Mercenaries in/and history: the problem of ahistoricism and contextualism in mercenary scholarship

ABSTRACT

The history of the mercenary seems little less than the history of organized warfare itself. From the dawn of recorded history to the recent rise of Private Military Companies, mercenaries appear as a historical constant that allows scholars to make grand historical claims about the organisation of force within world history. This article cautions against this view, arguing instead that the analysis of this actor has been compromised by the failure to adequately historicise and contextualize the concept of the mercenary due to the uncritical acceptance that mercenaries are a trans-historical occurrence. Informed by a historicist contextual approach, I show how two foundational characteristics of the mercenary concept, a Westphalian understanding of ‘foreignness’ and a modern account of ‘self-interest’, were absent in the periods preceding the 18^th century. I demonstrate this absence through an analysis of ‘mercenaries’ in Ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, exposing how the problematization of these actors within their own historical context displays a radical difference if compared to our contemporary understanding of the mercenary. In doing so this article raises awareness to the historical specificity of this seemingly universal concept and cautions against the uncritical backward projection of this concept into the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Mercenaries
• contextualism
• historicity
• non-state actors
• presentism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 48.

2. Mockler, Mercenaries; Axelrod, Mercenaries; Singer, Corporate Warriors.

3. Kadercan, Strong Armies; Clulow, Unjust, Cruel and Barbarous.

4. Griffith, Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World; Trundle, Greek Mercenaries; and Roy, The Mercenaries of Cyrus.

5. De Vries, Medieval Mercenaries; Lower, The Papacy and Christian Mercenaries; France, Mercenaries and Paid Men; and Casiraghi, Useless and Dangerous?

6. Olsen 2021, “The Social Construction of Mercenaries“; Musah, and ́Kayode Fayemi, “Africa in Search of Security”.

7. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 1.

8. Abrahamsen and Williams, “Security Beyond the State”; Whether PMCs are mercenary or not is still subject for debate. See e.g. Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers.

9. Mockler, The New Mercenaries, 14.

10. Sikora, “Söldner,” 201

11. Musah, and ´Kayode Fayemi, “Africa in Search of Security,” 16.

12. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander.

13. Trundle: Mercenaries.

14. Luttwak, “Towards Post-Heroic Warfare”.

15. Kiernan, Foreign Mercenaries; Stewart, The Tyrant’s Progress.

16. Kinsey, “Private Security Companies”; Adams, “Private Military Companies”.

17. Anderson, The Origins of the Modern European State System; Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States.

18. Avant, “From Mercenary to Citizen Armies”; Percy, Mercenaries; Black, Military Revolution.

19. Förster, Rückkehr der Condottieri?

20. McFate, The Modern Mercenary.

21. Arnold, “War in Sixteenth-Century Europe”; Calcara, “Contractors or Robots”.

22. Tallett, “Soldiers in Western Europe”.

23. Percy, Mercenaries; Bures & Cusomano, “The Anti-Mercenary Norm”.

24. Fitzsimmons, Private Security Companies.

25. Lower, The Papacy and Christian Mercenaries; Perinčić, Venetian defence system.

26. Kiernan, Foreign Mercenaries; Thomson, Mercenaries.

27. Hedal, Blood and Blackwaters.

28. for alternative views see Ettinger, Mercenary Moniker; Wilson, Foreign Military Labour; Riemann, As Old as War Itself?

29. Petersohn, Reframing the anti-mercenary norm.

30. Wilson, Foreign Military Labour; Riemann, As Old as War itself?

31. Ettinger, The mercenary moniker.

32. Riemann, As Old as War itself?

33. Lyons, The Invention of the Self, for a summary of this claim see specifically pp. 2–7

34. Lyons: The Invention of the Self, 2.

35. Ibid., 3.

36. Riemann, As Old as War itself?

37. Lawson, Culture and Context, 39.

38. Triantafillou, New Forms of Governing, 20.

39. See e.g McFate, The Modern Mercenary; Singer, Corporate Warriors; for an initial challenge to such historical analogies see Malešević, From Mercenaries to Private Patriots.

40. Skinner, Meaning and Understanding.

41. See e.g. Price, Chemical Weapons Taboo; Roshchin, (Un)Natural and contractual international society; Ciutǎ, Security and the Problem of Context; Scheipers, “The most beautiful of wars”; de Carvalho, Costa Lopez and Leira, Historical International Relations; Colás and Mabee, Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits and Empires.

42. Cello, “Taking history seriously,” 4.

43. Ibid., 6.

44. Lawson, “The Promise of Historical Sociology,” 404.

45. Lawson and Hobson, “What is History?” 422.

46. Cello, “Taking history seriously,” 5.

47. Skinner, Meaning and Understanding; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment.

48. Lawson, “The eternal divide”.

49. Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution, 54.

50. Howard, “Lessons of History” 494

51. Cello, “Taking history seriously,” 6.

52. Ibid., 9.

53. Isin, Being Political, x.

54. Nicholls, “Against Darwin,” 97.

55. Keene, International Political Thought, 4–5.

56. Conolly, Political Theory, 6.

57. Roshchin, “The Challenges of Contextualism”.

58. Lawson and Hobson, “What is History?,” 420.

59. Mockler, Mercenaries; Axelrod, Mercenaries.

60. Trundle, Greek Mercenaries, 10.

61. Ibid.

62. Trundle generally places this term in quotation marks to highlight its difference to our contemporary understanding.

63. Trundle, “Identity and Community”.

64. Ibid., 29.

65. Trundle, Hiring Mercenaries.

66. Gómez-Castro: Ancient Greek Mercenaries; See Ettinger: Mercenary Moniker and Riemann: “As Old as War itself” for a similar claim.

