Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The eighteenth century saw more years of war than of peace. This book demonstrates that children participated in war as soldiers, as non-combatants, and as civilians. It also argues that juvenile imagery was an integral part of warfare, used to motivate soldiers to fight and to justify the command structure.

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The eighteenth century saw more years of war than of peace. Though victimhood might jump most readily to mind when thinking about how this affected young people, it is only a small part of the picture. The Seven Years' War and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influenced how children played, learned, worked, and perceived the world around them, regardless of whether they were in the heart of the battle or far from the action.

Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain considers how British and foreign youngsters affected the waging of war, not only as stalwart camp followers, boy soldiers, patriotic civilians, and bereaved victims, but also as evocative images of innocence, inability, and dependence. Drawing on a wide variety of source material and reading it against the grain, the book uses both children's lived experience of war and their representation in wartime imagery to reassess neglected aspects of the social and cultural histories of the long eighteenth century. This includes the profound impact of military culture on eighteenth-century childhood, but also the surprising ways in which childhood itself was mobilized for military ends. The same sentiments that set childhood apart as a distinct stage of innocence were used to marginalize youngsters' war contributions, or leveraged by the state to further military goals, and where children's historians have concentrated on the way in which war made children grow up 'before their time', the other side of this picture, far less frequently voiced, is that war might be seen to infantilize adults.

The result is a comprehensive and wide-ranging account of childhood and war across the eighteenth century that makes novel contributions to and connects two distinct historiographical sub-fields: the history of childhood and military history.