Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats - in this volume, Philippe Rogger and André Holenstein bring together 17 contributions on military entrepreneurs in the early modern world. The transnational studies explain how belligerent powers did indeed rely on thriving markets where military entrepreneurs provided mercenaries, weapons, money, credit, food, expertise, and other services. The volume shows how readily business relationships for supplying armies in the 17th and 18th centuries crossed territorial and confessional boundaries.
This volume offers a "reconceptualization of warfare in early modern Europe", writes Rafael Torres-Sanchez in his review. He points in particular to the most successful contributions to the volume, above all the "excellent introductory essay", a "programmatic intervention in the state of the field". Furthermore, he commends the analytical reversal from state- to society-centric, the proposal for a new research agenda centred on the distributive effects of institutional arrangements, the empirical richness of the volume and its methodological pluralism. The book, he concludes, achieves significant historiographical advance: "The history of warfare should no longer be confined to sovereign decisions or institutional reforms; it must include those who mobilized resources, negotiated risks, and made war a viable (and often profitable) enterprise."
Read the review on infoclio.ch and HSozKult and the full book open access at Brill.
Torres-Sanchez, Rafael: Review: Rogger, Philippe; Holenstein, André (Ed.): Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats. Military Entrepreneurs in the Early Modern World, Leiden 2024, in: infoclio.ch, 10.09.2025, <https://www.infoclio.ch/de/rez?rid=151082>.
