The Eighty Years War
Olaf van Nimwegen, Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, Louis SickingPetra Groen (ed.)
- Title
- Fighting for a Living
- Subtitle
- A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000
- Editor
- Erik-Jan Zürcher
- Price
- € 124,00 excl. VAT
- ISBN
- 9789089644527
- Format
- Hardback
- Number of pages
- 688
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 07 - 01 - 2014
- Dimensions
- 15.6 x 23.4 cm
- Open Access
- Download on Open Access Platform
- Discipline
- History, Art History, and Archaeology
1. Introduction: Understanding changes in military recruitment and employment worldwide
Erik-Jan Zürcher
2. Military labour in China, circa 1500
David M. Robinson
3. From Mamluks to Mansabdars: a social history of military service in South Asia, circa 1500 to circa 1650
Kaushik Roy
4. On the Ottoman Janissaries*
Gilles Veinstein
5. Soldiers in Western Europe, circa 1500-1790
Frank Tallett
6. The Scottish mercenary as migrant labourer in Europe, 1550-1650
James Miller
7. Change and continuity in mercenary armies: Central Europe, 1650-1750
Michael Sikora
8. Peasants fighting for a living in early modern North India
Dirk Kolff
9. “True to their salt”: Mechansims for recruiting and managing military labour in the army of the East India Company during the Carnatic Wars in India
Robert Johnson
10. The scum of every country, the refuse of mankind: recruiting the British Army in the eighteenth century
Peter Way
11. Mobilization of warrior populations in the Ottoman context, 1750-1850
Virginia H. Aksan
12. Military employment in Qing dynasty China
Christine Moll-Murata and Ulrich Theobald
13. Military service and the Russian social order, 1649-1861
Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter
14. The French army 1789-1914: Volunteers, pressed soldiers and conscripts
Thomas Hippler
15. The Dutch army in transition: from an all-volunteer force to a cadre-militia army, 1795-1830
Herman Amersfoort
16. Draft and draftees in Italy, 1861-1914
Marco Rovinello
17. Italian colonial troops in East Africa
Uoldelul Chelati Dirar
18. Nation building, war experiences and European models: the rejection of conscription in Britain
Jörn Leonhard
19. Mobilizing military labour in the age of total war: Ottoman conscription before and during the Great war
Mehmet Besikçi
20. Soldiering as work: the all-volunteer force in the United States of America
Beth Bailey
21. Private contractors from the nineteen nineties to the present. A review essay
Yelda Kaya
Reviews and Features
"Historians have long overlooked the labour involved in soldiering. But now, with the publication of Fighting for a Living, the world of military workers is brought to the forefront of scholarly inquiry. The editors throw a critical shining light on the nature of war and the nature of work for the millions of individuals who have contributed their labour, and often their lives, for the militaries of the world."
Nathan Wise, School of Humanities at the University of New England, Australia
Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed.)
Fighting for a Living
A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000
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.
Editor
Erik-Jan Zürcher
Erik-Jan Zürcher is director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, as well as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Turkish Studies at Leiden University.
