A History of Occupation as a History of the Rationalisation of War

Military occupation as a phenomenon plays a paradigmatic role in any analysis of the relationship between civilians and war as a situation where the military's interaction with the civilian population is at its most overwhelming. It also provides, through comparative examples of military occupation, a means by which we can identify lines of development in regulating civil-military relations. If the eighteenth century is particularly prominent in this chapter, it is because this period can be seen as a culmination of early modern developments, insofar as the various experimental approaches of the late sixteenth and, above all, seventeenth centuries appeared to now be systematised in practice – as well as being reflected in ‘classical’ European international law. For the most part, these standards still applied to the wars waged by nineteenth- and twentieth-century European states and, in this respect, can be viewed as something of an early modern achievement.

This chapter thus argues against the frequently expressed view that military occupation has been a transhistorical feature of war since ancient times. Those who advocate such a view rarely make a clear distinction between military occupation, conquest and domination by a foreign power. By contrast, this chapter insists on the historically specific character of military occupation in the context of continental European warfare. It had ancient and medieval precursors, but military occupation as a specific complex of practices only came to be realised in the early modern period, because that is when the decisive preconditions were available.