Redcoats;The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-1763
Stephen Brumwell

ISBN 0-521-80783-2
Recent scholarship has highlighted the significance of the Seven Years War for the destiny of Britain's Atlantic empire. This major study offers an important new perspective through a vivid and scholarly account of the regular troops at the sharp end of that conflict's bloody and decisive American campaigns. Fresh sources are employed to challenge enduring stereotypes regarding both the social composition and military prowess of the 'redcoats'. The book shows how the humble soldiers who fought from Nova Scotia to Cuba developed a powerful esprit de corps that equipped them to defy savage discipline in defense of their 'rights'. It traces the evolution of Britain's 'American Army' from a feeble, conservative and discredited organization into a tough, flexible and innovative force whose victories ultimately won the respect of colonial Americans. By providing a voice for these neglected shock-troops of empire, Redcoats adds flesh and blood to Georgian Britain's 'sinews of power'.

FIT FOR SERVICE; THE TRAINING OF THE BRITISH ARMY 1715-1795
J.A. Houlding

ISBN 0-19-822647-0
In this study of the army’s peacetime and wartime training regimen in the period between the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns and the reforms associated with the Duke of York, J.A. Houlding looks primarily at the various circumstances that contributed to such a lack of preparedness that one officer considered the troops ‘in imminent danger of being cut to pieces in our first encounter’. In discussion of the poor training of the eighteenth-century army the usual suspects are the purchased commissions system and lack of drill regulations. Houlding challenges that argument, analysing a mass of War Office documents including Marching Orders, Inspection Returns and drill books, to present a detailed account of the timetable of peacetime service and the preoccupations of the army with civil matters which, he concludes, left it short of the time and opportunity for training.

The History of the British Army: Vol. II
J.W. Fortescue

ASIN: B000MGOVHU
covers from the 1713 to 1763 and includes the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, the scandals of the reign of King George I, the war with Spain and the dispute over the Austrian Succession, and the Battles of Fontenoy and Culloden. It also covers the situation in India and the contest for mastery with the French. The expansion into North America is described and the differences that arose between the French and the British, together with Wolfe's campaigns in North America. The volume includes much material on the development of the British Army, and the problems that arose with regard to recruitment and conditions of service at that time.

THE MILITARY EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF REASON
Christopher Duffy

ISBN 1-85326-690-6
War in the 18th century was a bloody business. A line of infantry would slowly march, to the beat of a drum, into a hail of enemy fire. Whole ranks would be wiped out by cannon fire and musketry. Today we marvel at the courage of those who plodded slowly and remorselessly into the maelstrom. How did they come to do it, and why? The scope of Christopher Duffy’s investigation is wide. The brutalities of the battlefield naturally assume a central place, but he also traces the lives of the officer and the soldier from the formative conditions of their earliest years to their violent deaths or retirement, and shows that, below their well-ordered exteriors, the armies of the Age of Reason underwent a revolutionary change from medieval to modern structures and ways of thinking.

The French-Indian War - 1754-1760
Daniel Marston

The French-Indian War was fought in the forests, open plains, and forts of the North American frontier. The French army, supported by North American tribes, was initially more successful than the British Army, who suffered from lack of experience at woodland fighting. This title explains the background to the wars and charts the military development of the British Army and the reforms that contributed to its eventual superiority. In both skirmishes in the forests of the frontier and great battles such as Louisbourg and Quebec, the British proved they had learnt well from their Indian allies.

WOLFE
The Career of General James Wolfe from Culloden to Quebec
Stuart Reid

ISBN 1-885-11973-9
James Wolfe is chiefly remembered as the Hero of Quebec; the 32 year old Major General who died on the Plains of Abraham winning Canada for the British Empire. Yet as this new biography by Stuart Reid reveals he also had an enormous influence on the British Army itself. I reckon it a very great misfortune to this country," he once wrote to his mother, "that I, your son, who have, I know, but a very modest capacity, and some degree of diligence a little above the ordinary run, should be thought, as I am, one of the best officers of my rank in the service."

The Seven Years War
Daniel Marston

ISBN 978-1579583439
The closest thing to total war before the First World War, the Seven Years' War was fought in North America, Europe, the Caribbean and India with major consequences for all parties involved. This fascinating book is the first to truly review the grand strategies of the combatants and examine the differing styles of warfare used in the many campaigns. These methods ranged from the large-scale battles and sieges of the European front to the ambush and skirmish tactics used in the forests of North America. Daniel Marston's engaging narrative is supported by personal diaries, memoirs, and official reports.

THE FRENCH and INDIAN WAR - 1754-1763
The Imperial Struggle for North America
Seymour I. Schwartz

ISBN 0-7858-1165-6
The French and Indian War, 1754-1763: The Imperial Struggle for North America presents, for the first time, a description of the battles and engagements of the war complemented by contemporary maps, drawings, and engravings of troop movements, views of forts, and portraits of participants. This book contains 118 illustrations, many from the author’s own collection, as well as from public and private sources in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
The French and Indian War, also called the Great War for the Empire, changed the map of North America. The battles that occurred between 1753 and 1760 took more lives than the American War of Independence, making the French and Indian War the bloodiest conflict fought on American soil in the eighteenth century.
The war pitted the French and their Indian allies against the English colonists and their Indian allies along the Atlantic seaboard in an attempt to gain possession of the Ohio Valley. Warriors of legendary and even heroic stature faced each other. The war afforded George Washington his first command of troops. It saw the exploits of Captain Robert Rogers and his Rangers and the dominant role of Sir William Johnson, the great Indian agent in New York colony. It saw the deaths of Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham as the British captured Quebec. It erased France’s political influence from the continent and established English dominance east of the Mississippi and in Canada. And it set the stage for the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States of America.
The French and Indian War, 1754-1763: The Imperial Struggle for North America will be of great value to anyone interested in American history, military history, and the history of cartography.

