Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour, 1500–2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher

Abstract

Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour, 1500-2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zurcher. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2014. 688 pp. $99.50 US (cloth). It is surprising that it has taken so long for the publication of a collection of essays organized around the idea of warfare and military service as forms of labour. While the division between military and labour history has at times seemed stark, the diverse set of essays by a group of international scholars included in Fighting for a Living makes clear that there is considerable room for convergent interest. Just as military historians have tended to ignore labour as being tangential to the maintenance and operation of militaries, so too have labour historians often failed to investigate militaries as sites of labour, sometimes even considering militaries as being antithetical to and engaging in destructive rather than productive activities. Yet modern militaries have often been the largest employers in society, and the work of soldiers clearly can be considered a kind of labour. Not only can soldiers produce surplus value for states and elites through military victory, but most soldiers spend far more time in garrisons engaged in a variety of labours, including the development of civilian infrastructure, than they ever do on the battlefield. summarizing the approach that the authors of the collection's essays take, editor Erik-Jan Zurcher asserts that In our view, soldiers are not a separate category of people who sometimes fulfill the role of workers; they are workers (p. 12). The authors clearly take the position that, rather than being something in which soldiers occasionally engage, labour must be understood as part of the core functions of soldiers. The collection includes an extensive introduction and nineteen essays that approach the topic from a global perspective--examining Europe, Asia, India, the Middle East, and the United States--across the past five centuries. looking across these historical case studies, Zurcher and the International Institute of Social History (IISH)'s Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, the research group responsible for assembling this collection, have examined underlying patterns and produced a draft taxonomy of military labour relations that begins to suggest what determinative factors might influence particular labour relations within a given military. They propose a threefold set of possible labour relations categories: reciprocal labour (providing work on the basis of shared assumptions about obligations, found in, for example, the use of tribal forces by the Ming emperors of China and the Ottoman sultans); tributary labour (workers legally obliged or coerced to perform labour by the state or polity); and commodified labour (labour acquired by the employer--the state or the army--in the marketplace, as in the hiring of mercenaries, volunteer soldiers, or defense contractors). …