This is a generally disappointing book seeking to develop a good theme. It is certainly of interest to examine the way in which a particular confessional and emigré minority was drawn towards soldiering as a career, and how this might have led to the development of its own ideals and approaches to military service. Interpretations of military effectiveness and organisation which stress culture and identity have recently drawn attention as an alternative to more familiar arguments about a ‘western way of war’ strongly identified with technological and organisational innovation. Case studies in this book examine Huguenot soldiers in the service of Britain, the Dutch Republic, Brandenburg-Prussia, Brunswick-Lüneburg, Savoy-Piedmont and Russia and, as the introduction by Matthew Glozier and David Onnekink points out, this presents an excellent opportunity to explore the particularities of Huguenot service in different confessional and organisational contexts, through issues of loyalty and corporate identity, and in the development of military professionalism. Religion in early modern armies has been the subject of no less extensive recent research and, as many of the authors of this volume point out, multi-confessional armies were a fact of life in the seventeenth century. As such, exploring the ways in which the Huguenots' religious beliefs were central to their military identity in a way perhaps distinctive from other religious minorities, and how far they made successful military careers because they adapted well into the military system around them, or remained a consciously separate minority, wedded to their own military traditions as well as their beliefs, could have been central issues for the various contributors. However most of the essays in this volume go little beyond the purely descriptive and narrative.

Individual chapters describe the careers of Louis de Durfort-Duras, earl of Feversham, and Henri de Ruvigny, earl of Galway. These vie with general, narrative essays on Huguenot soldiers in Williamite England, and in Ireland, and an essay by John Childs on Huguenot regiments in the British army down to 1702, Childs incidentally sounding a note of scepticism about the lasting impact of the Huguenots: with the demobilisation following the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, the Huguenot regiments were broken up and soldiers and officers subsequently scattered amongst the native regiments. The combination of this choice of topics and a strongly narrative approach in all five essays (together with a sixth, by Glozier and Onnekink, on Huguenots in Dutch service), leads to an unacceptably high degree of repetition and duplication in providing details of a story that is already well-known and has been written about by many of these authors in different contexts: by the fourth separate introduction to the life and career of Friedrich Hermann von Schomberg, the reader is entitled to wonder whether some more rigorous editing might not usefully have been employed. More engaging are those essays which tackle less familiar aspects of the Huguenot military diaspora: Glozier on Russia, Paula Bianchi on Savoy-Piedmont and two articles by Detlef Harms and Matthias Asche on Brandenburg-Prussia, which, while also committed to telling the story of Huguenot military service, do provide rather more analysis of the character and distinctiveness of Huguenot soldiering within the military institutions of these states.