Suchergebnisse

Foreign soldiers were a major element in virtually all European armies between the early sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The extent and duration of their use clearly indicates they were far more than a temporary expedient adopted solely until states acquired the capacity to organize forces from their own inhabitants. Rather than being a hindrance to state formation, they were integral to that process. Likewise, the formation of European states and an international system based on indivisible sovereignty was not purely competitive: it also entailed cooperation. The transfer of foreign military labour is an important example of this and is central to what can be labelled the European Fiscal-Military System, which assisted the emergence of a sovereign state order and was dismantled as that order consolidated in the later nineteenth century. Wilson's article articulates 'foreign soldiers' as an alternative to the problematic term 'mercenaries', and examines their motives, explaining how and why foreign soldiers were recruited by early modern European states.as well as assessing the scale of their employment. The article concludes that the de-legitimation of foreign military labour was connected to fashioning the modern ideals of the citizen-in-arms as part of a more general process of nationalizing war-making.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, universal conscription has been by far the predominant system of military recruitment, but the phenomenon has received surprisingly little attention from social historians. This lack of attention is all the more surprising if one considers the interesting position occupied by conscription at the crossroads of wage and non-wage labour and free and unfree labour.The following articles by Khaled Fahmy, Erik Jan Zürcher and Stephanie Cronin deal with the spread of the conscription system in one specific area (the Middle East) where it has been the most prominent feature of the establishment of increased and centralized state control over societies which, until relatively recent times, consisted of largely self-sufficient agrarian communities with very little contact with the outside world. The introduction of universal conscription confronted both states and populations with entirely new demands and problems.

AbstractThis article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark. Beginning with the story of a single man and his unfortunate trajectory through a sequence of punitive measures before his death as a prison workhouse inmate, the article looks at how punishments of soldiers communicated in multiple ways and were used to a variety of ends that were both typical and atypical within eighteenth-century society. It argues that soldiers experienced a breadth of both corporal and carceral punishments that were, in many cases, designed to limit otherness while communicating exemplarity along a fine-tuned spectrum of pain. The clearest example of this was running the gauntlet; a harrowing physical ordeal meted out by the offender's fellow soldiers. Turning to the carceral experiences often initiated by this ritual, it then examines how former mercenaries experienced convict labour differently from other occupational groups based on several factors. Their gender and occupational belonging meant they were funnelled towards specific penal institutions. Yet, their status as migrants and potential military labour meant they would often exit these institutions in specific ways. Whereas civilians often endured dishonouring punishments, ex-military convicts experienced punishments designed to inflict great pain without rendering them unfit for later military labour.

This thesis consists of an introductory part and two self-contained chapters related to the supply of volunteers to the Swedish Armed Forces. Chapter [I] represents the first effort to explore the relationship between civilian labour market conditions and the supply of labour to the military in the all-volunteer environment that Sweden entered after the abolishment of the peacetime draft in 2010. The effect of civilian unemployment on the rate of applications from individuals aged 18 to 25 to initiate basic military training is investigated using panel data on Swedish counties for the years 2011 through 2015. A linear fixed-effects model is estimated to investigate the relationship, while controlling for a range of socio-demographic covariates and unobserved heterogeneity on the regional level, as well as aggregate trends on the national level. The results indicate a positive and statistically significant relationship between the unemployment rate and the application rate. The results are robust to non-linear form specifications, as well as allowing the civilian unemployment rate to be endogenous. As such, the results suggest that the civilian labour market environment in Sweden can give rise to non-trivial fluctuations in the supply of applications to initiate basic military training within the Swedish Armed Forces. Chapter [II] studies how local labour market conditions influence the quality composition of those who volunteer for military service in Sweden. A fixed-effects regression model is estimated on a panel data set containing IQ scores for those who applied for military basic training across Swedish municipalities during the period 2010 to 2016. The main finding is that low civilian employment rates at the local level tend to increase the mean IQ score of those who volunteer for military service, whereas the opposite is true if employment rates in the civilian labour market move in a more favourable direction. As such, the results suggest that the negative impact of a strong civilian economy on recruitment volumes is reinforced by a deterioration in recruit quality.

AbstractThe consolidation of numerous regional polities in the aftermath of Mughal imperial decline presented favourable socioeconomic opportunities for South Asian service communities. Protracted armed conflicts in southern India allowed a variety of mercenaries, soldiers, and war bands to accumulate resources in exchange for mobilizing manpower on behalf of states with weak standing armies. This article focuses on British imperial efforts to obtain sufficient quantities of military labour during its struggle with the Mysore sultanate. As the sultanate assumed an increasingly hostile attitude towards independent warrior power, local strongmen sought more amenable arrangements with alternate entities. The British East India Company received crucial support from autonomous warrior groups during its southern wars of conquest. Warriors in turn utilized British resources to consolidate local sovereignties. Thus, the initial British intrusion into peninsular Indian society further fragmented the political landscape by patronizing petty military entrepreneurs.

The article analyses how the norm against mercenarism shapes the legitimate parameters of exchange in the market for military outsourcing. The dominant interpretation of this dynamic is that neoliberal states and private military companies (PMCs) have come to restrict their transactions to non-combat functions in order to circumvent contemporary articulations of this norm. The article, by contrast, contends that even within these narrowed parameters of exchange, neoliberal states and PMCs have been required to work through the norm against mercenarism. Using the 'global security assemblages' approach, and drawing upon new data relating to the UK case, it explores how the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and PMCs have sought to appropriate symbolic capital from a domestic private security licencing regime so as to distance their non-combat transactions from the norm against mercenarism. In so doing, it facilitates a reappraisal of the regulatory potential of this norm within today's pluralised military landscape.

The category of 'military labour' has traditionally been used to designate 'combat labour' – the labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening the category of 'military labour' to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives.

Fighting for a Living investigates the circumstances that have produced starkly different systems of recruiting and employing soldiers in different parts of the globe over the last 500 years. It does so on the basis of a wide range of case studies taken from Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East and Asia.The novelty of "Fighting for a Living" is that it is not military history in the traditional sense (concentrating at wars and battles or on military technology) but that it looks at military service and warfare as forms of labour, and at the soldiers as workers. Military employment offers excellent opportunities for this kind of international comparison. Where many forms of human activity are restricted by the conditions of nature or the stage of development of a given society, organized violence is ubiquitous. Soldiers, in one form or another, are always part of the picture, in any period and in every region. Nevertheless, Fighting for a Living is the first study to undertake a systematic comparative analysis of military labour. It therefore speaks to two distinct, and normally quite separate, communities: that of labour historians and that of military historians. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched ; edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher ; Description based upon print version of record ; en