Few people know more about the eighteenth-century British army, especially its strategic habits, than Ira Gruber, a professor at Rice University and author of several key works on the British army during the American Revolution. His latest effort is nothing less than indispensable, not just for students of the American war but for all those interested in European military thinking, writing, and publishing in the eighteenth century.

Gruber’s analytical premise is straightforward; the work required to fulfill it was not. He has tracked down the books that some forty-two British officers “owned, bought, recommended, cited, or discussed between the War of the Spanish Succession and the wars of the French Revolution—altogether some 650 titles” (5). Much of the bulk of the book (pt. 2) is a catalog of those titles with notes as to who owned which. Gruber further catalogs (pt. 3) an additional 243 period titles that were neglected by his roster of readers. Part 1 provides a miniature biography of each of the forty-two officers, with a discussion of how Gruber knows what he does about their book owning or reading habits. All of these biographies are useful, some are absolutely intriguing. Of particular note is Gruber’s discussion of Clinton’s reading notes, found in his papers in two different archives or in his annotated copy of Stedman’s History of the American War. This exhaustive search of Clinton’s papers is characteristic of the labor involved in the production of this book. An exhaustive set of appendixes collates all these data into various categories.

The analytical heart of the book, however, lies in the somewhat misleadingly titled “Introduction.” Here Gruber takes his extraordinary range of data and masterfully summarizes it while exploring its implications in sixty-three pages of now-required reading in the field. Gruber begins with a sort of collective biography of his forty-two officers, arguing in essence that they were in no sense “representative” as a statistical cross-section of the army’s officer corps but that they were influential men—men whose opinions were likely to percolate out into the rest of the officer ranks. He then takes the reader on a tour of their preferred books, pointing to a heavy interest in the classics (Caesar being the most popular author), military history, engineering, and the art of war, over subjects such as drill, discipline, and medicine. Furthermore, just over half of the books were published on the continent in a language other than English. Many officers, for example, owned the Comte de Guibert’s Essai général de tactique, but none owned or recommended the published English translation. Gruber finds that this cosmopolitan approach to military literature accelerated after the midcentury and the British defeat during the War of Austrian Succession. During the first half of the century, British officers tended to prefer the classics and military histories, especially those of Marlborough’s campaigns. From 1756 to 1799, however, their preferences shifted to books on the art of war, followed by engineering or artillery, classics, and military history. Especially important were works by French and continental authors, notably Vauban, Saxe, Folard, Feuquières, Clairac, followed by Turenne, Puységur, Guibert, Montecuccoli, Frederick, Guischardt, Turpin de Crissé, and Machiavelli.

With his data thus summarized, Gruber turns to their implications and how they fit into our understanding of the British officer corps. He offers a brief summary of the British military Enlightenment, which he finds remarkably limited. British officers rarely wrote their own works, and when they did, they tended to be practical drill manuals or treatises rather than attempts, per the Enlightenment ethos, to systematize a set of principles of war. Nevertheless, Gruber points out that the British maintenance of a standing army after 1714 provided an imaginable career path for young aristocrats. And, despite the continued practice of buying and selling commissions, the Hanoverian monarchs encouraged merit and an ethos of service to the crown.

This professionalizing process accelerated in conjunction with the shift in reading habits after the 1740s, and Gruber then asks what these new attitudes meant in terms of a British way of war. He admits the difficulty of connecting a reading program or a book list to specific operational or strategic choices, but this is the best that can be done. Gruber chooses the ten most popular books, reviews their strategic “advice,” and concludes that “in short, the French authorities on war that our officers valued most—those which became especially popular in the mid-eighteenth century—offered a more cautious approach to the art of war than the most popular of the classical and British authors” (44). This “prudential art of war” sought to reduce the risk of aggressive battles and instead to exhaust an enemy through sieges, maneuver, and the occasional defensive battle. Gruber then shows how this influence likely shaped the strategic choices of late eighteenth-century British commanders during the American Revolution, especially Clinton, Gage, and Howe, although not Cornwallis. Gruber’s work here is an important entry into the debate over the question of “decisive” battle in the early modern era. I have always argued that public figures of the era believed that battle was decisive, and therefore generals simultaneously hoped for a battle’s decision while fearing its consequences if things went sour. John Lynn has argued that French authorities did not believe that battle was decisive, and that was why they chose to avoid it. Clinton’s words, however, can be read as an awareness of how decisive battle could be, at least in defeat, and thus his own preference for a prudential form of war: “except in certain situations for be it remembered, one victory obtained by the assailing army does not decide the contest; one battle lost by him does too often” (45).

Books is simply invaluable. It is a remarkable reference work on eighteenth-century military thought and publishing (British and otherwise), while also presenting as close to a comprehensive examination of the written components of a British “strategic culture” as we are likely to get for the early modern era.