Abstract
Enemy combatants captured in wartime are both a potential resource for their captors and a logistical and security nightmare. This has long been reflected in their treatment. Over the centuries, captured enemy combatants have been sold as slaves (or simply used as slave labour), forced to switch sides, ransomed for money, swapped for other prisoners, physically maimed to ensure they could no longer fight, starved to death, imprisoned under abysmal conditions, or outright massacred. And yet, surprisingly, at other times (including in the period covered by this book), most prisoners of war – though not, as Morieux shows, all – have not only had a protected status but, especially in the case of officers, been allowed a degree of freedom of movement that seems extraordinary by modern-day standards.
Highlights
The society of prisoners looks comparatively at policies ‘on the ground’ with respect to prisoners of war in France and Britain, two of the strongest and most centralized states of eighteenth-century Europe
The time-period is significant here, not just because it coincided with the rise of what many historians like to call the fiscal-military state, but because it saw a flowering of publishing and activism around human rights, including condemnations of torture, capital punishment, the slave trade, religious persecution, and the imprisonment of non-criminals
As Morieux shows, this arose in large part from the highly entrepreneurial way that commerce raiding, imprisonment for debt, and, the slave trade functioned in the eighteenth century
Summary
The society of prisoners looks comparatively at policies ‘on the ground’ with respect to prisoners of war in France and Britain, two of the strongest and most centralized states of eighteenth-century Europe. One of the questions at issue is whether, as much of the literature on prisoners of war suggests, developed nation-states supported recognizably modern prisoner regimes.
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