Covering late antique Egypt into the period of Arab rule, this chapter introduces documents and literary texts translated from Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. In the countryside, coloni joined slaves and dependents at work on the great estates of Byzantine Egypt, while in the cities slavery continued as before. Coptic literature from the same period introduces servitude within Christian monasteries. The writings of Shenoute and Gnostic texts regularly employ the vocabulary of slavery in a negative sense. The trade, employment, and emancipation of slaves continued. Conscripted labour is also documented. Children and adults donated to monasteries represent a new form of sacred servitude. With the Arab conquest of Egypt, war and raiding resurface as important sources of slaves. Nubia and the Near East were again key areas for their acquisition, and slaves are illustrated as active in most areas of life and integrated into the religious life of their owners’ households.

The collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the subsequent rise of the Meiji government were accompanied by the Japanese archipelago’s first large-scale conflict in two centuries. Warfare was not merely a consequence of the social and political upheaval of the restoration era. Rather, organizational reforms and the adoption of new technologies helped accelerate the collapse of the shogunate and shaped the manner of the modern state’s consolidation. Rather than recounting campaigns and battles, this chapter focuses on three interlocking sets of themes: technology, social change, and gender. Each theme relates to a particular story of the restoration era: the replacement of traditional Japanese arms by gunpowder weapons; the decline of the samurai and the rise of the conscript soldier; and the effacement of warrior masculinity by the ideal of the patriotically subservient “serviceman” (gunjin).

Even as the Army increased its commitment to peacekeeping, its overall strength declined, as defence budgets dropped from their Cold War heights. This drawdown saw the Army turn inwards as it managed the shift from a forward-deployed overseas force to a smaller one primarily based in the continental United States. As the Army’s numbers fell and the overseas missions it deployed on increased, soldiers and their families suffered from the increase in operational tempo and the Army struggled to retain personnel. Later in the decade, the Army faced a severe recruiting shortfall amid a booming economy, as it missed its enlistment targets in 1998 and 1999. This shortfall, which coincided with an increasing reliance on the National Guard and Army Reserve for overseas deployments, as well as internal deliberations over the changing role of the Army, prompted renewed concerns about the health of the All-Volunteer Force. Tensions between the twin ideals of the ‘citizen soldier’ and the ‘profession of arms’ were heightened after the end of the Cold War, as the Army’s leadership struggled to rethink the nature of military service while managing a large-scale drawdown from their 1980s peak.

World War I felled Berlin’s grand hotel industry in three blows. The first was a shortage of goods, services, and labor; the second, a decline in the quality of the goods and services still available; and the third, a resultant depletion of capital reserves as shortages drove prices out of reach. As the state increased its demands on everyone’s time and energy, managers found themselves unable to devote their full attention to shoring up systems and hierarchies. A grueling four years then ended in ignominy and danger when, in November 1918, political violence surged into hotel lobbies, restaurants, and guest rooms. The fate of Berlin’s grand hotels mirrors the fate of the German Second Empire, which also collapsed in the face of defeat and revolution in the fall of 1918.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, the journal The Sphere published a two-page spread showing the ‘Shakespeare Cliff’ with the well-known ‘This England’ speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II, alongside other images connecting England to Shakespeare’s work. Related to the image are many writings of the First World War, including editions of the plays, the life of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and warfare, the Tercentenary of his birth, and the relation between Shakespeare and German literature. An article in the popular John O’London’s Weekly argued that Shakespeare had been a soldier, and suggested that Englishmen should follow his example and fight for their country.

This chapter discusses the economic dimensions of war. It begins with the classic guns vs. butter framework from economics, whereby spending on the military trades off with spending on other priorities. It builds on this concept to discuss the three main ways that governments finance wars, through increased taxation, borrowing, and printing money. It also examines the market for warriors – how governments gather citizens into the military as soldiers – comparing conscription and volunteerism systems. Next, it discusses the market for weapons, how the private sector produces weapons for the government, and the consequences of different market structures for weapons production. Among other concepts and issues, it explores the fundamental problem of sovereign finance (that government borrowers cannot be forced to pay off debts), the "commercial peace" proposition that trade between states breeds peace, and the economic consequences of war. It applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study on whether access to credit helps state win their wars, and a case study of the development of the US taxation system as a means to fund US participation in the World Wars.

