CHRISTINE WRIGHT. Wellington's Men in Australia: Peninsular War Veterans and the Making of Empire c. 1820-40. (War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2011. Pp. vii, 243. 55.00

Abstract

The history of settler colonialism is an increasingly lively field, now boasting a journal, Settler Colonial Studies, and provocative schema such as James Belich's contention of an Anglo settler revolution in the early nineteenth century connected to technological and economic change. Christine Wright's welcome addition to the field also contributes to histories of Australia and the British Empire, and may perhaps best be situated in what Australian historian Peter Stanley terms “military social history.” Wright's book, based on her Ph.D. thesis, is an impressively researched prosopographical study of the British army veterans of the Peninsular War who settled in the Australian colonies in the 1820s and 1830s, when there was a rapid expansion of free settlers alongside the continuing system of convict transportation. The Peninsular War, fought in Portugal and Spain from 1808 to 1814, was the latter stages of Britain and its allies' war against Napoleon. The British army had expanded sixfold during the generation-long struggle against revolutionary France, then Napoleon. At war's end there was massive demobilization, with the army reduced from 236,000 soldiers in 1814 to 81,000 in 1819; the navy's reductions were additional to these. Wright demonstrates that large numbers of young men who would not previously have been able to afford to purchase army commissions and promotions were able to raise their social status during the war—that is, if they survived it. Many of the officers who were put on half-pay retainers in the postwar years found that they and their families could not survive on half-pay in Britain's collapsed postwar economy; migration to the settler colonies became an attractive option.