Abstract
The year 2015 marks the bicentennial of perhaps the most famous battle (at least in the United Kingdom) of the ‘Great Wars with France’ which were finally brought to a close over a few miles of rolling Belgian countryside near Waterloo on 18 June 1815. It is, therefore, timely to consider Roger Knight’s most recent work, now available in paperback. The title might point to the central theme, how Britain achieved victory over Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, but like any great work of mainstream scholarship on this period (where the mention of the N word in the title certainly helps sales), the key word is to be found in the subtitle: ‘organization’. So while British naval and military campaigns fought by such well-known historical figures as Nelson and Wellington (and many other less well-known) were certainly important for British success in the wars, for wars are by their nature about violence, bloodshed and killing, Knight’s focus is firmly upon the structural and organizational foundations of ultimate victory. This is not a book about Britain fighting but an extremely valuable assessment of Britain and the British at war.
Knight is well placed to produce such a broad work of historical synthesis based as it is on over 40 years of academic research. He is thus able to pepper the work with numerous interesting historical examples. But this is no mere cabinet of historical curious anecdotes, for this work rests on a powerful central message which answers the question of how Britain, a small island nation with, by continental standards, a small army but a powerful navy, fought France for 22 years.
The focus here is on the supporting services that were mobilized to keep Britain fighting during that long and exhausting conflict. So taking centre stage are the links between government and the financial services sector, banking (money), taxation, intelligence and surveillance, logistics, victualling, transports for the Army, the convoy system, the defence infrastructure, shipbuilding and manpower. In essence, the book is about the Grand Strategy (lamentably, still an unfashionable term amongst scholars) of fighting as near a total war as one could imagine in the Georgian period. In all this the central theme is the growing professionalization of the British war effort (including the vital importance of the private sector) which in turn is inherently linked to the concept of Britain becoming a ‘modern’ state. As Knight himself notes, ‘At the centre of the British national effort was parliament’ (p.464), for the British political system ensured increasing accountability for those running the British war effort in a manner alien to the continental powers. But the cost was the very thing that many Britons were fighting for – liberty. Britain was, by the late 1790s, ‘a strongly repressive state, complete with Home Office spies and anti-labour legislation’ (p.94). With the mobilization of manpower and enormous spending on defence it could be argued that Britain was also a militarized state, which at its peak mobilized between 11 and 14 per cent of the adult male population, around three times what France achieved (p.260). This all required organization and administration and some reforms, but it was making war that drove the reforming agenda.
Of course some of these ‘organizational’ themes have been covered, albeit for the later war years, in pervious works by Christopher Hall (British Strategy in the Napoleonic War) and Rory Muir (Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon,) but Knight is to be commended for covering the entire war (and peace) period between 1793 and 1815 in a manner which brings home to the modern reader the true extent and scale of the conflict between Britain and France. In fact Knight delves further to the peacetime efforts of William Pitt whose reforms, particularly with regard to naval power, between 1783 and 1793 reaped substantial long-term benefits for Britain when war did come – a timely reminder for all politicians that defence must be taken seriously in times of ‘peace’.
The pre-war period witnessed the birth of the modern peacetime ‘civil servant’, a process which developed during the 1793–1815 wars (Knight’s appendix listing the officials involved in Government departments during the wars is a valuable resource in itself). Charles Middleton had seen active service in the Royal Navy during the Seven Years War and then served as Comptroller of the Navy between 1778 and 1790. Like others of his ilk, he was ‘Driven, controlling and self-absorbed, and caring nothing for personal popularity, they forced through change not because it was politically advantageous to do so, but because they believed it was right and that it was needed’ (p.55). He was made a Lord of the Admiralty in 1794 and, as Lord Barham, was appointed as First Lord in 1805 overseeing the Trafalgar Campaign. Or men like George Rose, a treasury clerk in the 1760s who died as Treasurer of the Navy in 1818, and who was at the centre of government power for over three decades, ‘up early and late’ his obituary noted, ‘with a total disregard of amusement, was always and totally in his business’ (p.107). Sir Philip Stephens served the navy as secretary to the Board of Admiralty before being promoted to the Board as a Baron – in total he accumulated 67 years in naval administration by the time he retired as an octogenarian in 1806.
So while there was long-term continuity there was also much change, most notably a desire to move away from the placemen, sinecures and ‘fees’ system of the eighteenth century towards a more professional and enlarged civil service paid by salary to do the job and forbidden to enter parliament. What was crucial here was the pressure of wartime work, which saw the replacement of older administrators with those who were much younger. In 1809 John Wilson Croker was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty at the age of 29 and in the same year Palmerston was appointed Secretary at War at just 25. Across the public service young, hard-working men brought dynamism to the work of government. These administrators required professional expertise rather than politics; when John Charles Herries was, with the support of the then Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, appointed as Commissary-in-Chief, he implemented a mathematics and English exam for those applying for posts within the Commissariat. In all this, as Knight persuasively argues, the enhanced scale of the war was the crucial driver, for that led to an increase in bureaucracy – the number of state employees doubled between 1803 and 1815 by which date the payroll for those in public service stood at £3.2 million. It is the role of what might be termed today the ‘Whitehall warriors’ that really stands out in this book.
If there is one major criticism that can be laid at Knight’s door, however, it is that his focus on the ways and means of how the British fought can become disjointed from the ends – what was Britain fighting for? This is the crucial part of thinking about grand strategy and can be illustrated by his assessment of the ever controversial British campaigns in the West Indies. The architect, Henry Dundas, is criticized for the horrendous butcher’s bill of up to 70 per cent of those involved (including death, discharges and desertions, pp.75–6) but Dundas did not intentionally send men there to die. The object was to secure British commercial interests in the region which were critical to the well-being of the British economy. Doing so would also deny such benefits to France as the region accounted for around 40 per cent of French overseas commerce. Here Dundas understood the character of a global conflict, for the war in the West Indies and the war in Europe were inherently linked. In essence, Dundas wanted to destroy French naval power and France’s long-term means of rebuilding it, thereby providing economic and military security to the British Isles and overseas colonies, allowing Britain to become the dominant global power in naval and economic terms. That would ensure the well-being of the British economy and permit Britain to fund and arm European powers to take the fight to France in Continental Europe. Of course, the implementation of this aim would be far harder in practice and Knight correctly surmises that Dundas’s failing was his inability to understand the limitations of the British war machine in achieving his desired object – another lesson our contemporary politicians would be wise to remember.
In order to truly appreciate the importance of this book, the reader would benefit from a broad understanding of the formulation and implementation of British policy and strategy acquired from other works. Yet, that is not intended to put the casual reader off. Anyone interested in the history of Georgian Britain will find much of interest and utility in this excellent book which covers many topics undervalued in other sweeping narratives. Roger Knight is to be commended for highlighting the role of conflict in the creation of Britain as a modern state and how the state developed the administrative and bureaucratic systems which were finally in place by 1815 to back up the political and strategic ambitions of a global superpower.