Chapter two examines the conflicting nationalist politics mobilising Irish volunteers in wartime Britain. It profiles the political languages and cultures of Irish volunteers in British centres, from the 150,000 recruits in the British armed forces to the eighty-seven rebels in the armed forces of the Irish Republic; interrogates the correspondence, and separation, of Irish nationalist identities between home/front; and charts the rise, and estranged demise, of Irish Party support in wartime Britain. The Irish Party, this chapter submits, successfully maintained its ‘two face’ political position in Britain, in anticipation of a short war and a bitterly contested general election on the Home Rule issue, a political strategy termed ‘home front nationalism’. Redmond’s rejection of a British Cabinet position in May 1915, and the I.P.P.’s rejection of conscription in January 1916, however, fatally undermined the Irish Party’s policy. The participation of British-based Irish Volunteers in the 1916 Rising was a rebellion against the wartime politics of ‘home front nationalism’ and British citizenship. An examination of the ‘British connection’ to the Rising, from the Edinburgh-born James Connolly to the London-based Michael Collins, supports the thesis that military strategy was not the primary focus of the 1916 leaders.

This chapter examines mass killing, ‘extermination’ and ‘genocide’ in Chinese history, focusing on the Warring States period and early empires. The Chinese language contains many words for ‘attack’, ‘kill’, ‘extermination’, ‘eradication’, and ‘destruction’ of the enemy. The concept of ‘genocide’ is rendered as ‘extermination’ of an ethnic group. Mass killing was facilitated by China’s precocious development of the technology of rule, especially national conscription and centralized administration. As early as 268 BCE, the state of Qin articulated and practiced an official policy of conquest by ‘attacking not only territory but also people’ to ensure that rival states and their populations could not recover. The Western Han dynasty massacred the Xiongnu in 133-91 BCE and beyond, while the Eastern Han dynasty exterminated the Qiang in 169. Ran Min of a later divided era launched ‘execution of the Jie and extermination of their kind’ in 350. The recurrence of mass killing did not end with the fall of the last dynasty in 1911. The ‘megamurderers’ Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong created ‘China’s bloody twentieth century’ by killing 10.2 million in 1921-48 and 37.8 million in 1923-76, respectively.

Building on a comprehensive conscription system established ahead of the French Wars, the Habsburg Monarchy could raise armies almost as large as those available to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. But fielding a large force was not enough to win. Among the more prominent factors undermining Austria’s military capacity was the collective ethos of her officers, whose meagre pay, low social standing, and limited promotion opportunities bred indifference to military professionalism. While reform efforts by the talented Archduke Charles substantially improved the fighting effectiveness of the Habsburg troops, the Archduke never enjoyed the full trust of the emperor. Against Charles’ advice, in 1805 the army was pushed unprepared into war, resulting in a crushing defeat. In spite of far better military performance in 1809, the Monarchy’s attempt to take on the Napoleonic Empire single-handedly led to another costly failure. Forced to scale down its army in the Peace of Schönbrunn, Austria covertly retained much of its veteran manpower. In 1812, while nominally a French ally, further arrangements were set for a rapid expansion and training of her forces. When the Habsburgs have re-joined the war against Napoleon, the size and quality of the Austrian contingent tipped the balance in favour of the Allied Coalition ensuring Napoleon’s final defeat.

The post-Frederician Prussian army cultivated the glory of the past, but also experienced continuous debates and reforms intending to optimize the army according to the principles of enlightened rationalism. The confrontation with the French revolutionary armies activated intensive discussions, but for the military authorities, the experiences did not call for principal doubts about the suitability of the army. The defeat of 1806, however, did. The following reforms had to handle elementary needs to re-establish the armed forces, but also took the opportunity to create new organisational frameworks and to introduce new principles for recruitment, military justice and officers’ careers. From a quantitative perspective, the important measures converged on the implementation of a general conscription, and from a qualitative perspective, they especially targeted reconciling the educated middle-class with military service. When the break with France in 1813 effaced the previously existing restrictions, the plans resulted not only in an augmentation of the standing army, but in the establishment of complementary military formations of own characters. Their coexistence reflected organisational constraints, as well as different aspects of the previous debates. Although not without improvisations, the authorities were able to increase the armed forces more than sevenfold within about nine months.

