Product Description

From the earliest English settlements the survival of the infant colonies in North America depended upon local militias. Throughout the 17th and most of the 18th century royal troops were seldom shipped out from Britain, and the main burden of successive wars with the American Indians, and with the regular troops and militias of Britain's colonial rivals France and Spain, usually fell upon locally raised soldiers. These units also fought alongside the Crown forces during major operations such as the French-Indian War of the 1750s. This second of a fascinating three-part study covers the militias and provincial troops raised in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, New York and New Jersey.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #551728 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-25
• Released on: 2002-07-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 48 pages

About the Author
René Chartrand was born in Montreal and educated in Canada, the United States and the Bahamas. A senior curator with Canada's National Historic Sites for nearly three decades, he is now a freelance writer and historical consultant. He has written numerous articles and books including some 20 Osprey titles and the first two volumes of Canadian Military Heritage. He lives in Hull, Quebec, with his wife and two sons.

Customer Reviews

Great Books
Reading the works of Rene Chartrand is like eating a full course meal. Well served. Well formed. No Bad Taste. The information within is well served and in good quality. And quite filling for the mind.

In the five books of King Louis XV's army, the entire french military of the time period was well well served up like a Five Course Meal.

In the three books of Colonial American Troops we have a similar feast of accurate well served information on the pre-revolution american soldier. Which can also be served with the revised edition of Wolf's Army by Robin May and Gerry Embleton and the two books of General Washington's Army by Marko Zlatich and Peter Copeland.

For those who enjoy early american history, these three books are are an excellent find.

Good
Although there is no way to be totally accurate on these questions of uniforms, the folks here make very good educated guesses and the quality of the plates is great.

Colonial American Troops 1610 - 1774 (1)
Colonial American Troops 1610 - 1774 (1), is a recent Osprey Men-at-Arms (#366) by Rene Chartrand, with illustrations by David Rickman. In this book Mr. Chartrand attempts to give a brief history of the military forces within the American colonies. This first of a three-volume set focuses on Virginia, New Sweden, and the New Netherlands. Not only does Chartrand investigate the colonial militias, he is also careful to highlight the presence of Royal troops within the colonies.

I found the book to very entertaining and informative, and thoroughly researched (despite the fact that he misspells my name as Tinsdale in the citations for his colour plates). It is highly appealing to see a work that touches on the seventeenth-century militias of the colonies, as these are often forgotten in the wake of works dealing with the French and Indian War, or the American War for Independence. Mr. Chartrand is obviously shrewd enough to realise that the provincial militias of the eighteenth-century cannot be fully understood without looking to their seventeenth-century origins.

The colour plates show a great amount of detail, and are careful to illustrate some of the more unusual (i.e. archaic) aspects of the early military forces within Virginia, and the New Netherlands. The pictures, too, lend themselves well to the text, though I did find that those concerning the eighteenth century did outnumber those dealing with the seventeenth. However, that is forgivable, as seventeenth-century colonial America has been ignored somewhat by the public interests.