Moral Economy, Contract, and Negotiated Authority in American, British, and German Militaries, ca. 1740–1783

Abstract

How do armies function?Why do large numbers of common soldiers follow the orders of small numbers of officers?These questions ought to interest more than just historians of war, for the way in which military organizations work can tell us something about processes of government in other settings.But the opposite is no less true: we can learn much about armies by looking at the societies from which they were recruited.To gain a better understanding of how eighteenth-century armies functioned-the purpose of this article-we need to borrow three concepts usually employed outside the military sphere: moral economy, contract, and negotiated authority.The idea of a moral economy, initially applied to the mentalité of eighteenthcentury English food rioters, is helpful as a means of illuminating the attitudes of common soldiers to their service.1 The rank and file inhabited a world of custom, precedent, and rights.Officers who did not respect the soldiers' sense of a set of established entitlements were likely to find it hard to secure obedience.Related to the moral economy is contract, usually employed in political philosophy to describe the nature of the reciprocal relationship between ruler and the ruled.Eighteenth-century soldiers conceived of their service as a form of contract.The contract in question was implied rather than written; but if officers failed to live up to the terms of the tacit bargain struck at enlistment-a variation on the timehonored governing compact of obedience in return for protection-then soldiers felt themselves no longer obliged to obey.Successful officers recognized the need to work within the boundaries of the soldiers' moral economy and to acknowledge the rank and file's contractual thinking.Indeed, the key to officers' effective exercise of power was to appreciate its limits and act accordingly.Here our final borrowed concept is useful.For historians of the eighteenth century, negotiated 1 The originator of the concept was E. P. Thompson: see his "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present, no.50 ð1971Þ: 76-136, reprinted in his Customs in Common ðLondon, 1991Þ, chap.4.

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