Annual Booklist 2019 : Dr Aimee Fox
Dr Aimée Fox is an historian and lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. She is the author of Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won both the SAHR Templer Best First Book Prize and the British Army Military Book of the Year Prize in 2018.
The first book that I would recommend is Verity McInnis’ Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers' Wives in India and the U.S. West (Oklahoma University Press, 2017). While not strictly about the British Army, it is an excellent comparative study of how American and British officers’ wives acted as agents of empire, served as part of their husbands’ units, and used their husbands’ military rank to underpin their own social worlds. It is such a good read and provides an important historical contribution to the critical feminist literature within social science and international relations on the militarisation of women’s lives. Of particular interest is McInnis’ exploration of ‘whiteness’ and the racial hierarchies that these wives actively reconstructed in their domestic and public lives.
Second, without wanting to appear like I’m on Oklahoma University Press’ payroll (!), has to be Ian Beckett’s A British Profession of Arms: The Politics of Command in the Late Victorian Army (Oklahoma University Press, 2018). This is an absolute tour de force, providing us with a much clearer picture of matters relating to promotion and appointment in the British Army during this period. As one would expect, the book is grounded in extensive archival research and is packed full of interesting anecdotes. What I particularly like about this book is Beckett’s attempts to demystify promotion and career advancement in the Army, providing us with a far more nuanced account, whilst also revealing the similarities between the military and broader society.
My third choice would be Douglas Delaney’s The Imperial Army Project: Britain and the Land Forces of the Dominions and India 1902-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2017). Delaney asks a series of complex questions in this book: how did Britain secure the commitment of the Indian and dominion armies? What did Britain want from these armies? How was cooperation and interoperability ensured? Ranging across the two world wars and the periods before and in between, Delaney shows how Britain attempted to negotiate the tension of standardising tactics, techniques, and procedures across the British Empire armies, whilst accommodating the growing autonomy of those armies. In addition to being a really good read, this book has read across for modern militaries fighting in coalitions, highlighting the obvious importance of formalised compatibility, but also paying attention to those informal, personal relationships that are worth their weight in gold.
Fourth is a book by my excellent colleague, Helen McCartney, Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2005). McCartney’s work makes explicit the important link between home front and war front, showing how soldiers maintained their civilian character in the face of modern war, drawing on shared beliefs and local, often class-based identities. Focusing on 1/6th and 1/10th Battalions of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, this really is microhistory at its absolute best. It acknowledges the very specific experience of these two units and of Liverpool itself, but it also positions that experience well within the larger literature around Britain’s wartime experience.
Finally, I want to recommend Helen Parr’s Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper (Allen Lane, 2018) – winner of this year’s Templer Medal, the 2019 Duke of Wellington Medal, and the Longman-History Today Book Prize. If its accolades haven’t already encouraged you to go out and buy it then maybe my recommendation will! This book is stunning. I couldn’t put it down. It is a very personal story, focused around Parr’s uncle, Dave, a paratrooper killed during the Falklands Conflict. But it is more than that. It is a study of professionalism, of military values, of loss, of adventure, but also of humanity. It was a book that caused me to laugh aloud, to wince, to pause, to think. A rare and wonderful book that I thoroughly recommend.
As for a book that should exist but doesn’t yet, that’s such a tough one! I think I would like to see more works on the British Army in the years after the First World War. There’s so much great doctoral work going on in this area, so I hope it won’t be too long before we have a book that competes with David French’s outstanding Raising Churchill’s Army. I am also really excited to read Professor Heather Jones’ forthcoming work For King and Country: The Culture of Monarchy in First World War Britain, 1914-1936, which will hopefully shed some important light on the relationship between the Royal family and the British military.