ABSTRACT
Recent studies of British expansionism have demonstrated the multifaceted ways in which individuals and groups engaged with and tried to dominate the wider world. Experts, explorers, evangelists and entrepreneurs mixed with convicts, craftsmen and community-builders in a tumultuous process driven by curiosity, conscience, careerism and greed. 1 All classes and most areas of the United Kingdom were affected by the enhanced pace and range of such diverse interactions. Yet this inclusive approach to imperial historiography has tended to obscure the centrality of warfare to British empire-building, the consolidation of the position and power of the elite most closely identified with leadership in war – the landed aristocracy and gentry – and the development of a distinctive British military culture resulting from the interaction between the traditional elite and military efficacy. 2 This chapter explores some of the most important ways in which aristocracy – in terms of caste and the more general aspiration to high social status – was central to British militarism. There were different possible models for the interaction between politics and the military, with the situation in Britain offering its own peculiar ambiguities and contradictions. But despite political and ideological limitations on aristocratic influence, the armed services’ command systems were dominated by those of aristocratic and gentry background or aspirations. Members of the aristocracy served in the armed forces in disproportionately high numbers during the long wars. This widespread involvement had three impacts which will be assessed here. Leadership in war, and the discipline and professionalism which infused that leadership, offered a behavioural exemplar from which to defend semi-feudal ideas and a model of elite values with which to rebut critics’ castigation of the upper classes’ dilettante or sybaritic lifestyles. Of more practical application were the infusion of military skills into the landowning elite and that elite’s use of those skills to organize the militia and to face down domestic challenges or threats to the prevailing political and social order. Finally, the landowning elite’s deep involvement with the armed services during the long wars increased the interlocking links between the country’s political and military leadership networks.
