Annual Booklist 2025 : Professor Kevin Linch
Kevin Linch is Professor of British History at the University of Leeds, and specialises on Britain's armed forces in the Napoleonic period and their interaction with wider social and cultural trends. He won the 2024 Templer Medal with his book The History of the British Army, 1783-1815, and was made a Fellow of the Society in 2025 in recognition of his work on the Georgian Army Officers database (https://www.georgianarmyofficers.org/).
Edward J. Coss, All for the King’s Shilling: The British Soldier under Wellington, 1808-1814 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010).
The Peninsular War is a well-trodden field for historians of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, but this book really gets into the experience of being a soldier in the British Army during that conflict. It is very much focused on soldiers and soldiering, covering what motivated them, what shaped their world and how they shaped it. It has essential insights about the physiological and psychological impact of being a soldier in the period that ought to shake any rosy or romantic perceptions about the men in redcoats, whilst simultaneously not condemning them.
Evan Wilson, The Horrible Peace: British Veterans and the End of the Napoleonic Wars, (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023).
An important contribution generally to the field of veteran studies, this work is a foundation text for understanding Britain demobilisation at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And, yes, it does discuss both the Army and Royal Navy – itself a reason to recommend it. The book does analyse the British state’s demobilisation of the enormous war machine that it had bought into being through the 1790s and 1810s. More significant though, is the study of the veterans’ experience. Through this book, there is a real sense of how the war continued for veterans, as they fought for recognition, for return in some form to a ‘civilian’ life, or continued to serve in other ways.
Roger Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military in the Revolutionary Age (University Press of Florida, 1998).
Sadly, harder to obtain than it should be, but an essential study of the British Army in the Caribbean. Huge numbers of soldiers from the British Army were sent to the Caribbean, many of them never to return. Ostensibly, the region seems mostly to be garrison duty, excepting famous campaigns which perhaps naturally attract attention. This book is, in some ways, and antidote to this, recovering the rhythms and experience of service in the Caribbean. Exploring how the environment and landscape shaped their world, and how soldiers were affected by, and affected, a social, cultural, and political world that was riven by an economy based on the labour of thousands of enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbeans.
Gavin Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and Portugal, 1808-1814 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Another work about the Peninsular War but essential reading for two very important reasons. Like All for the King’s Shilling, this is about soldiers’ experiences in the Peninsular War, and in this case much more about the world that they found themselves in as they campaigned through Portugal and Spain. For most soldiers, Iberia was beyond their ken and this book explores how soldiers experienced and understood the people they encountered that were allies but seen by Britain’s soldiers as different, exotic, and even sometimes as ‘backward’. In undertaking this study based on many memoirs and letters, there are important points about us reading these documents more carefully, and with an eye on these writers and the influences on their writing.
Matthew Taylor, Black Redcoats: The Corps of Colonial Marines, 1814-1816 (Pen & Sword Military, 2024).
An important work of history as restitution, on a very important aspect of the black history of the War of 1812 between Britain and the USA. A study of the enslaved who served Britain, itself a slave-holding empire, against the slave-holding Republic, it is much more than an account and analysis of what these men did. It also demonstrates the continued relevance and value of the study of units / regiments, and how a world can be reconstructed from the records we have.
I feel that there is so much still to be done on Britain’s soldiers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Like calls made by John Houlding in the 2022 Annual Booklist, relative to the other arms, artillerymen and the artillery are understudied. Perhaps my most earnest wish would be for a study on horses – perhaps even all animal motive power – and Britain’s land forces in the era. Important work has been done by Andrew Bamford in Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword: The British Regiment on Campaign, 1808-1815 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013) – consider this a sneaky sixth recommendation – with a chapter in that book on horses. Still, there is more to do. The numbers involved were prodigious, but the systems of procurement, care, and discharge were almost all decentralised. Then there is also the economic and social impact – what were the consequence of the transfer of so much literal horsepower to the armed forces? Is there, perhaps, a link to these wars’ demand for horses, increasing costs to supply them, and a tipping point in emergence of steampower for transport in Britain?