Historian Jenny Uglow (The Pinecone) describes In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 as "a crowd biography." For much of her career, Uglow has looked at the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the lens of individual lives. Here she offers a broader account of how the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars affected those who remained at home. The big names of British history--William Pitt and William Cobbett, Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen--appear in their proper places. But Uglow focuses on less-celebrated lives in all levels of society, from factory boy to aristocratic lady, as recorded in letters, memoirs, diaries and parish records.
In These Times is not another "day in the life" historical text. Instead, Uglow looks at how 22 years of constant warfare shaped society in fundamental ways. She not only describes direct effects of war, such as enlistment practices and the economic impact of government military contracts, but also places events that are normally described in terms of their domestic impact (such as the social disruption of the Industrial Revolution) within the context of war. She looks at newspaper distribution, shoe manufacturing, the relationship between war loans and private banking and the ethical dilemmas of Quaker gun manufacturers.
Depicting a society in which war is as pervasive as bad weather, Uglow's book combines social and military history in a manner that will appeal to readers of both. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins