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Markku Peltonen, Stephen Banks. A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750–1850. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press. 2010. Pp. 317. $115.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 2, April 2012, Page 603, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.117.2.603
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This is a well‐researched book on dueling in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It examines the cultural and theoretical underpinnings of dueling, its prevalence, social composition, and changing character, as well as its final demise. The book is based on a large body of primary material, which the author skillfully uses to establish a number of novel and important points. One of its merits is that it combines theoretical sophistication with a thorough analysis of primary sources. Stephen Banks makes numerous interesting points and draws many important conclusions but never overstates his case.
The book consists of ten chapters, which could be thematically divided into four groups. The first three place dueling in cultural and intellectual contexts. Banks opens with a brief discussion of earlier centuries, emphasizing that, although the duel was never legal, it “appeared to have successfully subverted the actual operation of the criminal justice system” (p. 23). This was so because it had a significant role to play in the social and cultural world of the gentleman. Banks demonstrates that dueling was an integral part of the broader culture of competitiveness, self‐assertion, and violence. Fair and manly violence became, in the course of the eighteenth century, an integral part of the British national identity. At the same time, however, Banks also emphasizes that dueling was closely linked with civility and politeness; the duel was, as the title of the book puts it, a polite exchange of bullets. Gentlemen were trained in the arts of courtesy at the same time they were educated to endure and inflict violence.
