Towards embodiment: the historiography of the Georgian militia

The militia in eighteenth-century England was an institution that straddled the civil and military worlds. On the one hand, it was administered by the structures of local government, was composed of civilians who served part-time in peacetime, and was celebrated as ‘the constitutional force’. On the other, militiamen were virtually indistinguishable from redcoats, were subject to martial law, and served in an institution that increasingly became an adjunct to the regular army. Britain had long possessed what Ian Beckett terms an ‘amateur military tradition’, but this paper focuses on the so-called ‘New Militia’ that was created in 1757 and served in the three major conflicts of the eighteenth century, the Seven Years War, the American War and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In this paper I will draw on my experience of writing Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford UP, 2015) in order to reflect upon different historical approaches to the institution. This is the first book-length study since J.R. Western’s classic of 1965, and indeed the militia has received relatively little attention from military historians, possibly because it never faced the invasion that it was created to repel. Instead, it is more productive to consider the ways that antiquarian, Whig, Tory and social historians have written about the institution. Looking forward, this paper will think about how approaches from cultural history, particularly histories of masculinity and the body, can help us to understand both how the militia was represented in public culture and also experienced by the men who served. In this way, the paper will think about the liminal position of the militia between ‘war’ and ‘society’ – both in terms of the eighteenth-century world, and also its historiography.