Sieges were central to the evolution of customary laws of war in early modern Europe and represented the most regularised form of warfare. They were also where civilians were most at risk of exposure to the violence of conventional war, including the phenomenon of sack. A besieging force that stormed a town had the right to put the garrison to the sword and to sack the town. Yet the long tradition of sack has been neglected by historians, only now emerging as a subject of study in its own right. This chapter explores the history of sieges, sack, and the laws of war in Western Europe over the course of the long eighteenth century (1660–1815). It highlights sieges as an important but relatively neglected place for examining changes and continuities in customary laws of war, ideals of barbarity and civility, and moral sentiment over the long eighteenth century.

While it is sometimes claimed that, during the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), there were no theatrical performances in the colonies owing to legislation passed by the Continental Congress, many did, in fact, still take place. Leading this provision of wartime entertainments were the British military in occupied New York, and this chapter concentrates on their performances at John Street Theatre – renamed the Theatre Royal – including their repertory of Shakespearean plays. In this context, wartime theatre was a clearly political act: the individuals involved in these productions were both theatrical and military actors. Chapter 2 examines the operations of this wartime theatre and the range of repertory performed by the British military, including their prioritization of Shakespearean plays that feature monarchical structures of government – such as Richard III and Macbeth – over classical histories such as Julius Caesar that carried a republican ethos. These productions were used by some as a form of propaganda and the chapter re-evaluates this term to show how Shakespeare and the theatre more broadly were weaponized during this conflict.

This chapter will examine theatre both for, and by, the armed services on the fighting fronts. It will outline how and why theatre was an important aspect of leisure time for British, Colonial and allied troops fighting on land, at sea and in the air. This chapter will examine the importance of both watching and taking part in theatrical entertainments through a discussion of the professional civilian and military Concert Parties in the Army, Navy and the RFC/RAF, the role of voluntary-aid organisations such as the British Red Cross and the YMCA, and theatrical entertainments in wider wartime contexts such as PoW camps and military hospitals. A key focus of the chapter will be the social function of such entertainments, the content, and the practicalities of how they were staged in various wartime contexts.

Chapter 2 explains how the British Army’s ‘honeymoon’ period in Northern Ireland came to an end by May 1970, and how these early months entrenched certain ideas about nationalist and unionist communities in British strategic thinking. The chapter argues the army succeeded in partially repairing trust between Catholics and the state, but that this proved highly destabilising. Strategists under-estimated lingering anger over the events in August 1969 and exaggerated their ability to control tensions. The decision to concentrate soldiers in predominantly Catholic areas and leave the police in Protestant areas gradually made the army appear biased. Tougher action, when it came, looked like it was happening only against one section of the community, whilst the army’s ability to understand Protestant militants was limited and strategists in any case wished to avoid any confrontation from that quarter. The Provisional IRA’s offensive began around Easter 1970, before the British Army adopted a more aggressive stance. By permitting provocative Protestant marches in Belfast the British began to lose the Catholic goodwill so carefully gained by army battalions in the preceding months. The British response to rising republican violence can only be understood in the context of the expectations about loyalist reactions.

On 23 March 1972 the British cabinet suspended the Northern Ireland parliament, scaled down military operations, and prepared to negotiate with nationalists and republicans. This chapter asks why it took Heath’s government so long to strategically adapt, and what the delay resulted in. A straight causal line is often drawn between internment, Bloody Sunday and direct rule from London being imposed. Bloody Sunday, when the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen unarmed protesters during an anti-internment march on 30 January, is considered to have happened in the context of a policy vacuum, or amidst frenetic efforts to secure peace. This chapter argues that the persistence of an offensive strategy intended to defeat the IRA and force nationalists to accept minor constitutional reforms contributed to Bloody Sunday. The direct-rule decision is frequently attributed to the fallout from Bloody Sunday. But the thinking and planning necessary for strategic adaptation had already taken place. The offensive strategy endured for weeks longer because ministers decided to delay direct rule. The massacre propelled large numbers to join the IRA, a recruitment glut essential for the expansion in violence seen during 1972. Those new recruits proved effective because IRA strategy and tactics had already changed before Bloody Sunday.

