This panel revisits the problem of the ‘mercenary’ in European history. It asks how the outsourcing of warfare, and the cultural exchanges that the practice fostered, have shaped the trajectories of states and societies from the 16th through the 20th centuries. While we are all specialists in European histories, we are interested in facilitating a conversation that considers the problem across diverse geographies, including Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and colonial spaces in the Americas and Indochina. Our panel puts several subfields into a dialogue: histories of sovereignty and statecraft, social and labor history, migration studies, military history, cultural histories of violence and death, among others. Recent attempts to put these fields into conversation, especially the history of capitalism, offer an opportunity to rethink the phenomenon of the ‘mercenary’ and its place in the making European modernity. The following questions guide our thinking: Is the mercenary a transhistorical phenomenon? How should historians address varying degrees of mercenary activity in their work? What historical experiences and worlds does a history of mercenaries make accessible that would otherwise remain hidden or go unnoticed? What role do mercenaries play in major critiques of political economy and violence, from Marx to Frantz Fanon?

Our panel will present four papers by Govind Sreenivasan (Brandeis), Benjamin Hein (Brown), Steven Press (Stanford), and Mate Rigo (Brandeis). Sreenivasan opens the discussion with an exploration of the social lives of early modern mercenaries in the Holy Roman Empire. Legal and notarial records point to much more diverse experiences than are often presumed, owing to both a wide range of social backgrounds as well as the fact that military duty projected individuals across different and distant cultural spaces. Hein further complicates the picture by proposing that the nature of the mercenary’s work could change on a seasonal basis and was never limited to military duty. Oftentimes, for instance, mercenaries spent their days spinning yarn or engaging in craftwork like tanning or ironmongery, so much so that military barracks were sometimes likened to ‘spinning mills.’ Like Sreenivasan, moreover, Hein finds that mercenaries were able to develop their productive skills during their deployment to distant lands, including North American colonies.

Press’s paper takes us to the early nineteenth century and questions the idea that by this time modern states and empires had achieved a monopoly over violence. His examination of cultural perceptions of the ‘mercenary’ problem at the Congress of Vienna suggests that contemporaries remained divided about whether direct control over their armed forces was a necessary or even desirable aspect of state sovereignty. Rigo’s contribution throws light on the surprising continuity of a nineteenth century anational mercenary force, the French Foreign Legion, into the era of the Cold War. Rigo asks why many Southeast and Central Europeans became entangled in the French effort to re-colonize Indochina, even as their home states vehemently distanced themselves from colonialism and advocated global socialist solidarity.