Mercenaries and Industrialization

A curious feature of eighteenth-century military administration in central Europe is the so-called ‘company industry’ (Kompaniewirtschaft). The term referred to a then-widespread practice of putting hired soldiers to work in a non-military capacity, mostly as spinners and weavers who worked in military barracks that, by some accounts, resembled veritable ‘spinning mills.’ This paper turns to the Kompaniewirtschaft as a way to understand the nexus between the military policies of the 18th century European state and economic modernity. That the fiscal-military state played an important role in the industrial revolution by way of stimulating unprecedented demand for finished goods is a commonplace; here I am interested in how a peculiar military-administrative policy rendered a key feature of industrial modernity, the ‘factory,’ thinkable. Given that some of the worker-soldiers involved—‘mercenaries’ in the literal sense of the word—were occasionally deployed to far-away places, including colonies in the Americas, long deemed an important site of innovation in management and disciplinary techniques, suggests that there was plenty of opportunity for inspiration. To consider these and other propositions, I consider the writings of Sir Benjamin Thompson, the ‘Count of Rumford,’ who was hired in 1790 by the Bavarian court in order to reform the Bavarian army.