Early Experiences of Manpower Problems in an Industrial Society at War: Great Britain, 1854-56

Abstract

It is now a platitude that comprehensive manpower budgeting plays a vital role in the total war effort of any industrial society. Yet it was not until the Second World War that this was fully appreciated, even in Britain, the nation with by far the longest experience of the problems of an industrial economy geared to international trade. In the First World War bitter experience did indeed slowly compel its rudimentary enforcement, first with badges and leaving certificates for munitions workers, and finally with the prevention of those in essential occupations from enlisting for military service. Yet British ideas about the best way to meet the calls of war upon a country's manpower remained obstinately naive. Three or four generations earlier, however, in the 1854-56 war with Russia, the only European war Britain engaged in between 1815 and 1914, mid-Victorian Englishmen had already had their eyes forcibly opened to some of the novel problems which confront an industrial society at war, and a few had dimly begun to perceive their implications. In manpower, as in many other wartime concerns, the problems and expedients of twentiethcentury Englishmen at war had mid-nineteenth-century antecedents of which they knew nothing and whose very existence they did not suspect. For British experiences during the Crimean War were not simply forgotten; they were grotesquely distorted exceptionally quickly and thoroughly, and necessarily remained so as long