Fighting for a Living : A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000

Though fighting is clearly hard work, historians have not paid much attention to warfare and military service as forms of labor. This collection does just that, bringing together the usually disparate fields of military and labor history. The contributors - including Robert Johnson, Frank Tallett, and Gilles Veinstein - undertake the first systematic comparative analysis of military labor across Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East, and Asia. In doing so, they explore the circumstances that have produced starkly different systems of recruiting and employing soldiers in different parts of the globe over the last five hundred years. 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 "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. Offering a wide range of case studies taken from Europe, America, the Middle East and Asia, this volume is not military history in the traditional sense, but looks at military service and warfare as forms of labour, and at soldiers as workers. Military employment offers excellent opportunities for international comparison: armies as a form of organized violence are ubiquitous, and soldiers, in one form or another, are always part of the picture, in any period and in every region. Fighting for a living is the first study to undertake a systematic comparative analysis of military labour. It therefore will be of interest to both labour historians and military historians, as well as to sociologists, political scientists, and other social scientists"--Page 4 of cover Contents Preface Introduction Military Labor In China, C. 1500 From The Mamluks To The Mansabdars On The Ottoman Janissaries (Fourteenth-Nineteenth Centuries) Soldiers In Western Europe, C. 1500-1790 The Scottish Mercenary As A Migrant Labourer In Europe, 1550-1650 Change And Continuity In Mercenary Armies: Central Europe, 1650-1750 Peasants Fighting For A Living In Early Modern North India “True To Their Salt” “The Scum Of Every County, The Refuse Of Mankind” Mobilization Of Warrior Populations In The Ottoman Context, 1750-1850 Military Employment In Qing Dynasty China Military Service And The Russian Social Order, 1649-1861 The French Army, 1789-1914 The Dutch Army In Transition The Draft And Draftees In Italy, 1861-1914 Nation-Building, War Experiences, And European Models Mobilizing Military Labor In The Age Of Total War Soldiering As Work Private Contractors In War From The 1990S To The Present Collective Bibliography Notes On Contributors

A richly illustrated and comprehensive discussion of all the explicit pictorial references in Nabokov's oeuvre and their bearing on the major themes in his novels