"The impact war had on the creation of the British unitary state has been commented on by numerous historians in the past, and this present work builds successfully on their research. Historians such as Jeremy Black, Linda Colley, David Scott, and Scott Wheeler have deepened our understanding of British military history, transforming it into a more respectable discipline, a discipline that has occasionally been viewed as an arcane and disagreeable specialty concerning, as it does, killing. Indeed, as the present author rather graphically phrases it, military history was "like the history of pornography, not to be encouraged in a decent university" (p. xix). However, Charles Carlton, a former part-time soldier in Britain's Territorial Army, has a great deal to say about killing, for the diverse peoples of the British Isles in the three centuries after the battle of Bosworth in 1485 became "extremely good at fighting and killing, and in doing so, flourished mightily" (p. xiv). The almost incessant conflict of the period, both domestic and international, was, he further argues, a prime mover in shaping both British history and its slow, but irresistible, movement toward a centralized British state—a development that touched the lives of almost all the peoples of the British Isles in the early modern period. The thesis that a seventeenth-century European military revolution had important social and cultural implications for the peoples of Europe is not a new idea, yet this study is an accessible introduction to such a perspective for the general reader, especially those interested in the ever-popular Tudor and Stuart dynasties.
An author of previous studies on Archbishop Laud, Charles I, and other royal warriors, in this book, Carlton extends the scope of his earlier work Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638-1651 (1992), which describes the experiences of the ordinary soldier during, as he correctly terms them, the British Civil Wars. To try to encapsulate both the military aspects and the political developments of nearly three hundred years of British history, including Ireland, is an ambitious project, especially in just thirteen chapters. However, the author not only largely carries it off but has also written an interesting book.
In his thirteen alternating chapters, Carlton discusses two main themes. First, he reviews the macro aspects of the period, on how warfare affected the state, its institutions, the economy, and international relations. These are well-trodden paths and the author freely admits that this feature of his study reflects the experiences of the elite, of those in power. Some professional historians might take issue with a number of his broad generalizations, often couched in a somewhat popular, if not ahistorical, jargon. This is certainly true of his treatment of the many Anglo-Irish conflicts in which, he suggests, Elizabethan Englishmen came to view the Irish "in much the same way as Germans in the Second World War thought Jews as Untermenschen who could be exterminated without compunction" (p. 51). While admitting that military events in Ireland in the later civil wars were complex, Carlton portrays the English after the massacre of Ulster Protestants in 1642 as motivated by a righteous anger; he argues that they conducted their campaigns against the Irish "with the casual cruelty characteristic of S.S. Einsatzgruppen" on the eastern front (p. 135). Of course, atrocities were committed by all sides during these conflicts, and while an Irish background may make one sensitive to such statements, one can only wonder what motivates a historian to suggest that English actions must be understood within the context that for much of the time Ireland was under martial law; the English were involved in seek-and-destroy actions against guerilla fighters who just did not play fair; the weather was terrible; drink played a part; and many atrocities were committed in "hot blood, making them more understandable, perhaps even excusable" (p. 53). It is perhaps not surprising that Edmund Burke came to conclude in the eighteenth century that if a disciplined army could be a danger to liberty, an undisciplined army was often ruinous to society itself…"
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