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Matthew McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. viii + 217. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐870364‐8 (hb)

In the first major work published for fifty years that focuses on the New Militia, McCormack explores a range of themes, including gender, citizenship, national identity and social class. By a qualitative analysis of a diverse selection of source material from satirical prints to plebeian memoires, using a variety of approaches from cultural studies, he contributes to our understanding of masculinity in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the first part of the book he explores representations of the militiaman in political discourse and visual culture, which he contrasts in the second part of the book with the lived experiences of those who actually served. In so doing he successfully demonstrates that the militia as embodied was not the militia as intended by its original proponents. The chapters follow a roughly chronological order from the inception of the New Militia in the mid-1750s to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, after which it went into a prolonged period of decline. Yet, this is no narrative history of the institution; rather, it is a smorgasbord of well-chosen case studies – many of which he has previously published – that provide a taste of various aspects of the institution and the wider political culture. One case study focuses on ‘the Maidstone Affair’ of 1756, which provided ample ammunition for ‘country’ patriots, who saw the establishment of a force of citizen soldiers as a neoclassical panacea to the perceived problems of moral decline and effeminacy. The 1761 confrontations between the Lincolnshire Militia and the regular army enable McCormack to examine the rivalries between the two services and to demonstrate an overlap of the military and civilian spheres with regard to expected manners of officers and gentlemen. Similarly, he uses the Gordon Riots to scrutinise the role of the militia in supporting the civil power, particularly the empowerment of male citizens in a paramilitary capacity. The other chapters that are not based on particular events break new ground for historical research. Key among these is the chapter on recruitment, in which McCormack redresses historians’ emphasis on the ‘fiscal-military state’ by focusing on the available human resources as evidenced in the militia ballot lists, which recorded a great deal of information about the male population and their physicality. The paying of substitutes to take the place of wealthy men who were drawn in the ballot resulted in regiments being manned mostly by the working poor: a far cry away