Little appeared to change with Brazilian independence regarding the establishment of colonies. The new imperial government continued to sponsor the settlements established during the Joanine years and kept signing on agricultural workers in Europe for similar endeavors. While colonies grew in economic and demographic terms, many of them did so at the expense of enslaved Africans and their descendants in direct contravention of their founding principles. Additionally, migrants contracted in Europe as field hands were in fact mercenary soldiers for Pedro I’s forces. This chapter explores how colonization informed a foundational rift in Brazilian politics. As constitutional order struggled to establish itself, colonization pitted an entrenched executive with imperial ambitions and an emergent legislature trying to assert itself.

Taking as starting point the lives of an Irish general and a Cretan naval officer, both involved in the 1820 revolution in Sicily, the chapter explores the ways in which mobility and conflict interacted in the post-Napoleonic period across the Mediterranean, and connected revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa, Sicily, Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the Aegean Sea in the 1820s. These case studies show the overlap between the categories of volunteer and mercenary, imperial agent and freedom fighter, refugee and economic migrant, as well as their fluidity. More generally, they point to the very different ways in which one could become a revolutionary and the plurality of motivations behind such a decision. They suggest that while the Napoleonic Wars were crucial to produce new types of displacement, it is important to consider them also in continuity with longer-term, Early Modern patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean.

This chapter provides the historical and scholarly context to the book’s main argument, and hence treats the military and economic developments that engulfed the Greek world in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods. arguing that these should be seen as intrinsically connected. Following discussion of scholarly approaches to the economic transformation of the Greek world at this time, paying special attention to the old formalist–substantivist debate, the chapter advocates a closer look at the types of markets available, especially the market for labour. This market, the book contends, first appeared in a full form in the military sphere; accordingly, the chapter questions scholarly approaches and attitudes towards paid military service, debating especially the notion of ‘mercenary’ soldiers, who should better be conceived of as military wage labourers.

To ascertain soldiers’ potential status as wage labourers, this chapter discusses the process of initial enlistment and the ensuing terms of service, questioning especially whether soldiers enlisted of their own accord and retained their free status. It emerges that, from the reforms by Philip II of Macedonia onwards, political circumstances dictated a strong drift towards greater and at times complete reliance on so-called voluntary troops, who enlisted in exchange for pay. Thus, while the bulk of troops under Philip and Alexander were conscripts, these armies from the outset encouraged the enlistment of hired, voluntary troops in both elite and ordinary divisions. The lines between different troop types were blurred significantly under Alexander, whose conscript forces re-enlisted as hired men mid-way through his campaign. The Successors, whose often fickle claims to territory complicated the conscription of troops, were almost wholly reliant on voluntary troops. Accordingly, it is at this point that the epigraphic record attests military contracts, in which soldiers’ continued freedom of movement is guaranteed, alongside other terms of service. In the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms, we see a return to conscription, especially in times of greatest need, alongside an enduring preference for professional, hired soldiers to man the standing armies.

Chapter 4 looks at the concept of combatants and non-combatants, and its connected status, that of prisoner of war (POW). It examines who is entitled under IHL to combatant status, and examines those persons who have been denied combatant and POW status under IHL. Particular attention is paid to the status of resistance fighters, national liberation and guerrilla fighters, those participating in a levée en masse, and participants in non-international armed conflicts. The chapter outlines those categories of participant not entitled to combatant status such as spies, mercenaries, so-called unlawful combatants, and private military and security contractors. Chapter 4 also explores the current legal thinking regarding a contentious area of the law – that of civilians taking direct part in hostilities. The rules regarding POW status and the treatment of POWs are described. The chapter concludes by examining another developing area of the law: the power of detention in non-international armed conflicts.

