national character is relevant to the entire period under examination, but gained more value, and greater emphasis at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the proliferation of nationalism in Western Europe.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
English nationalism on the other hand, can be convincingly placed as far back as the sixteenth century. See: among others, Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 42–54.
see: Linda Colley, Britons: The Forging of a Nation (London: Vintage, 1992).
Of course my template owes a great deal to the formative work on this subject, see: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed. (London: Verson, 2006).
Oliver Goldsmith, ‘Essay XII [National Prejudices]’, in Essays and Criticisms by Dr. Goldsmith with an Account of the Author… (London: J. Johnson, 1798), p. 130.
The most prominent of such writings come from campaigns in Colonial America. See Thomas Anburey, Travels through the Interior Parts of America (New York: Anro Press, 1969)
see: William L. Stone, Letters of Brunswick and Hessian Officers during the American Revolution. Translated from Schloezer’s Briefwechsel (Albany, NY: Joe Munsell’s Sons, 1891).
For an in-depth analysis of what British officers were reading, see the appendices of: Ira Gruber, Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2010).
Tamara Hunt, Defining John Bull Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003)
Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner, The English Satirical Print 1600–1832 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), pp. 13–14.
John Shebbeare, Letters to the People of England, nos. 1–6 (London: J. Morgan, 1755–8)
William Cobbett, Political Register, XV(26) (1809), pp. 993–4.
Andrew Mackillop, ‘For King, Country and Regiment? Motive and Identity in Highland Soldiering 1746–1815’, in Steve Murdoch and A. Mackillop (eds.), Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience c. 1550–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 185–212.
The main issues and categorizations persisted deep in to the twentieth century. See: Sir Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation, 4th ed. (London: Metheun & Co., 1948)
David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, in Three Essays, Moral and Political (London: A. Millar, 1748), pp. 1–38.
Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 159–60, 165–6.
F.K. Stanzel, ‘National Character as Literary Stereotype. An Analysis of the Image of the German in English Literature before 1800’, in C.V. Bock (ed ), London German Studies I (London: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, 1980), pp. 101–5
Hafia Fania Oz-Salzburger, ‘Exploring the Germanick Body — Eighteenth Century British Images of Germany’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fur deutsche Geschichte, 26 (1997), p. 17.
J.A. Houlding, Fit For Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 168–9
Quoted in: Lieut-Colonel Alfred H. Burne, The Noble Duke of York: The Military Life of Frederick Duke of York and Albany (London: Staplehurst, 1949), p. 120.
See, amongst others: Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
For more on the ideas of Henry Lloyd, see: Patrick J. Speelman, Henry Lloyd and the Military Enlightenment of Eighteenth-Century Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), esp. pp. 3–4
see: Matthew MacCormack, ‘Citizenship, Nationhood, and Masculinity in the Affair of the Hanoverian Soldier, 1756’, Historical Journal, 49(4) (2006), pp. 980, 991.
Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), pp. 324–5
Brendan Simms, ‘Hanover: The Missing Dimension’, in Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte (eds.), The Hanoverian Dimension, (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), p. 9.
Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manner and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 1–2.
Edward Barrington de Fonblanque, Political and Military Episodes in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century Derived from the Correspondence of the Right Hon. John Burgoyne, General, Statesman, Dramatist (London: MacMillan, 1876), p. 17.
Campbell Dalrymple, A Military Essay. Containing Reflections on the Raising, Arming, Cloathing, and Discipline of the British Infantry and Cavalry; with Proposals… (London: D. Wilson, 1761), pp. 44–5.
Friedrich von der Decken, Versuch über den englischen National-Character (Hanover: Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung, 1802), p. 34.
William Hogarth, The Gate of Calais, or the Roast Beef of Old England (London: Tate Britain, 1748).
Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner, pp. 176–7, 190–1; Anon, Law for the Out-Laws (London: Edwards and Darly, 1756).
See: Jeremy Black, ‘A Stereotyped Response? The Grand Tour and Continental Cuisine’, Durham University Journal, 83 (1991), esp. p. 151.
For more on these connections, see: Andrew C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006)
In a rather unfavourable biography of the Prussian Monarch — unsurprising for 1919 — Norwood Young wrote that ‘In England he was, in the early part of the war, acclaimed a “Protestant Hero”, though he was neither Protestant, nor a Hero.’ Norwood Young, The Life of Frederick the Great (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1919), p. 347.
