Abstract
The study of Romantic literature and culture, long concerned with the response to the French Revolution, has more recently begun to appreciate the significance of war. Drawing on this research and featuring many who have contributed to this field, the essays in this volume engage the pervasive effects of war in Enlightenment and Romantic-period culture. The period covered, from approximately 1750 to 1850, has been traditionally regarded by military historians as a relatively self-contained era in the evolution of warfare and its battlefield technologies. An era before wars began to be fully transformed by industrialisation, it represented the culmination of an early modern military revolution that saw a transformation in European war-making with the spread of firearms, artillery, fortifications and new forms of military drill.1 While in certain respects our period could be viewed as the last, distinctive phase in this revolution, it is also clear that new military techniques emerged that both enabled and demanded the kinds of massification of war that had transformative effects on society as a whole, leading to modern forms of total war. Political, economic and military historians now recognise the conflicts of the long eighteenth century as being of fundamental importance to the development of the British nation-state, creating the ‘ fiscal-military’ state linking taxation, the credit economy and state authority, and shaping national and imperial identity in terms of an antagonistic Gallic or colonised ‘other’.2
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Notes and references
The concept of the military revolution was first proposed by Michael Roberts in The Military Revolution, 1560–1660: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the Queen’s University of Belfast (Belfast: M. Boyd, 1956). Since then, the significance and timing of the revolution has been intensely debated, see G. Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
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J. R. Watson, Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 213; Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, pp. 46–53;
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Ramsey, N., Russell, G. (2015). Introduction: Tracing War in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture. In: Ramsey, N., Russell, G. (eds) Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137474315_1
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