War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean (1300-1800) | History of Warfare Book 97 | Academic Research & European Military History Studies

A summary of the review just posted on StrategyPage.Com:'Albeit dealing with a period centuries in the past, this is a surprisingly timely work, given, as the introduction notes, that mercenaries – now called “private security organizations” – have had a revival since the onset of the Iraq War in 2003. The introduction goes on to examine the role of mercenaries in state formation from late Medieval through the Early Modern Period, when state instructions became sufficiently strong as to support permanent military forces. There follow fourteen essays on various aspects of this trend, grouped into four categories, the medieval origins of military “entrepreneurialism,” the varied nature of such entrepreneurialism from the Thirty Years War through the mid-eighteenth century, the development of state mechanisms to oversee and ultimately replace mercenaries, and a look at the Ottoman experience. Students of the nature of state formation will certainly find this an important work, but since individual chapters focus on particular countries in specific periods – fourteenth century Aragon, seventeenth century Germany, Britain in the American War for Independence, etc. – these will prove of value to specialists in those areas.'For the full review, see StrategyPage.Com