This was another division between Briton and German, the former being an admitted mixture of various races, the latter very little. Hume, Three Essays, pp. 16–17; Hugh MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal, QC: Harvest House, 1982), p. 43.
David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, 6 vols. (London: 1757[1754]), vol. I, p. 141.
R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), esp. chaps 3–4.
Anon, The Palatines Catechism, or, A True Description of their Camps at Black-Heath and Camberwell. In a Pleasant Dialogue Between an English Tradesman and a High-Dutchman (London: T. Harc, 1709), p. 1.
Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation-States, The French and German Experience, 1789–1815 (Princeton, NJ: D. van Nostrum, 1967), pp. 125–7.
This work will largely try to avoid the concept of German nationalism, due to the considerable divide in when it officially began outside of intellectual circles, including convincing arguments for the mid-nineteenth century. See: John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), pp. 72–80.
For a discussion of the divide between the press and soldiers’ views in the Thirty Years War, see: Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years’ War 1618–1848 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), esp. p. 3.
Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 3–6.
Sometime, solidarities were formed not from association with the army as a whole, but among soldiers of a certain campaign, or theatre. One example, being the ‘American Army’ in the Seven Years War. Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: the British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), esp. chaps 9 and Conclusions.
Decken, Versuch, pp. 36–7. See also: Gerhard v. Scharnhorst, Scharnhorst-Briefe an Friedrich von der Decken 1803–1813, edited by German von J. Niemeyer (Bonn: Dümmler, 1
Charles Edward White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militarische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801–1805 (Mishawaka, IN: Better World Books, 1988), esp. chaps 1, 4.
Clausewitz moves from the macro to the micro in explaining the martial character of an army: ‘An army’s military qualities are based on the individual who is steeped in the spirit and essence of this activity; who trains the capacities it demands, rouses them, and makes them his own.’ Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Oxford: OUP, 1976), III, p.
Thomas Morris, The Recollections of Sergeant Morris, edited by John Selby with an Introduction by Peter Young (Gloucestershire: Windrush Press, 1998), p. 22.
Burne, The Noble Duke of York, p. 64; Grace E. Moreman, Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge: Steadfast Son of King George III, 1774–1850 (New York: Edwin Mellon, 2002), p. 66.
For an excellent examination of this, see: Armstrong Starkey, War in the Age of Enlightenment, 1700–1789 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), esp. chap. 3.
Conway, Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe, pp. 282–3. For an extensive examination, see: Anthony Bruce, The Purchase System in the British Army, 1660–1871 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980).
John Childs, ‘The Army and the State in Britain and Germany During the Eighteenth Century’, in John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (eds.), Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and German (Oxford: OUP, 1999), esp. pp. 62–3, 68–70.
Some propounded that part of the national character of the English nation was its uniquely ‘English’ gentlemen. Paul Langford, ‘Manners and the Eighteenth-Century State: The Case of the Unsociable Englishman’, in Brewer and Hellmuth, Rethinking Leviathan, pp. 294–6; Stephen Haseler, The English Tribe: Identity, Nation and Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 72–5.
Quoted in Robert Brown, Corporal Brown’s Campaigns in the Low Countries: Recollections of a Coldstream Guard in the Early Campaigns Against Revolutionary France (London: Leonaur, 2008), pp. 120–1.
T.H. McGuffie (ed.), Peninsular Cavalry General, 1811–1813: The Correspondence of Lieutenant-General Robert Ballard Long (London: George G. Harrap, 1951), p. 143.
Christopher Hibbert (ed.), The Wheatley Diary: A Journal and Sketch-Book Kept during the Peninsular War and the Waterloo Campaign, 2nd ed. (Gloucestershire: Windrush Press, 1997), p. 64.
Christopher Duffy includes several more entertaining anecdotes. See; Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 1987), esp. pp. 12–13, 163, 266.
Jay Luvaas, Frederick the Great and the Art of War (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 76.
For more a detailed discussion of these differences, see Stephen Conway, ‘The British Army, “Military Europe,” and the American War of Independence’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 67(1) (2010), pp. 69–100.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Mark Wishon
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wishon, M. (2013). National Character and Transnational Professionalism. In: German Forces and the British Army. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284013_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284013_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44900-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-28401-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)