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A dirty, indolent, priest-ridden city: British soldiers in Lisbon during the Peninsular War, 1808-1813
Citation
Daly, G, A dirty, indolent, priest-ridden city: British soldiers in Lisbon during the Peninsular War, 1808-1813, History, 94, (316) pp. 461-482. ISSN 0018-2648 (2009) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright Statement
The definitive published version is available online at: http://interscience.wiley.com
Official URL: http://interscience.wiley.com
DOI: doi:10.1111/j.1468-229X.2009.00466.x
Abstract
Between 1808 and 1813 Lisbon was the gateway for British soldiers entering the Peninsular War. For many British soldiers the Iberian Peninsula was not only their first combat experience but also their first time abroad, with their military service as part of a broader experience of travel and cross-cultural contact. British letters, diaries and memoirs of the Peninsular War have long been used by historians as the basis for military and campaign histories; rarely have they been appreciated as travel and ethnographic accounts, allowing us to explore how British soldiers described, experienced and understood the foreign physical and cultural environments of Portugal and Spain. This article investigates British soldiers' attitudes to Lisbon and its inhabitants. Their writings illuminate the relationship between war, travel and identity; British views on Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula more generally; and the mentalities and cultural values of a broad cohort of young Britons in the early nineteenth century. Most soldiers wrote largely critical and hostile accounts of their time in Lisbon, identifying markers of cultural difference and in so doing revealing their own notions of what it meant to British and civilized.
Item Details
Item Type: | Refereed Article |
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Research Division: | History, Heritage and Archaeology |
Research Group: | Historical studies |
Research Field: | British history |
Objective Division: | Expanding Knowledge |
Objective Group: | Expanding knowledge |
Objective Field: | Expanding knowledge in history, heritage and archaeology |
UTAS Author: | Daly, G (Dr Gavin Daly) |
ID Code: | 56999 |
Year Published: | 2009 |
Web of Science® Times Cited: | 6 |
Deposited By: | History and Classics |
Deposited On: | 2009-06-11 |
Last Modified: | 2010-04-14 |
Downloads: | 3 View Download Statistics |
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