Killing for the State, Dying for the Nation: An Introductory Essay on the Life Cycle of Conscription into Europe's Armed Forces

This essay provides a broad overview of the European experience with recruitment of military manpower. [The authors] combine a sequence -- in the form of a periodization stretching from the early modern period until today -- with a rough typology distinguishing the seawards, non-continental cases (with England as the archetype) from two continental types: one "seawards" (France as the archetype), the other "landwards" (Prussia as the archetype). [The authors] also include some remarks on the Nordic countries, which mostly approximate the French type of military recruitment. While this essay does not provide a fully articulated model of military recruitment -- that would be the task of a much longer study! -- it does develop a provisional typology of such recruitment. That typology in turn provides a context by which regional trends and patterns in the recruitment of military manpower can be better understood, and can also serve as the basis for further comparative analyses of this important topic. [Adapted from the source document]