This chapter analyses British strategy once direct rule had been imposed from London, and covers the period up to September 1972, when talks between the political parties happened without the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party. The chapter documents the efforts by the army to buttress Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw’s quest for peace. Discontent lingered amongst elements in the security forces over restraint in fighting the IRA. Low-level brutality continued, particularly in tough regiments. In July the British government and the Provisionals held secret negotiations. Beforehand, republicans and loyalists targeted civilians to shape the impending dialogue. Senior figures in the Ministry of Defence believed loyalist attacks on Catholics might encourage republicans to modify their demands. Loyalist mobilisation probably convinced the government not to give anything away to republicans. These events, and the success of Operation Motorman in re-entering republican areas, persuaded the army to go back on the offensive against the Provisionals. In doing so they committed to retaining internment, expanding interrogation and adopting a modus vivendi with loyalists. These choices allowed the force level in Northern Ireland to be brought down, as demanded by the commitment to NATO, and swelling discord about repeated deployments on a deeply unpleasant mission.

British strategists came to accept permanent conflict in Northern Ireland because they could only imagine things being worse without them. Preparing for the long haul meant getting the army force level to a sustainable level. From mid 1973 senior officers expressed anxieties about what the repeated tours were doing to their men. Morale-sustaining measures played some part in ameliorating the fatigue. This chapter examines the debate about reductions in the military commitment as the context for understanding the Ulster Workers’ Council strike in May 1974, which condemned Northern Ireland to conflict for decades to come. The chapter argues the Ministry of Defence discouraged the Northern Ireland Office from asking for the reinforcements needed to suppress the strike. By delaying, emphasising police unreliability and presenting a catastrophe as inevitable, the ministry kept the force level down. A major arrest operation towards the end of the strike showed loyalist insurrection to be a less worrisome prospect than commonly feared. An intractable conflict was tolerable to the cabinet as in 1973–5 the character of the violence turned less ‘British’ and more ‘Northern Irish’. Successive London administrations gave confidence to those who opposed political change by the strategy of limited containment towards violent loyalism.

This chapter traces the origins of the Troubles in Northern Ireland from the mid 1960s, depicting the British government’s ignorance about the Province and reluctance to get involved. The chapter assesses the development of British military thinking about insurgency, arguing the army reflected on the lessons of the decolonisation wars, and realised the tactics used in the colonies would not be suitable in the future. The army’s deliberate intellectual decolonisation before 1969 made it much harder for soldiers to accept later on that others might perceive their actions to be inherently colonial. The chapter shows how the Ministry of Defence began to consider what might happen if the disputes on the streets of Northern Ireland got more serious. From an early stage, defence planners and ministers feared a civil war, and this fear shaped decision-making for years to come. Northern Ireland was viewed by the British as a home nation, therefore deserving support, but also deeply alien in political and social terms. The government’s decision to delay sending in the army for as long as possible made the task of restoring order more difficult, as the local police force’s credibility evaporated, and Catholic communities looked beyond the state for protection.

Introducing internment in August 1971 broke ancient prohibitions against detention without trial and forcible confessions, and incited a fervent reaction across Northern Ireland. Rather than viewing internment in isolation, this chapter evaluates the implications of Prime Minister Heath granting the army permission to wage war against the IRA. The wartime mindset began to take hold because initial operations appeared to be successful. Even as the Provisionals escalated their violence, soldiers retained some sympathy for the Catholic population, and thought of their own approach as discriminate. An arms amnesty, searches and arrests provided plentiful statistical evidence to feed the optimistic mood. Improvements to the military intelligence system gave credence to General Tuzo’s wish for gradual, low-key attrition of the IRA, especially targeting the Provisional leadership. This chapter argues the turn towards repression built slowly, and derived as much from the nature of British common law, Britain’s global commitments and London’s calculations about blame politics, as it did from fears of a loyalist backlash. The growing hurt done to those adjacent to the targets of the military failed to register as meaningful enough to force any major re-think in strategy.

