100 books like Redcoats

The Seven Years’ War is obscure in the American historical imagination: if it’s remembered at all, it’s as a hazy, unimportant flintlocks-and-tomahawks event.

In this gripping, masterful narrative, Fred Anderson leaves his reader with no doubt of just how momentous this conflict was. He examines imperial, colonial, and indigenous actors to explain how the French were expelled from North America and how the war’s aftermath was a catalyst for both Native and colonial resistance to British rule.

Arguably the first world war, it could also be called the war that made America. 

For any who might feel that Anderson’s 900-page Crucible of War might be a bit too long, the historian thoughtfully produced this 382-page book on the same topic. There’s less detail, obviously, but Anderson still covers essentially the same ground and does so once again in highly readable fashion. It’s a journey in which Anderson explains how the conflict destroyed the French empire in North America, overturned the balance of power on two continents, altered the roles of Indigenous peoples, and contributed toward what a generation later would become the American Revolution. The book is well illustrated.

Some readers want to see history as well as read it. Thankfully, there are many books about the Seven Years’ War that offer loads of illustrations, both from the era and produced more recently by illustrators. René Chartrand is the author of many such books, one of which is this one about the forts of New France. The author and illustrator present in-depth information about such French forts as Chambly, St. Frédéric (Crown Point), Carillon (Ticonderoga), Duquesne (Pittsburgh, PA), Ouiatenon (Quebec) and Vincennes (IN). As with all of Chartrand’s books, this one enriches our understanding of the Seven Years’ War, in this case by looking more carefully at the French side.

Most historians see the 1759 siege of Québec as the ultimate battle in the Seven Years’ War. The pivotal character in that real-history drama was Major General James Wolfe, who died just as the battle on the Plains of Abraham was won. The story of Wolfe (and his French counterpart Montcalm) and the titanic struggle they were involved in has been told many times. What Stephen Brumwell adds in this multiple award-winning book is a fascinating biography of the figure at the center of it all. The author follows Wolfe from childhood to death and readers don’t want to miss a thing. It’s a brilliant, fast-paced, highly readable book.

Diana Gabaldon is one of the best writers of 'intimate epics': tales of more or less ordinary people drawn into the flow and flood of real historical events. I especially enjoy her Lord John novels.

Making her protagonist at odds with the morality of his time—Lord John is an unapologetic (though necessarily closeted) homosexual—creates extra tension in a work that sets John—and in this case, Jamie Fraser as well—against the backdrop of the Jacobite conspiracy's death throes and the prickly honor code of the British Army.

Passionate, humorous, adventurous—all things that keep me turning the pages until the wee hours! 

This is the one First World War novel in which the characters actually talk like soldiers – i.e., they swear. It therefore provides a powerful counterpunch to our usual notion of what the trenches sounded like.

The scalding language survived intact due to the book’s complicated publication history. Initial release in an anonymous volume available only for subscribers meant that Manning, an Australian who had served on the Somme, could sidestep the mores of his time.

The result was lines like this: "“Fuckin' slave drivers, that's what they are!” said Minton, flinging himself on the ground.  “What's the cunt want to come down ‘ere buggerin’ us about for, ‘aven't we done enough bloody work in th’ week?”” A bowdlerised version – “Her Privates We” – later followed, but the unexpurgated original is the one to read.

Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and T.E. Lawrence all praised Manning’s work.

Swinton was a British Army Royal Engineer who developed the battle tank. He writes an insightful and often humorous account of the young Subaltern, Lieutenant Backsight-Forethought, who during a series of fitful dreams, repeatedly gets everyone under his command killed. Ultimately, (through multiple failed lives lived) he learns enough about small-unit infantry fighting tactics to successfully defend the fictional Duffer’s Drift during the Boer War. Although Captain (later Major General) Swinton published it as a fictional tale, his aim was to teach tactical lessons and to generate discussion and debate among Subalterns.

I have a theory that great fiction about the British Army may require conscription – that system propelled individuals who otherwise would have never joined the military into the institution. They could then respond in writing in a manner that peacetime volunteers were never able to.

Evelyn Waugh, already in his late 30s when the Second World War was declared in 1939, was an unlikely soldier. However, he turned his experiences – notably in West Africa, Crete, and Yugoslavia – into a trio of fine fiction centered on a somewhat Waugh-like character, Guy Crouchback.

Waugh’s genius is to capture some of the eccentricities of army life – the discussion about the merits of porpoise skin as a material for boots will echo with anyone who has ever overheard, or participated in, an earnest discussion about the minutiae of kit. 

I found this novel on a secondhand stall in Kenya when I was 18 or 19 and devoured it. Little known today, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later adapted by the BBC.

Judd relates a tour by a fictional British Army unit in Northern Ireland in some of the most violent days of the Troubles in the 1970s. The protagonist, Charles Thoroughgood, is an Oxford graduate at a time when most army officers were school leavers, and the book chants his increasing disillusionment.

My early edition featured on the cover – next to a crouching individual in combats toting a pistol on a lanyard – an endorsement from Jack Higgins: “Quite simply one of the best novels of army life I’ve read in years.” Higgins was right. 

In the interests of full disclosure, I knew Campbell at university so my judgment on this novel of the Afghan war cannot be fully impartial.

I found it powerful though. There are obvious overlays between the experience of Campbell himself and his central protagonist Tom Chamberlain – both serve in high-period Afghanistan as officers with cavalry units. (Campbell was in the Blues and Royals). That overlap grants the novel its authenticity – from its dissection of 'ally,’ British army slang for cool, to “rock star” bomb disposal officers capable of “squaring up to colonels” and coffins of blast victims reduced to a few scraps of ruined flesh subsequently weighed down with sandbags.

Campbell’s next novel, The Fires of Gallipoli, set in the First World War, will be out next year.