Morale, Modernity, and British Social Imaginaries

The first chapter situates the history of morale within the broader trajectories of histories of notions and practices of discipline, and it suggests that what lent the historical concept of morale its force, what made it so appealing for myriad actors across civil society, had to do with the distinctive characteristics of the army as a disciplinary institution. Rather than tracing the history of morale as a history of how it was defined, morale is better examined in terms of what those who argued for management of morale sought to achieve and the social and political visions they sought to promote. The notion of morale provided Britons with a template for thinking about the production of cohesive social bodies, and set normative expectations that underpinned British social imaginaries.