paints brigs for the British fleet.
Dear Friends and Fellow Historians,
For those who are not also members of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), you may want to look at the new (January 2010) issue of the William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) journal.
One of this quarter's feature articles is: The British Army, Military Europe, and the American War of Independence, by Stephen Conway.
Synopsis:
Recent British scholarship, reacting against the dominance of the Atlantic perspective, has sought to highlight the European orientation of the eighteenth-century British and Irish. This article emphasizes, and seeks to demonstrate, European consciousness in the British army employed to put down the American rebellion. The transfer of personnel, technology, ideas, and institutions among the different European armies, and their common commitment to the Eurocentric laws of war and a shared military etiquette, all helped to create the sense of a European occupational fraternity that transcended national distinctions. British and Irish military men were an integral part of this transnational soldierly society. The place of the British army in military Europe should matter to historians of the Revolution because it helps to explain why so many British officers and even common soldiers reacted so negatively to Americans in arms, both rebels and loyalists. The British army's superciliousness, resented bitterly by m any Americans, probably owed less to the contempt that metropolitan Britons had for provincials than to the feelings of superiority European professional soldiers felt for military amateurs.
An online version is now available via the History Cooperative here [preview only for non-registered viewers - Editor].