Book Review: On the Edges of Whiteness. Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War by Jochen Lingelbach

Abstract

the northern European bias of previous scholarship. However, the reasoning behind Greig’s decisions on which English or French memoirs to include or exclude are murkier. She has also made little effort to represent the men of the non-commissioned ranks. This is interesting, since Greig emphasizes the need to consider memoirists’ status and celebrates the presence of junior commissioned officers like Moyle Sherer and John Kincaid. Of the 14 memoirists of British origin in the bibliography, only Joseph Donaldson is from the lower ranks. I am not qualified to speak about missing French, Spanish, or Portuguese memoirs, but there are at least seven British privates and well over a dozen corporals and sergeants who have published accounts of their Peninsular War service during the period Greig is covering. Their absence from the book diminishes its value to British historians of the Peninsular War who rely heavily on these rankers’ first-person accounts. Issues of source selection aside, Greig’s transnational approach allows for many important new insights. Spanish authors were less likely than their British or French counterparts to be critical of military decisions in their memoirs. Where English publications were subtly political—with more of a propensity to dedicate their work to generals —it was the Spanish authors who wrote with more obvious agendas in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. Guerrilla leaders used their account of the Peninsular War ‘to lobby for positions of power under their preferred regime’ (p.115). Aristocratic generals seeking government rewards for loyal service issued their own war stories in print. The Spanish colonies’ wars of independence opened a market for these treatises to be consumed by new readers who read Peninsular accounts of resistance and liberation through their own distinct context. Demand for French memoirs saw a similar boost during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–1871, when French readers sought tales of former glories to assuage the humiliation of this more recent defeat. There is no similar speculation of the impact of the Crimean War, though it would seem an obvious explanation for Greig’s observation that ‘colonial service narratives’ replaced Peninsular War accounts in the British memoir market of the 1850s and 1860s (p.160). Greig is especially elegant in describing the materiality of the books and the physical experience of reading them. She transports us, in evocative prose, to distant archives and vividly recalls things like flyleaf inscriptions, bindings, and illustrations. These details make this a refreshing and rewarding study of sources. Peninsular War memoirs’ ongoing popularity ensures that Dead Men Telling Tales will remain required background reading for many researchers.