Dr Erica Charters: List of publications

This spotlight issue provides broad historical insight into COVID-19, showing that epidemics need to be studied within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts, and reflecting on how history can contribute to a better understanding of our current predicament.

This book examines the relationship between civilians and warfare from the start of the Thirty Years War to the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It interrogates received narratives of warfare that identify the development of modern ‘total’ war with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and instead considers the continuities and transformations in warfare over the course of 200 years. The book examines prisoners of war, the cultures of plunder, the tensions of billeting, and war-time atrocities throughout England, France, Spain, and the German territories. It also explores the legal practices surrounding the conduct and aftermath of war; representations of civilians, soldiers, and militias; and the philosophical underpinnings of warfare. The book probes what it meant to be a civilian in territories beset by invasion and civil war or in times when ‘peace’ at home was accompanied by almost continuous military engagement abroad. It shows civilians not only as anguished sufferers, but also directly involved with war: fighting back with shocking violence, profiting from war-time needs, and negotiating for material and social redress. Finally, the book shows us individuals and societies coming to terms with the moral and political challenges posed by the business of drawing lines between ‘civilians’ and ‘soldiers’.

This article examines 18th-century European warfare, tracing the first formal codifications of conventions of war, frequently introduced by military physicians and initially regarding the treatment of the sick and wounded. It outlines to what extent these conventions were followed in practice, particularly in the challenging environment of American irregular warfare, with a focus on the most well-known incident of "biological warfare" in the period: the deliberate spread of smallpox by British officers among Amerindians in 1763. More broadly, it demonstrates that the history of military medicine provides a fruitful method with which to uncover assumptions about the ethics of war.

During the siege at Quebec, 1759–60, which followed the battle on the Plains of Abraham, high rates of disease contributed to the British defeat by French forces in April 1760. While historians have not previously discussed military medical preventative measures, a detailed examination of the siege demonstrates sophisticated attempts to adapt to a foreign environment and its disease, as well as how disease contributed to the development of American provincial and British antagonism and perceptions of difference.