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Capt. Francis Grose

ISBN 978-1587982477
The canting or slang language A fascinating and hilarious collection of all the words and phrases that raised eyebrows in the 18th century. The original 1796 alternative dictionary of 'The Vulgar Tongue', educated readers in the correct usage of colloquialisms, slang and old English idioms. Includes those familiar entries such as 'mealy-mouthed', originally meaning over-modest, and revives classics that should never have been forgotten, such as 'apple dumplin shop' for a woman's bosom, 'nit squeeger' (a hairdresser) and 'flaybottomist' (a teacher). So, you won't be a 'Jason's Fleece' if you buy this book. In fact, take full advantage of the Vulgar Tongue and you'll be much less of a 'nigmenog'. No true aspiring vulgarite should leave home without it!

Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket
Richard Holmes

ISBN 978-0393052114
A rich, anecdotal history of the British soldier from the American Revolution through the Indian Mutiny.
Redcoat is the story of the British soldier—those noncommissioned men whom Kipling called "the backbone of the army"—from roughly 1760 to 1860. Based on the letters and diaries of the men who served and the women who followed them, the book is rich in the history of a fascinating era. Among the highlights are Wolfe's victory and death at Quebec, Wellington's Peninsular War, Waterloo, the retreat from Kabul, the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny.
The focus of Redcoat, however, is on the individual recollections and experiences of the ordinary soldiers in the wars fought by Georgian and early Victorian England. Through their stories and anecdotes—of uniforms, equipment, flogging, wounds, food, barrack life, courage, comradeship, death, love, and loss—Richard Holmes provides a comprehensive portrait of an extraordinarily successful fighting force. 16 pages of color, 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations.

BRITISH REDCOAT - 1740-1793
Stuart Reid / Richard Hook

ISBN 1-841-76153-2
Objects of grotesque caricature and popular distrust in their own times, British Redcoats nevertheless represented a formidable fighting force and laid the foundations of the British Empire. The British Army was drawn from a far lower percentage of the population than almost any other European army, and at home they were employed chiefly as a police force. This, coupled with their demonisation in American mythology, earned the Redcoats a fearsome reputation as a penal institution run by aristocratic dilettantes. This volume seeks to put the record straight. It investigates the lifestyles and motivations of the warriors who quelled the Jacobite rebellion and covers the weapons, armour and tactics they employed.

COLONEL SAMUEL BAGSHAW
AND THE ARMY OF GEORGE II, 1731-1762
EDITED BY ALAN J. GUY

ISBN 0-370-31501-4
Samuel Bagshawe, the orphaned son of a Derbyshire gentleman, enlisted in the Army as a private soldier in 1731. When he died in 1762, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, he was a colonel of a regiment of foot soldiers, raised in Ireland at his own expense, and also an MP. But this promotion was only achieved after a struggle against crippling disability, for in 1746 he had lost a leg by cannon shot in the abortive raid on the Breton arsenal and dockyard of Port l’Orient. Then in 1755, when he was second-in-command of the first King’s regiment to serve in the Indian sub-continent, he lost the sight of one eye from disease and his health was wrecked thereafter. From now on, the hunt for preferment and his desire to fix himself and his young family in the great world grew ever more desperate.
This selection of Bagshaw’s letters and papers, with an introduction, commentary and notes, offers a rich account of regimental soldiering as it was carried on by a cast of characters who would not be out of place in the pages of Henry Fielding or, in our own time , Evelyn Waugh. As an illuminating record of the military condition during what is still a relatively unknown period of the Army’s history, together with its often hilarious accounts of daily life on the battlefield, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the England of the eighteenth century.

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
David Hackett Fischer

ISBN 978-0195069051
This cultural history explains the European settlement of the United States as voluntary migrations from four English cultural centers. Families of zealous, literate Puritan yeomen and artisans from urbanized East Anglia established a religious community in Massachusetts (1629-40); royalist cavaliers headed by Sir William Berkeley and young, male indentured servants from the south and west of England built a highly stratified agrarian way of life in Virginia (1640-70); egalitarian Quakers of modest social standing from the North Midlands resettled in the Delaware Valley and promoted a social pluralism (1675-1715); and, in by far the largest migration (1717-75), poor borderland families of English, Scots, and Irish fled a violent environment to seek a better life in a similarly uncertain American backcountry. These four cultures, reflected in regional patterns of language, architecture, literacy, dress, sport, social structure, religious beliefs, and familial ways, persisted in the American settlements. The final chapter shows the significance of these regional cultures for American history up to the present. Insightful, fresh, interesting, and well-written, this synthesis of traditional and more current historical scholarship provides a model for interpretations of the American character.

Oeconomy and Discipline:
Officership and Administration
in the British Army, 1714-63
Alan James Guy

ISBN: 978-0719010996

"A Soldier-Like Way"
the Material Culture of the British Infantry 1751-1768,
the French & Indian War era, by R. R. Gale

Available at Track of the Wolf