The Legacy of the Armed Nation

The Napoleonic mobilization for national defence was undoubtedly the greatest ‘national project’ in Britain's experience. It deserves to be called a ‘national project’ because it fits so exactly as a pre-bureaucratic combination of central, local, and voluntary effort for a defined, widely publicized, and accepted national purpose. National defence was a state problem sufficiently important and challenging as to bring about a sustained burst of government activity when the usual pattern was for the localities to be entrusted with the enforcement of national policy with minimal supervision from outside. National defence is difficult to see as a set of emergency measures or even emergency institutions interrupting for a period longer-term trends. Instead, the armed nation was organized according to the existing structure of authority while drawing on the strongest developing elements of the British polity — sentry leadership, a unified propertied class, and a positive interaction between the government and the localities.