Despite its often poor reputation and the scaremongering that accompanied its growth, the private military and security industry does not threaten the content or spirit of international humanitarian law (IHL). Nonetheless, concerns remain about both the behaviour of actors within the industry – private military and security companies (PMSCs), their employees, and employers – as well as the interest and capacity of states to hold these actors to account. There is a tension, therefore, between the clear applicability of IHL to PMSCs and doubts about its enforcement. The private military and security industry illustrates the gap between the ideals of IHL and its operational reality, and how this gap has then informed the creation of new soft law frameworks. In recent decades, international efforts have sought to further establish such guidance for the behaviour and use of PMSCs. One such effort, the Montreux Document, is an initiative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Swiss Government, restating existing standards. While the Document has seen success in terms of state engagement and participation, PMSCs and their employers, as well as the broader regulatory climate around PMSCs, appear largely unaffected.

The conclusion draws together the main themes discussed in the book, and briefly examines what happened after the end of the war, in 1815. Suddenly, with the decommissioning of the fleet, most (though not all) ‘foreign’ seamen were no longer needed, and many of them were reduced to beg in the streets. The utilitarian system of ‘pragmatic inclusiveness’ that had directed naval recruitment collapsed, and displacement was the trigger for legal and cultural forms of discrimination which had been suppressed by the Navy during the war. Thus, its exceptional bubble eventually burst. Different types of labels and demarcations, which had been treated as, and proven to be, utterly unimportant, all of a sudden became a convenient framework for both individuals and the state to harken onto, crystallising ‘foreign Jack Tars’ into a group. The legal categories that were twisted in one direction during wartime now further proved their flimsiness by being twisted in the opposite direction. Caught in between states, the same men who were previously wanted by all were now rejected by all.

The introduction lays out the book’s main arguments and themes, and compares the Royal Navy to the two different contexts which it straddled: the maritime world, and the armed forces. Naval service was more strictly regulated and anchored in the structures of the state than work in the merchant marine, and it was invested with explicit national and patriotic meaning. However, it also differed from service in the Army, as it required a good proportion of recruits to have specialised skills, and usually integrated them all into mixed crews, rather than establishing separate ‘foreign’ units. The Navy’s peculiar status, suspended between the military and national on the one hand, and the maritime and transnational on the other, is what makes it an important case study. If ‘foreign Jack Tars’ were in some senses mercenary fighters, they were also primarily – like ‘British’ Jack Tars themselves – a transnational, mobile, and often highly professionalised seafaring workforce. Studying them in the crucial historical juncture of the French Wars allows us to present a transnational history of a national institution, expose the compromises and contradictions underlying the power of modern states, and probe and deconstruct the very meaning of the term ‘foreigner’.

Section E seeks to show how the law on the conduct of hostilities that would apply in relation to the use of conventional weapons also applies in respect of nuclear weapon operations. The Rules and Commentaries deal with persons participating in the hostilities, who are distinguished from protected civilians, and with specific issues of naval and air warfare. The Rules and Commentaries on nuclear targeting address the notion of ‘attack’, the principle of distinction, prohibited nuclear attacks, the definition of military objectives, proportionality and active and passive precautions. As to methods of nuclear warfare, the Section addresses perfidy and ruses, the improper use of protective indicators and emblems, as well as the concept of zones. The Section further includes Rules and Commentaries on persons and objects entitled to specific protection and on the protection of the natural environment in times of armed conflict.

In Chapter 6 I investigate the increasing use of Private Security and Military Contractors as armed guards, mainly in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, during the USA’s lengthy occupations there, but also elsewhere. I question whether this represents the erosion of international and domestic US prohibitions on mercenarism and find that it does not; as with the previous two cases, these prohibitions changed rather than disappeared. This process occurred as the US government incorporated armed contractors into its operational command and control structures, while the private firms themselves developed mechanisms of self-regulation through a code of conduct and a professional association. Communications technology played a major role in process at first, but then bureaucratic dynamics took precedence. The boundaries between public and private violence have shifted, but most recognisable forms of mercenarism remain prohibited.

