Desertion and Discipline: How British Soldiers Influenced the Military Justice System during the Seven Years’ War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The academic examination of military justice is relatively new. Military history has focused on such topics as commanding officers, tactics, logistics, combat, and outcomes. However, exploring the theme of military discipline, by concentrating on relations between commissioned and enlisted ranks, engages the army as a social institution with its own internal power dynamic. Two historiographical interpretations on the subject have developed over the last few decades. One builds upon the orthodox view of discipline in the Early Modern Era as severe and punitive, portraying militaries as whipping men to war. Recently, revisionist historians have argued that over the 18th-century, military justice became more benign, in part as a result of the army taking greater care in its treatment of the men informed by Enlightenment thinking and partly forced by the actions of soldiers themselves, who by no means constituted unthinking cattle. This approach conceives discipline as negotiated by the two parties. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the disciplinary relationship between the British military and its soldiery was based on conflict over the conditions of their service and resolution of that conflict by one form or another. The British soldiers consistently clashed with their superiors over their treatment and what they believed were their contractual rights. When the British leadership did not address their concerns, a considerable group of soldiers engaged in the extreme act of desertion, thus renouncing their commitment to the military and the Monarch. The British military leadership responded to this by continuing to exert their absolute control and dominance through the affliction of harsh punishment, and through the occasional display of mercy with reduced sentences and pardons, thus remaining steadfast on balancing the life and death of their men. During the Seven Years’ War, military punishment was neither entirely brutal nor wholly merciful; instead, it balanced the two, which contributed to the complex relationship between British soldiers and their leadership.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".