67. Miller, The Practical and Economic; for a contestation of that view see: Van Wees: Greek Warfare.

68. Trundle, Mercenaries, 14.

69. Ibid.

70. Trundle, Greek Mercenaries.

71. Herman, Ritualised Friendship, 10.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid., 12

74. Ibid., 34

75. Mitchell, Greeks bearing Gifts, 17.

76. Walker, Inside/Outside.

77. Von Reden, Exchange in ancient Greece, 499.

78. Van Wees. Greek Warfare, 72.

79. Ibid., 73.

80. Trundle, Hiring Mercenaries, 48.

81. Trundle, Greek Mercenaries, 28.

82. A title given to governors of provinces inside the Persian Empire.

83. Xenophon, quoted in Herman, Ritualised Friendship, 11.

84. Herman, Ritualised Friendship, 2.

85. Trundle, Greek Mercenaries, 30.

86. Herman, Ritualised Friendship, 6.

87. Ibid., 7.

88. McFate, Modern Mercenaries; Singer, Corporate Warriors; and Percy, Mercenaries.

89. De Vries, Medieval Mercenaries, 45.

90. Morillo, Mercenaries, Mamluks and Militias, 248.

91. Dawson, The Dividing of Christendom, 38–39.

92. Ferguson and Mansbach, Remapping Global Politics, 76.

93. Morillo, Mercenaries, Mamluks and Militias.

94. France, Mercenaries and paid men, 10.

95. Geuss, Outside Ethics, 41.

96. Ibid., 41.

97. Lima, The Dark Side of Reason, 92.

98. Grundmann, “Rotten”.

99. Percy, Mercenaries, 80–83.

100. France, Mercenaries, 5.

101. LeGoff, Medieval Civilization, 93.

102. Cardini, The Warrior and the Knight, 75.

103. For a discussion on the problematic nature of the term ‘feudalism’ see: Bouchard, Strong of Body, 35–38

104. Duby, The Three Orders, 13.

105. Bouchard, Strong of Body, 30.

106. Kleinschmidt, Öffentlichkeit, 19.

107. LeGoff, Medieval Civilization, 134.

108. Ibid., 134.

109. Drake, Problematics of Military Power.

110. Ibid., 135.

111. Rist, The Papacy, 25.

112. Teschke, The myth of 1648, 69.

113. Bouchard, Strong of Body, 23.

114. Drake, Problematics of Military Power, 116.

115. Jones, Knight, 155

116. See note 114 above.

117. For a sustained engagement with this code see Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence.

118. Grabois, “Militia and Malitia,” 51.

119. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 37

120. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 3–4.

121. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, 305.

122. Drake, Problematics of Military Power.

123. Drake, Problematics of Military Power, 124.

124. Vaux-De-Cerney, History of the Albigensian Crusade, 299.

125. Oksanen, Flanders and the Anglo-Norman World, 126.

126. Drake, Problematics of Military Power, 124.

127. Hammilton, Ecce Homo Sine Domo, 120.

128. Strickland, War and Chivalry, 318.

129. Carraz, Precursors and Imitators, 105.

130. Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic, 122.

131. Zedler, Universal-Lexicon, 1242.

132. Drake, Problematics of Military Power, 135.

133. Foucault: The Order of Things, 29.

134. Riemann, As Old As War itself?

135. See e.g. Avant, “From Mercenary to Citizen Armies”; Percy, Mercenaries.

136. Hellliwell and Hindess, “The Past in the Present,” 388.

137. Percy, Libya’s ordeal.

138. Turnbull, The Lost Samurai.

139. Cusumano and Kinsey, Advancing Private Security Studies.

140. See e.g. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security Privatization, Higate and Utas, Private Security in Africa

141. Corvisier and Childs: A dictionary of military history, 502.

142. Kaldor, New and Old Wars; Brown et. al, Violent Non-State Actors.

143. Cerny and Pritchard, The New Anarchy; Ezrow.

144. Kruck and Schneiker; Colás and Mabee, Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits and Empires.

145. For an example see Yuan, China’s private security companies.

146. See e.g. McQuade, A Genealogy of Terrorism; Ditrych, Ondrej: Tracing the Discourses of Terrorism.

147. Policante, The Pirate Myth.

148. For notable exceptions see e.g. Colás and Mabee, Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits and Empires; Shirk, Busting Blackbeard’s ghost.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malte Riemann

Malte Riemann is a senior lecturer in the Department of Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Reading. He studied in Bremen (Germany) and Pietermaritzburg (South Africa), and holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Reading (United Kingdom). His research interests lie in the privatisation of war and its effects on the state’s legitimate monopoly on violence, historical sociology, and the relationship between public health and conflict. His work has been published in various journals, including Journal for Global Security Studies, Critical Public Health, RUSI Journal, Peace Review, and Discover Society, and he most recently published a monograph in German on the transformation of war titled Der Krieg im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert (Kohlhammer Verlag, 2020).