In this Introduction to the book, I raise the question of the possible erosion of prohibitions on assassination, torture, and mercenarism. I discuss the limits of ‘norm death’ as an explanation and propose instead that a ‘normative transformation’ has occurred. I outline how pragmatism, practice theory, and relational sociology will inform my perspective, how I will critique and build on theories of norm change in IR, and how I will analyse the three cases: the USA’s targeted killing programme, the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme, and the USA’s extensive employment of armed contractors in war zones.

This chapter continues with some of the themes from Chapter 5 by looking at the Katangese mission in Brussels; the installation of a Rhodesian accredited diplomatic representatives in Lisbon; the Rhodesian diplomatic mission in Britain, Rhodesia House; and the creation of Bophuthatswana’s London mission in Holland Park, “Bop House.” This chapter describes the complex, acrimonious, and sometimes counterintuitive politics behind the diplomatic statuses of these missions, as well as the symbolic and totemic significance of mission buildings themselves as protest venues. Similar to the controversies that their missions provoked in America, they likewise exposed deep political divisions within Britain.

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.

Part I outlines the international law applicable to economic activity both for the war and in the war zone. It begins by briefly outlining the difference between premodern and modern international law norms governing the acquisition of labour and property in war. The two sets of norms were radically different. As systems of warfare in Europe changed from premodern plunder-based warfare to modern industrial-based warfare, international law overturned and replaced norms regulating plunder and the taking of slaves, with norms that sought to protect labour and property from appropriation and exploitation in war.

I look at India’s role as a hub of circulation of military personnel. During the second half of the eighteenth century, India was a battlefield between the British, the French and Indian powers, in which soldiers of various provenance were mobilised, but most important was the rise of the sepoy armies of the East India Company. Apart from contributing to the establishment of British preponderance in India, the sepoys were also used in expeditions abroad, starting with their participation in an assault against Spanish Manila in 1762. Eschewing an exclusive focus on the military aspect, I scrutinise the archive of sepoy deployments outside India for information about how ‘ordinary’ Indians dealt with foreign lands and foreign people. I pay particular attention to the role of Indian soldiers in the two world wars. I present a case study based on the censored mail of the Indian expeditionary force soldiers sent to France in 1914–15, a rich trove of observations sometimes bordering on ethnographic reportage. After independence, India’s armies continued to play a global role as the largest manpower contributor to UN peacekeeping. I also look at India’s contribution to world peace.

The history of Italian warfare from 1300 to 1500 has been dominated by discussion of mercenary soldiers. Italian states used them throughout the Middle Ages and by the fourteenth century the practice evolved into a species of “system,” characterized by reliance on preformed bands of substantial size, containing also foreign soldiers from outside of the peninsula. The era of the “companies of adventure” (compagnie di ventura), as it is known, lasted from roughly the second decade to the end of the fourteenth century. It was followed by the emergence in the fifteenth century of individual native mercenary captains, condottieri, who settled into regular service with states and were the precursor to more permanent armies by the middle of the century. The reliance on mercenaries rendered Italian warfare out of touch with developments elsewhere in Europe, and left the peninsula unprepared for the onslaught of the armies of France and Spain and the Italian Wars in the sixteenth century. The invasion of Italy in 1494 by the French king Charles VIII was the signal event that revealed the weakness of Italian military institutions and more generally the strength of the rising nation state over its evolutionary predecessor, the city-state.

The Fourth Crusade (1199–1204), culminating in the sack of Constantinople and the conquest of most of the Byzantine empire, is a textbook example of a noble plan gone awry. The original intent was to attack the Ayyubids in Egypt, but along the way financial and other considerations diverted the French and Venetian crusaders to Constantinople where they restored the deposed emperor Isaac II Angelos (r.1185–95, 1203–4) to power. According to an earlier agreement, Isaac was to provide the crusaders with military and financial aid, but fiscal problems within the empire made this impossible. As time passed, anti-Latin sentiment within the city led to a palace coup which overthrew Isaac. The crusaders then seized the city and the empire itself. The Fourth Crusade and the subsequent Latin conquest intensified the anarchy that already existed within the provinces, providing the grace blow to an empire which had become increasingly fragmented to the point of disintegration.