War is often seen as both morally repugnant and as a heroic activity conducted in the national interest. This introduction outlines some conditions in which this moral dualism appears and is managed in eighteenth-century Britain. It surveys the financial, social, and cultural pressures that could influence public attitudes to war. Focusing on selected examples, it explores the role of humanitarian feeling in justifying particular acts of violence, in enabling a general, compassionate acquiescence in war, and in encouraging the emergence of anti-war attitudes that eventually led to organised opposition to war.

In the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, writers across a range of political opinions had to reconcile their approval of martial ardour with their dread of popular violence. As a result, attempts to imagine patriotic ardour often coincided with, or coalesced with, attempts to encourage peace. This resulted in a melancholy call-to-arms. Writers linked collective support for war, or protest against it, with tranquilising communal mourning, or else focused on the wars of a lost past that preceded modern commercial and industrial relations, or else pushed the prospect of collective armed struggle for social justice stoically into an indefinite future. These strategies provided forms of moral insulation for like-minded communities. The discussion includes works by Anna Barbauld, Walter Scott, Helen Porter and Lord Byron, among others.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.

This contests Norbert Eliass view of the civilizing process. It argues that in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the promotion of gentler manners worked in the service of military aggression. Martial virtue was promoted against the threat of effeminacy and corruption, while poets celebrated the humanity of brutal victors in contemporary wars. The Fast and Thanksgiving services of the Church sancitifed the violence of the war zone while discouraging brutality in daily life. Fears about the corrupting influence of war news were countered by ideal models of martial virtue. A new theory of the sublime was developed, which claimed that an imaginative engagement with representations of violence could have a humanizing effect.

This chapter shows how the two most influential periodicals of Queen Annes reign, The Tatler and The Spectator, reacted to the perceived threat posed by the sometimes chaotic representation of contemporary battles in the newspapers, by offering readers fictionalised and idealised alternatives. This strategy was compatible with the attempts of their authors (mostly Richard Steele and Joseph Addison) to encourage politeness. War is seen to encourage disinterested sociability while the career of soldiering is seen to promote good manners. In the face of growing criticism of the bellicose aspect of European cultural heritage, the periodicals attempt to distinguish morally useful representations of violence from aristocratic codes of honour and from sensational barbarism.

As public criticism of Britains war-making became more vocal and searching in the later decades of the eighteenth century, the process of moral insulation (distancing the public morally from the violence of war) became more important. It allowed the pacific ideal of feminine virtue to be reconciled with support for war, as seen in the emergent figure of the wife-at-war. Expressions of sympathy for the victims of war, reinterpretations of pacific Christian doctrine, and attempts to dissociate the officer classes morally from the violent practices of those they commanded, all provided some moral insulation for members of the reading public. The chapter ends with reference to Jane Austens fiction, which both depends upon, and exposes the limits of, such insulation.

This chapter examines the attempts of Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith to reconcile war with their theories of progress. Both made impartiality a touchstone of enlightened judgement, and so found that the national partiality aroused by war was deeply problematic. Humes optimistic view of progress was undermined by his pessimistic account of the passions released in war, and by the evidence of the destructive waste entailed in contemporary war-making. His desire to moderate contemporary bellicosity led him, in his History of England, to emphasise medieval magnanimity in victory, in a way that was at odds with his progressive agenda. Adam Smith encountered a comparable problem. His attempts in his Theory of Moral Sentiments to provide improving models of public responses to war were at odds with his later conviction that the public was dangerously insulated from the destructive realities of war.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

This considers Gibraltar as a special case in the history of Britains developing empire. Captured by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1704, assigned to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the rock was devoid of the resources and potential for agricultural development that might justify the violence entailed in its conquest. This was a problem for an early observer (the poet John Breval, who described the place in Calpe, 1717), but the development of a taste for unimproved and mountainous landscapes, and a more confident sense of British power as civilizing, made it easier for later observers to justify British possession. The great siege of Gibraltar (1779-1783) cemented the rocks status as British: its bare features acquired an iconic status as a symbol of British independence and freedom, a reference point that could be evoked in the context of other imperial conquests.

This considers the relationship between the elevation of the novel into moral respectability and the turn to anti-heroic discourse. The novels of Daniel Defoe (works influenced by rogue narratives) show little interest in representations of feminine virtue of the kind Richardson foregrounds in his influential Pamela. Where Defoe represents martial violence with relatively few reservations, in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, a concern with feminine virtue is accompanied by anti-heroic discourse which entails critical views of war. As novelists, Fielding and Smollett both represent the malign effects of modern war while, in Amelia, Fielding even represents a form of pacifist feeling. The chapter ends with discussion of the anonymous Ephraim Tristram Bates, in which a potentially excellent soldier is defeated by a corrupt system of military patronage, and of Sternes Tristram Shandy, in which martial virtue has become a matter of moral sentiment, destructive of domestic order.