Fighting for a Living

690 Pages·2013·6.88 MB·English

   , . 
Fighting for a Living investigates the circumstances
that have produced starkly diff erent systems of
recruiting and employing soldiers in diff erent
parts of the globe over the last  years. Off ering
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 off ers 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 fi rst 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.
d Fighting for a Living
Erik-Jan Zürcher is professor of Turkish
Studies at Leiden University. In  he was d
elected a member of the Royal Netherlands
A Comparative History of
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Military Labour -
Edited by
ERIK-JAN ZÜRCHER
     
  
..
  
ERIK-JAN ZÜRCHER (ed.) Fighting for a Living
Fighting for a Living
Work Around the Globe: Historical
Comparisons and Connections
Open Access Book Series of the International Institute of
Social History (IISH)
Most human beings work, and growing numbers are exposed to labour markets.
These markets are increasingly globally competitive and cause both capital and
labour to move around the world. In search of the cheapest labour, industries
and service-based enterprises move from West to East and South, but also, for
example, westwards from China’s east coast. People move from areas with few
employment opportunities to urban and industrial hubs, both between and
within continents. However, labour relations have been shifting already for
centuries, labour migrations go back far in time, and changing labour relations
cannot be comprehended without history. Therefore, understanding these
developments and their consequences in the world of work and labour relations
requires sound historical research, based on the experiences of different groups of
workers in different parts of the world at different moments in time, throughout
human history.
The research and publications department of the International Institute of Social
History (IISH) has taken on a leading role in research and publishing on the
global history of labour relations. In the context of Global Labour History, three
central research questions have been def ined: (1) What labour relations have
emerged in parallel with the rise and advance of market economies? (2) How
can their incidence (and consequently the transition from one labour relation to
another) be explained, and are these worldwide transitions interlinked? (3) What
are the social, economic, political, and cultural consequences of their changing
incidence, and how do they relate to forms of individual and collective agency
among workers? These three questions are interconnected in time, but also in
space. Recent comparative Global Labour History research demonstrates that
shifts in one part of the globe have always been linked to shifts in other parts.
Series editor: Jan Lucassen, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Editorial Board: Ulbe Bosma, Karin Hofmeester, Gijs Kessler, International
Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Executive editor: Aad Blok, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Fighting for a Living
A Comparative History of Military Labour
1500-2000
Edited by
Erik-Jan Zürcher
Amsterdam University Press
Cover illustration: ‘A Turkish Janissary’, c. 1480, Gentile Bellini (Venetian, c. 1429-1507)
© The British Museum Company Limited
Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam
Layout: Crius Group, Hulshout
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
ISBN 978 90 8964 452 7
e-ISBN 978 90 4851 725 1 (pdf)
e-ISBN 978 90 4851 726 8 (ePub)
NUR 685 / 696
Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)
Erik-Jan Zürcher / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
In memory of Gilles Veinstein (1945-2013)
Contents
Preface 9
Introduction 1
Understanding changes in military recruitment and employment
worldwide
Erik-Jan Zürcher
Military labor in China, c. 1500 43
David M. Robinson
From the mamluks to the mansabdars 81
A social history of military service in South Asia, c. 1500 to c. 1650
Kaushik Roy
On the Ottoman janissaries (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries) 115
Gilles Veinstein
Soldiers in Western Europe, c. 1500-1790 135
Frank Tallett
The Scottish mercenary as a migrant labourer in Europe, 1550-1650 169
James Miller
Change and continuity in mercenary armies: Central Europe, 1650-1750 201
Michael Sikora
Peasants f ighting for a living in early modern North India 243
Dirk H.A. Kolff
“True to their salt” 267
Mechanisms for recruiting and managing military labour in the
army of the East India Company during the Carnatic Wars in India
Robert Johnson
“The scum of every county, the refuse of mankind” 291
Recruiting the British Army in the eighteenth century
Peter Way
Mobilization of warrior populations in the Ottoman context,
1750-1850 31
Virginia H. Aksan
Military employment in Qing dynasty China 353
Christine Moll-Murata and Ulrich Theobald
Military service and the Russian social order, 1649-1861 393
Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter
The French army, 1789-1914 419
Volunteers, pressed soldiers, and conscripts
Thomas Hippler
The Dutch army in transition 447
From all-volunteer force to cadre-militia army, 1795-1830
Herman Amersfoort
The draft and draftees in Italy, 1861-1914 479
Marco Rovinello
Nation-building, war experiences, and European models 519
The rejection of conscription in Britain
Jörn Leonhard
Mobilizing military labor in the age of total war 547
Ottoman conscription before and during the Great War
Mehmet Beşikçi
Soldiering as work 581
The all-volunteer force in the United States
Beth Bailey
Private contractors in war from the 1990s to the present 613
A review essay
S. Yelda Kaya
Collective bibliography 639
Notes on contributors 687
Preface
He’s f ive-foot-two, and he’s six-feet-four,
He f ights with missiles and with spears.
He’s all of thirty-one, and he’s only seventeen,
He’s been a soldier for a thousand years.
...
He’s the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can’t go on.
– Buffy Sainte-Marie, “Universal Soldier” (1964)
This pioneering volume is a remarkable international attempt to bridge
the gap between military history and labour history, by exploring the
labour of the military as a subject in its own right. During 2009-2012, a
team of twenty researchers from nine countries led by Erik-Jan Zürcher
systematically reconstructed the similarities and differences between
military recruitment and employment systems in Asia and Europe from
the sixteenth century onwards. Their comparative approach has made
it possible to discover general historical patterns. In turn, these patterns
suggest causal relationships which could, should, and no doubt will be the
subject of more in-depth studies in the future.
Until now, military historians and labour historians inhabited separate
worlds. Military historians were concerned with wars, military doctrines,
arms technology, campaign logistics, and similar issues. For them, soldiers
usually enter into the picture as the executors of commands, and, in the
narrative of military historians, what decides the outcome of battles are the
numbers, skills, weaponry and morale of the combatants. Labour historians
by contrast regard soldiers above all as the oppressors of labour resistance,
who sometimes – in revolutionary situations – change sides and join the
workers. According to many labour historians, what soldiers do as soldiers is
not “work” – since work is constructive, not destructive – but instead a kind
of “anti-work”. The military are indeed conventionally excluded from “the
labour force”, and therefore they are not counted in labour force statistics.
The idea that what soldiers do “cannot be work” is a moralistic prejudice,
however. Work is the purposeful production of useful objects or services.
Thus, work is a purposive activity, and work creates objects or services that
are useful to the people for whom the work is done. That makes participation