Abstract
Abstract: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European rulers established several new measures to support soldiers with disabilities. The term invalid was introduced to designate the men considered worthy of support. The article investigates the case of the Habsburg Monarchy through the lens of dis/ability history: it historicizes the making of invalids as a process connected to shifting concepts of dis/ability, military labor, gender, and the state. The analysis of early modern imperial decrees shows a valorization of disabled soldiers: distinctions between fitness and unfitness to serve, between invalids and other people with disabilities, and between invalids and "mutilants" were central to this process. "Invalidity" was thus intertwined with gendered notions of military honor, cameralist concepts of labor and utility, and a specific form of state formation and patriotism in the Habsburg Monarchy.
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