Annual Booklist 2026 : Dr Rory M. Butcher
Rory M. Butcher is the Research Promotion Officer at the Royal Armouries in Leeds and a LAHRI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, where he recently completed his doctorate. His research has centred on the Fencible regiments and the spectrum of regular-auxiliary military service, but more generally encompasses the relationship between war, the armed forces, and civilian society, in Britain during the long eighteenth century. He is currently receiving a Fellowship from the Army Records Society, contributing towards an edited collection relating to the Fencibles, and served as the Student Representative on the SAHR Council between 2022 and 2025.
John Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793-1815 (Clarendon, 1997)
I’m going to start this list off with what I am certain should be a foundational text on more Napoleonicists’ shelves, although sadly issues with access largely explains its absence from many. Cookson covers a mountain of source material with this monograph, drawing together the central argument that this period saw the development of what he calls ‘national defence patriotism’ – that British society found a semblance of widespread unity in its mobilisation against a common enemy. Not only is this convincing, and integral to our understanding of the British people across the whole period, but it is also eminently readable, and goes some way to demonstrating that academic texts can be enjoyable as well as informative.
Ilya Berkovich, Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Much of my work has found me placed between scholarship of the eighteenth century and scholarship of the “Napoleonic” period, and this next entry is my evidence that there is a great deal of commonality between the two which is sometimes forgotten. Berkovich’s research presents a significant level of detail in how ordinary soldiers were encouraged, or not, in their experiences of service – from individuals up to armies. His particularly sterling contribution, to my mind, is the development of John Lynn’s methodology into understanding distinct “phases” of motivation, as a soldier enlists, serves, and fights in an army, and the different ways in which that motivation is generated. It perhaps does not need stating how beneficial this is to scholars of any period of military history.
Matilda Greig, Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2021)
I believe this particular text has appeared on a previous iteration of these book lists, but I think it bears repeating. Our insight into the lives of those in the past is most often helped by their own writings, and Greig’s work provides plenty of reasons why engaging with these sources is not always as simple as one might assume. This book discusses how many soldiers and publishers found audiences in the post-war landscape of nineteenth-century Europe: connecting the Napoleonic to the Victorian worlds, as readers sought after some understanding of the military and the emotional experiences of the soldiers’ life. Not only a historical work, but a valuable methodological treatise.
Matthew P. Dziennik, The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in British America (Yale University Press, 2015)
It would be remiss of me as a researcher of negotiated authority not to flag this up as one of the most significant works for any student of the British Army in North America, but also of Scotland’s relationship with Britain. As Dziennik shows, many Scots wore red coats for their own personal reasons, including a chosen engagement with British imperialism, with many regiments raised as an extension of the socio-economic influence of Highland elites. Most prominently, this casts the Scottish soldiery as active agents in their military service, and therefore The Fatal Land plays a crucial role in furthering our understanding of the British nation, and all its differences, throughout this period.
Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack (eds.), Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715-1815 (Liverpool University Press, 2014)
As far as I’m aware there’s nothing in the rules saying I can’t recommend an edited book, so here we go! Britain’s Soldiers is a collection of some of the best scholarship on the topic, with chapters covering everything from disability at the Royal Hospital of Chelsea, to depictions of masculinity in painting, to female enthusiasm for the redcoat. My personal favourites are Stephen Conway’s fascinating discussion of the British relationship with “military Europe”, which should be an essential read for any scholar of the mid-century British-French rivalry, and Bruce Collins’ examination of the officer corps is a useful update to elements of Anthony Bruce’s The Purchase System. Plus the paperback, released in 2021, makes this an incredibly affordable piece of top-quality academia!
What next?
I am possibly in a tricky position as an early-career scholar in that the ideas I think most merit attention are those I am intending to consider myself! However, I would argue that much of the experience of the French Wars (1793-1815) is still unclear, and many research projects would benefit from the twinning of military with other lenses. The marriage of military and social approaches is what has led me to the conception of types of soldiering as a spectrum. Auxiliary and Regular might be period terminology, but it is clear that the lines are not so clear-cut as previously thought, and I strongly believe that the early modern and modern periods would benefit from more attention in this regard – most prominently the volunteer craze of the nineteenth century, and the independent companies raised during the Jacobite rebellions. I would also greatly welcome more research into how British army administration changed in the 1790s and 1800s, or more specifically what generated that change. Richard Glover’s 1963 Peninsular Preparation received a well-needed update from Kevin Linch’s 2024 The British Army, 1783-1815 on this topic (two more sneaky recommendations), but I suspect there might still be more work needed on the personalities involved, to contextualise the reforms which laid the way for the British Army’s later success on the battlefield and on campaign.