Malingering, the practice of feigning medical conditions for specific purposes, became a pressing concern for many practitioners of legal medicine following the introduction of conscription during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A burgeoning medicolegal literature on malingering revealed that some doctors went to great lengths to detect and expose malingerers by using deceit, coercion, painful procedures, and altered states of consciousness as diagnostic tools. Doctors justified the far-reaching tactics used in adversarial contests with suspected malingerers in the name of the public good. Acting on behalf of the state to expose them, doctors engaged in adversarial relationships with suspected malingerers. These encounters also provided an impetus for debates about medical ethics; however, ethical concerns about doctors’ methods of detecting malingering were rarely raised and debated until the end of the nineteenth century.

The chapter focuses on a persistent problem within nationalist ideology, as it emerged in Jacob Grimm’s reflections on the rise of mandatory schooling. School systems can impose a uniform language across a large territory, effectively giving shape to a national people. This became increasingly clear to Grimm as he witnessed the emergence of a veritable army of schoolteachers around the mid-nineteenth century. While he approved of greater national unification by means of mass schooling, the fact of public education also forced him to consider that the nation may not grow from below to delimit the proper reach of a state. Instead, an existing state apparatus could forge a more standardized culture by institutional means, at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language and customs within families. Hence the state may not need a philologist to trace national boundaries. Indeed, the school system itself, a necessary institution in the developed modern state, threatened local cultures with extinction and hence deprived populations of the cultural memory that Grimm had pledged to protect as a scholar.

In chapter 5, I describe how participants in the 1916 debates used the law of nations as it existed at the time, and the dominion and constitutional law of the British Empire to deliberate the justifications for war and for conscription. The languages of these debates included, for example, arguments about the preservation of White Australia, about the need to protect Australians’ civil liberties, and about the unequal claims made on the different classes of Australian society as a result of the First World War. The persuasiveness of uses of international legal language in 1916 depended on speakers’ abilities to navigate the complications of Australia’s colonial nationalism. Speakers made sophisticated arguments about the duties of the Dominion of Australia to the British Empire on the one hand, and to its own emerging nationhood on the other.

Chapter 5 examines the international law rules governing the mobilization of people to fight in wars. The chapter examines Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programmes in the context of UN peace operations, the internatinoal crimes of forced conscription, and child soldier recruitment. The chapter summarizes attempts to regulate the global private military and security industry, including through self-regulation, and the increasing attempts by states to criminalize foreign fighters under counterterrorism laws.

Grey gave a great push to convince his colleagues to consult the French government about activating the House-Grey Memorandum, only to be outmanoeuvred. With this diplomatic alternative set aside, the military successfully pressured the government to assent to a major summer offensive on the Somme. The military also sought to replace the strategy agreed a few months earlier with an economic fantasy: the military was now looking to win the war with an offensive in 1917 instead of in 1916, but refused to accept that Britain would face serious financial problems in continuing the Allies' massive US supplies through a 1917 campaign. Despite fierce resistance within the Cabinet, the House of Commons forced the acceptance of the military's position. The British government suffered a financial scare when McKenna warned that their assets deployable in the United States faced exhaustion by autumn. McKenna was wrong about the timing: Britain had more assets than he thought, enough to last them into early 1917. But the scare resulted in a serious reconsideration of the House-Grey Memorandum when House and Wilson pushed for an autumn implementation of the agreement. The memorandum's proponents were unintentionally undermined by Wilson’s speech to the US League to Enforce Peace.

As the British faced financial crisis in the United States, the Treasury developed a strategy to fight the war while sustaining their ever-increasing reliance on American supplies. A near-failure of a large Anglo-French loan in the United States revealed that American investors were unwilling to finance these supplies themselves, a revelation that should have been a decisive moment for British war strategy. Instead, McKenna faced a significant faction in the Cabinet who dismissed these concerns as overblown. This faction demanded large increases in the size of the British Army and imposing conscription on the British public – demands that led to a series of political crises for Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to manage.