Excerpt
This article considers the formation of the NRA-US in the context of the mid-nineteenth century and situates it within corresponding British military and imperial crises. The nineteenth-century NRA-US has not received the same attention as its twentieth-century counterpart and the best scholarship concerning the NRA-GB is from military historians who examined the related development of the Volunteer Force.6 Both projects were shaped by anxieties about the race and class of the citizen soldier, as well as driven by pragmatic concerns about the expense of policing empire. Three key developments shaped the trajectories of both associations. First, both the NRA-GB and NRA-US adjusted to the technological transformation of the rifle in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The advent of reliable breech-loading rifles meant new advantages and interest in shooting straight and accurately at long range. Second, both countries had experienced military shortcomings in recent wars—in the Crimean War and US Civil War respectively. Both imagined the militia within a shared Anglo-American political project of the citizen soldier. This vision of armed citizenship was a means of defending against despotism and anarchy, which in the latter half of the century looked like continental and Celtic politics respectively. Third, and in this vein, both countries established associations in response to a perceived threat of invasion and insurrection: the Orsini Affair, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the Orange Riots in the early 1870s. The result was the parallel reorganization of the militia, by way of the Volunteer Force and then the National Guard, and the formation of nationally and imperially coordinated local rifle clubs. Studying these two institutional stories together shows how the United Kingdom and the United States developed programs of selective armed citizenship in tandem, and how these programs were flexible to uphold the unevenness of race and class in citizenship.
