Originally published on January 23, 2023 (Episode 301)
Introduction
On May 11, 1745, the British Army marched into battle at Fontenoy with 15,000 soldiers carrying both muskets and Marlborough’s reputation. But Marlborough had been dead nearly 25 years, and his army’s successors had not adapted. The result was disaster: 6,000 British soldiers killed or wounded and the bitter recognition that their military system no longer worked.
In The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022), Huw Davies traces how the British Army—through defeat, improvisation, and resistance to change—slowly reformed itself during the long eighteenth century. His story is not just about muskets and campaigns, but also about institutional culture: how organizations learn, how they forget, how reform emerges despite suspicion and tradition—and how a reformation then becomes ossified, petrified tradition, suspicious of all reform and change.
About the Guest
Huw J. Davies is Reader in Early Modern Military History at King’s College London. He is the author of Wellington’s Wars: The Making of a Military Genius (Yale University Press, 2012) and Spying for Wellington: British Military Intelligence in the Peninsular War (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).
For Further Investigation
Huw J. Davies, The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022)
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💬 Listen & Discuss
What makes armies—and institutions more broadly—capable of reform? Is it defeat, innovation, or individual leadership? Share your thoughts in the comments and pass this episode along to anyone interested in organizational change, military or otherwise.
