Annual Booklist 2021 : Patrick Watt
Dr Patrick Watt is a historian and curator based in Istanbul. He is a former curator of the National War Museum of Scotland at Edinburgh Castle and is currently working on a project which examines the development of military museology in Britain, part-funded by an SAHR Centenary Grant. Patrick is interested in the social and cultural history of conflict in the period between 1745 and 1918 with a particular focus on material culture, Scotland and empire. His work has been published in Historical Research, the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, and the International Review of Scottish Studies.
First on my list is A Military History of Scotland (2012) edited by Edward Spiers, Jeremy Crang and Mathew Strickland. This collection of thirty-six essays is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the relationship between Scotland, the Scots and warfare, from the Roman invasions until the present day. The first twenty-two chapters are split into three sections each taking a chronological approach examining the emergence of a Scottish kingdom (c.1000 BC-1560 CE), the forging of a Scottish-British military identity (1560-1756), and the role of Scotland in the British Empire (1756-present). Most importantly, the following twelve chapters examine the cultural and physical dimensions of military Scottishness including the evolution of military dress and music, representations of Scottish soldiers in art and literature, and examining Scotland’s physical heritage in the form of castles, fortifications, battlefields and monuments.
Second, I would heartily recommend Aimee Fox’s Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918 (2018). My doctoral research examined this subject – how the British Army sought to learn and develop over the course of the Great War. Aimee Fox’s work sets the benchmark for study in this field, presenting a detailed and innovative study of how the army evolved in the most challenging of circumstances. Of particular importance here is Fox’s work on integrating civilian expertise into the army’s framework, and the ways knowledge was transferred between the different British expeditionary forces around the world. It is a thought-provoking study which does much to explore the complexities of institutional learning in the military context.
Third, I would recommend Catriona Kennedy’s Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (2013). The past ten years or so has seen a real upturn in high-quality studies of the social and cultural history of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic, both from the British perspective and from further afield. This work is one of my favourites and makes so many important connections between the military and civilian worlds. Its chapters examine the experiences of both prisoners of war and volunteers defending Britain from invasion, the transition from civilian to soldiers, and recasts the soldiers and sailors of the time as ‘travellers in uniform’, detailing their interactions with diverse world cultures. This is a particularly important book in terms of understanding how war was experienced and understood at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The fourth book I would like to recommend is William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019). This impressive and readable work charts the history of the East India Company from its foundation in 1599 until the Indian Uprising in 1857, with a particular focus on the demise of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century. The strength of this work is in its research: Dalrymple is an expert at bringing Indian voices to the fore and he must be heartily commended for his use of Persian, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil published and unpublished source material. The image of the EIC which emerges is that of a ruthless and profiteering corporation which stripped India of its wealth and facilitated the deaths of millions. The military dimension is well to the fore here with excellent accounts of the Battles of Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1765, and the 1799 storming of Seringapatam. Dalrymple skilfully examines the development of the EIC armed forces and charts how they acted in concert with the British Army to exert their dominance over the sub-continent.
Lastly, I would like to recommend Jennifer Wellington’s Exhibiting War: The Great War, Museums and Memory in Britain, Canada and Australia (2017). The study of military museology is much overlooked and this work is an excellent comparison of the different social processes which influenced the establishment of national military museums in Britain and two of its Dominions. While in Britain, the war was displayed as a ‘rupture with the past’, in Canada and Australia it was portrayed as being an important step in building their nascent nations. Of particular importance here is the section on informal collecting practices and how early exhibitions of war materiel provided a key link between battlefield and home, providing a visual representation of the conditions of war. Museums and exhibitions of material culture are among the most interesting and enduring cultural legacies of the Great War and this work is both a welcome addition to the field and a solid foundation for future research.
In terms of books I would like to see written, I could think of nothing better than a comprehensive examination of the collecting of military material culture in Scotland from the earliest times up to the present. Our national, regimental and military museums are filled to the brim with objects of national and international cultural significance, and it would be fantastic to see the best of these used to contextualise the story of the Scottish soldier, particularly in terms of engagement with empire. It can be a difficult subject to navigate, but one which we should tackle head on, in an open and frank discussion.