During the summer of 1970 the British Army’s tactics in Northern Ireland unmistakably shifted into a more aggressive gear. Responsibility is frequently pinned upon Edward Heath’s administration, elected in June. This chapter argues for continuity across the electoral divide as Heath pursued the reform agenda demarcated by his predecessor, Harold Wilson. This chapter refutes the notion that loyalist groups were largely irrelevant in British strategy. Even before the general election, fear of loyalist rebellion deterred strategists from impartially addressing violence from wherever it came. Fear of loyalism fused with over-confidence about the army’s ability to attack and suppress republicanism. From May 1970 the British Army launched a preventative assault on republicans, to ward off the danger of civil war by eliminating the only belligerent deemed defeatable. After the Conservatives gained power, the government sent HQ Northern Ireland additional manpower to pursue the offensive with greater vigour. The major curfew operation in the densely populated Catholic Falls Road area in Belfast in July is placed within the broader context of the assault on the IRA. When the first soldier was killed in February 1971, Prime Minister Heath felt public opinion in Britain now expected republicanism to be crushed.

Chapter two examines the conflicting nationalist politics mobilising Irish volunteers in wartime Britain. It profiles the political languages and cultures of Irish volunteers in British centres, from the 150,000 recruits in the British armed forces to the eighty-seven rebels in the armed forces of the Irish Republic; interrogates the correspondence, and separation, of Irish nationalist identities between home/front; and charts the rise, and estranged demise, of Irish Party support in wartime Britain. The Irish Party, this chapter submits, successfully maintained its ‘two face’ political position in Britain, in anticipation of a short war and a bitterly contested general election on the Home Rule issue, a political strategy termed ‘home front nationalism’. Redmond’s rejection of a British Cabinet position in May 1915, and the I.P.P.’s rejection of conscription in January 1916, however, fatally undermined the Irish Party’s policy. The participation of British-based Irish Volunteers in the 1916 Rising was a rebellion against the wartime politics of ‘home front nationalism’ and British citizenship. An examination of the ‘British connection’ to the Rising, from the Edinburgh-born James Connolly to the London-based Michael Collins, supports the thesis that military strategy was not the primary focus of the 1916 leaders.

The British Army took part in numerous operations, ranging from small expeditions to the West Indies, Africa and along the European littoral to major operations in Portugal, Spain and Belgium. Initial struggles with these responsibilities, together with those of imperial policing and maintaining order in Ireland would oblige the Army to implement extensive reforms, particularly in tactics and unit organisation, even while the system of purchase for officers remained intact. While British infantry produced mixed results in the field during the French Revolutionary Wars, in time it became noteworthy for its musketry and remarkable doggedness in battle. Chronically understrength and notoriously difficult to control, the cavalry tended to play only a minor part on campaign, while shortages of artillery and engineers plagued the Army throughout this period. Albeit comparatively small, in creating an Iberian foothold which soon developed into a major theatre of operations, the instrument forged in the battles and sieges of the Peninsula and southern France helped drain Napoleon’s resources over a substantial period and established the high standard of battlefield performance which was to reach its apogee on the field of Waterloo, from which would emerge one of history’s greatest commanders – the Duke of Wellington.

This book is the first major study of British soldiers’ violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using British soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain, to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, storm and sack of towns. The book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period, and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Storm and Sack reveals a multi-faceted story of not only rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.

This book is the first major study of British soldiers’ violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using British soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain, to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, storm and sack of towns. The book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period, and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Storm and Sack reveals a multi-faceted story of not only rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.

The conclusion will tie the chapters together and reinforce the notion of the Victorian period as a singular unit in British military history. It will address some of the overarching themes of the book such as the impact of British imperialism on domestic policy, the function of the army in the service of British political goals, and the evolution of military technology.