Nick Mansfield, Soldiers as Workers: Class, Employment, Conflict and the Nineteenth-Century Military (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016)

THIS BOOK MAKES an important contribution to the field of 19th-century British labour history. For too long, soldiers have been disregarded as workers. Rather, they have been seen as the agents of government imposition of order (often against unions and working people), and consequently, as separate from the working class from which most enlisted men and non-commissioned officers (NCOS) originally sprang. In this study, Mansfield intends to redress the balance. He argues that soldiers did not, for the most part, come from the poorest sector of the working class (the so-called "scum of the earth" in Wellington's famous phrase), but were drawn from a cross-section of the "respectable"' working class. Soldiers shared much with their civilian contemporaries, according to Mansfield, and retained key features of working-class culture: its values, aspirations, practices and strategies, and tactics for dealing with authority. As such, soldiers constitute a huge occupational group that has largely been ignored by historians, and which Mansfield is determined, paraphrasing E.P. Thompson, to rescue from the "condescension of most military and labour history." (25)

The structure of the book consists of an introduction, three long chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction sets out the historiography, and explains the somewhat convoluted structure of military service in 19th-century Britain. The men of the regular army, the militia, the East India Company army, and overseas military adventurers, are all Mansfield's subjects of investigation. Chapter 2 focuses on class structure in the army, which Mansfield says closely paralleled that of civilian society. Although there were some middle-class officers, in most branches of the army officers came principally from the aristocracy and gentry, of whom roughly two-thirds purchased their commissions. Mansfield investigates the working-class backgrounds of enlisted men and NCOS, how they were treated by the military, and their very limited opportunities for social mobility. Few NCOS were ever made officers even though, as he points out, it was the former "rather than the leisured officers who were responsible for most of the daily work and management of the regiment." (28) Mansfield concludes that soldiers "were not a separate semi-criminal caste, cut off from society, but a cross-section of working-class men, whose pre-enlistment backgrounds and outside links with family, friends and home localities influenced their behaviour in uniform." (69) Given the relative lack of mobility to the officer class, NCOS generally sided with the enlisted men in their companies during disputes, at times acting as "a combination of foremen and shop stewards," (157) and were part of a "rankers world" (69) impenetrable by officers.

In Chapter 3, Mansfield focuses on soldiers as workers, arguing that they "were proletarians with their military phase forming only part of their working lives." (70) Regiments required a wide range of skilled workers in order to function: schoolmasters, tailors, boot and shoemakers, butchers, musicians, clerks, cooks, blacksmiths, and armourers were all vitally necessary. The men who filled these roles often drew on pre-army training and experience. They were paid more than ordinary soldiers, and excused from most military duties. Whether tradesmen or not, soldiers often had a fair amount of leisure time, allowing them to turn handicraft or penny capitalist skills to their private financial advantage. Mansfield gives victualling, letter writing, and souvenir making as examples of the latter. Some soldiers also became officers' servants, which gave them access to various perqs, tips, and exemptions from duty. Finally, in India various administrative posts either in public service or in the provision of utilities were on offer. Mansfield shows that a range of similar conditions and behaviours existed between army tradesmen and civilian artisans: soldier-tradesmen like artisans were better paid, and their workshops "became strongholds of the alternative opaque world of the rankers." (71) Both groups enjoyed similar perqs, including waste materials they could use for private profit making endeavours. Mansfield does admit that there is little evidence that soldier-tradesmen formed unions or friendly societies, and certainly, they could be called upon to quell civilian strikes. Much of the chapter is given over to a detailed and valuable description of the conditions and practices in the various military trades. Mansfield concludes the chapter by noting that soldiers "largely showed pre-enlistment working-class attitudes and demonstrated solidarity in numerous ways." (154)

This last claim becomes the focus of Chapter 4. Again, Mansfield argues that class conflict in the military has not been sufficiently examined, and in a number of ways it resembled that found in the civilian labour market. Both control over the pace of work and the preservation of customary perqs were central concerns and like artisans, soldier-tradesmen engaged "in acts of resistance when their practices were challenged." (155) Finally, Mansfield insists that "a contract culture, with customary rates of pay and self-defined outputs" (159) existed in the military, just as it did in the civilian work world, and that it grew with the expansion "of the market economy, the decline of paternalism in their regional society and its relationship with dynamic British imperialism." (165) Mansfield says, moreover, that it was embraced by all rankers when they encountered official demands they thought violated customary practices, and he characterises it as "a combination of Thompsonian 'moral economy' and modern class conflict." (156) He finds evidence of this contract culture in a number of strikes and mutinies, in the assassination of unpopular or incompetent officers, in the commission of crimes to avoid being sent to unpopular or unhealthy destinations, and in forms of passive resistance like barracks grumbling, backchat to officers (when there were no witnesses), or graffiti critical of officers. Less convincingly, Mansfield also attempts to fit looting, desertion, and serving with the enemy into the contract framework. Perhaps this was so some of the time, but other factors, reasons, and pressures of a personal nature also accounted for such actions. Similarly, feigned illness, drunkenness, self-harm, and suicide may have arisen from notions of violated rights as Mansfield argues, but they also resulted from many other causes as well. The chapter makes important claims, and one wishes the strikes and mutinies had been more fully discussed (evidence permitting, of course).

The chapter might also have benefitted had Mansfield considered his passiveresistance material within the kind of framework James C. Scott developed in his books Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Mansfield's arguments are important, and they warrant further study. His claims about contract culture do need to be situated more clearly within their 19th-century context, however. Was contract culture backward looking to the moral economy, or was its growth in the military a response to the pressures of industrialization and imperialism? Soldiers as Workers addresses a lacuna in labour history, and one hopes that Mansfield will pursue these questions more fully in future work.

LYNN MACKAY

Brandon University