Austin Gee examines the Volunteer Movement in Great Britain between its founding by Pitt and Dundas in 1794 and the disbanding of its infantry corps in 1814. A few of its cavalry corps survived into the Victorian age. While important during the 1790s, it particularly flourished after the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens in 1803. The movement, however, went into a steady decline after the death of its mentor in 1806.

At its peak in 1804, with 400,000 men and 4,600 individual corps, the Volunteer Movement contained circa 18 percent of all men of military age in England, Scotland, and Wales. It especially prospered in South England and Scotland, where some counties contributed one-third of their adult males. The size of the individual corps varied greatly: the South Regiment of Devon Volunteers contained 2,484 men; the Norfolk Mounted Rifles only 24. The Volunteers were an auxiliary military force, completely distinct from the county militias, the fencibles, and the regular army. Unlike the rest of the defense apparatus, the Volunteers elected their own officers, who were bound by no property qualification. Gee presents ample evidence that the Volunteers, with an artisan and skilled workmen base, were socially a cut above the militia or the regular army, where laborers and unskilled workmen predominated. The Volunteers were clearly not merely a force of local propertied men and their clients. Gee has done an enormous amount of work in English and Scottish (though not Welsh) archives, and he convincingly shows the great range of political and religious allegiances found among the various corps.

Gee very much calls into question the arguments of Robert Dozier and David Eastwood that the Volunteer Movement metastasized from John Reeves's Loyal Association of 1792–93 and represented “Reevesite loyalism in arms” (266). Loyal but not loyalist, there is little evidence either of particular Volunteer disapprobation of popular unrest or of violent intimidation of democratic or republican societies. Hence, the Auchermuchty Volunteers demurred from suppressing food rioters. It was clearly never a totally Pittite force: Whitbread, Tierney, and Sheridan were all Volunteers. Gee has consulted poll books that show that the voting pattern of Volunteers was similar to that of the rest of the population. Even Spencer Perceval thought it permissible for Volunteers to sign petitions opposing the (1795) Pittite bills against seditious publications and restricting public meetings. The movement was thus loyal in a hazy and nonpartisan sense to the traditional constitution.

Why did so many individuals join the Volunteers? Gee sees fear of a French invasion as a prime motivating force and indeed largely agrees with J. E. Cookson's thesis of their representing “national defense patriotism” (19). He emphasizes other reasons as well. Volunteer service provided exemption from the threat of balloting for the (less socially exclusive) militia, the supplementary militia, and the Army of Reserve. Some may have joined for the pay, others from vanity and the opportunity to wear a (hopefully) well cut uniform. Others had a keen eye for the possibilities of future local patronage.

Gee accents the relative absence of religious discrimination, at least among Protestants, within the Volunteer movement. Dissenters generally served as Volunteers in proportion to their numbers in the population. A prominent dissenting minister delivered a fast day sermon in 1803 to William Pitt's Cinque Port Volunteers. From the available evidence, the military experiences of Roman Catholic and Jewish Volunteers were less happy. Gee has examined myriads of sermons preached before the Volunteer corps. These represent, I suppose, as much as anything, the manner in which the Christian establishment wished to present itself to the lower orders. Not surprisingly, there is a certain amount of emphasis upon the British as God's chosen people. For example, at the end of the century, with Europe and America ablaze with signs of apocalyptic prophesies coming to pass, a Volunteer chaplain modestly hoped that the Reading Armed Association would become God's special instrument to extend His knowledge throughout the world.

There have been no lack of commentators, at the time and subsequently, who have discussed the leap in the dark or the calculated risk that Pitt and Addington took in arming so many individuals, allowing them elected officers, and failing to subject them to regular military discipline. Did the Volunteers not thus resemble the Irish, French, and American civil clubs and societies? If Pitt's repressive legislation of the 1790s exemplified some fear on the part of the central authorities for the possibility of revolution, did the simultaneous arming of substantial sections of the lower orders by these same authorities bespeak confusion at the center of power? Gee concludes that the Volunteer Movement provides a “striking example” (264) of how a society—faced with revolutionary threats—chose not to reform itself but rather to employ existing local institutions and local power structures to ameliorate the difficulties. And in the end he compares the British Volunteers and their organization not to Irish Volunteers or to radical clubs but to the associated charities and voluntary societies so prominent in eighteenth-century British life.

Could one, however, unlike Gee, conclude that the conservative Volunteers might not have been very important at all? Unlike the Methodist organizations or the nascent union activity, which did transform certain sectors of the population, it is hard to see that British society greatly changed as a result of Volunteer training and maneuvers. A French invasion of course never happened. One wonders nonetheless how the Volunteers would have performed if forced to engage at some level with the Grand Army. Gee several times maintains that the necessity for the French war had ceased to be controversial by 1798. Is this quite accurate? Also, there was no Princess Elizabeth of Hesse Homburg in 1804 (180), nor was there a duke of Buckingham in 1808 (193). One would also like to have seen in this generally stimulating work a brief comparison of the Irish Volunteers of the 1770s and 1780s with the British Volunteer Movement after 1794.