Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution - by Ira D Gruber (Paperback)

About the Book

Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution

Book Synopsis

Historians have long understood that books were important to the British army in defining the duties of its officers, regulating tactics, developing the art of war, and recording the history of campaigns and commanders. Now, in this groundbreaking analysis, Ira D. Gruber identifies which among over nine hundred books on war were considered most important by British officers and how those books might have affected the army from one era to another. By examining the preferences of some forty-two officers who served between the War of the Spanish Succession and the French Revolution, Gruber shows that by the middle of the eighteenth century British officers were discriminating in their choices of books on war and, further, that their emerging preference for Continental books affected their understanding of warfare and their conduct of operations in the American Revolution. In their increasing enthusiasm for books on war, Gruber concludes, British officers were laying the foundation for the nineteenth-century professionalization of their nation's officer corps. Gruber's analysis is enhanced with detailed and comprehensive bibliographies and tables.

Review Quotes

A brilliant study. . . . It is impossible to do justice to this monumental work in a short review.--Army History

An interesting case study that charts the relationship between intellectual prescription and cultural (in this case military) practice.--Anglican and Episcopal History

This is a wonderful book. It provides real, tangible and quantifiable insight that will cause historians to reassess why certain eighteenth-century British field commanders acted as they did.--Journal of NC Association of Historians

This revealing and methodical book significantly advances our understanding of the professional thinking of British military leaders in the eighteenth century." --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Ira D. Gruber is Harris Masterson Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at Rice University. From 1966 to 2009 he taught courses in early American and military history at Rice, the U.S. Military Academy, and the U.S. Army Staff College.