As outlined in this book, the nuances in working lives, governing the structures and day-to-day attitudes of soldiers, provide conclusive evidence that these attitudes mirrored the emerging class system in British society and that class is the key tool for an analysis of the British army in nineteenth-century society. It fundamentally challenges the ‘ruffians officered by gentlemen’ theory of most military histories. The simplistic narrative of loyal, cheerful (preferable Irish) toughs, led by ‘proper’ gentlemen whom they adored, and who would beat any foreign enemy, is also widespread in popular culture – from the broadsides of the French Wars to the writings of Rudyard Kipling. But just as, contrary to myth, the nineteenth-century British army did not win all its battles, so in reality, rank and file could be subversive, miserable and hostile to its officers. This research uncovers the shared hidden world of the nineteenth-century soldier and (to paraphrase Edward Thompson) rescues him from the enormous condescension of most military and labour history.

The book's main objective – to define a labour history of soldiers – is presented in Chapter 1, along with an outline for the non-specialist reader of the technicalities of the varieties of nineteenth-century British military service. It identifies potential problems with current literature on the military, including the complexities of using contemporary rank-and-file memoirs. It argues, controversially, that quasi-conscription existed for much of the century as the major forces of industrialisation and imperialism acted upon British working-class men and women.

Chapter 2 covers the class structure of the nineteenth-century British army. It investigates the background of common soldiers and demonstrates that service in the ranks was not confined to ‘the scum of the earth’ but included a cross section of working-class men, who retained their former civilian culture. Soldiers were fundamentally working men in uniform, whose working lives, like many of their civilian counterparts, were governed by formal or informal contracts. The contractual nature of soldiering as evidenced here, indicates that the army allowed its soldiers to maintain more of the late-eighteenth-century moral economy mind-set than survived in civilian working-class mentalities, coping with abrupt changes in the nineteenth-century labour market. In this way class was a defining aspect of soldiers’ identity.

Class was also reinforced by rankers’ treatment being consistently worse than that of officers.