Citizen Soldiers and the British Empire, 1837–1902

'Ian Beckett has brought together an excellent team of contributors and produced a volume that complements admirably his own writing on citizen soldiers in Victorian England.' War in History 'an interesting survey of the volunteer tradition in the settler colonies, Ireland, and the somewhat anomalous case of India.' Victorian Studies 'The contributors to this book amply demonstrate how all the far-flung, exotically-named units of Victorian citizen soldiers were thoroughly interwoven into the social, cultural and military fabric of the British Empire, and must be considered seriously in any attempt to explain its complex dynamics.' John Laband, Wilfrid Laurier University 'This book contains a wonderful wealth of fascinating detail about an important but neglected dimension of military service throughout the British empire. It amply confirms the significance of citizen-soldiering among settler communities; its role in the consolidation of the nineteenth-century 'British world'; and also (perhaps paradoxically) how it contributed to those local loyalisms which underpinned the twentieth-century emergence of Canada and other dominions as nations in their own right.' Keith Jeffery, Queen's University Belfast