Rethinking the Universal ‘Mercenary’ in Contemporary Historical Debates

Note: This article was originally written in 2022 as part of an Oxford history course

In his infamous political treatise, Il Principe, Niccolò Machiavelli denounces one group of combatants as “useless and dangerous.”[1] He goes further still, contending that they have engendered “the ruin of Italy.”[2] Mercenaries, he regrets, “have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men.”[3] Machiavelli’s condemnation of mercenaries is perhaps its most famous historical articulation, but he is joined by a chorus of celebrated political thinkers. By the 19^th century, Kant, Goethe, and Mirabeau had all censured the employment of mercenaries or the mercenaries themselves.[4] Clausewitz, too, decried the soldier of fortune, canonizing Machiavelli’s damning verdict in Western military norms.[5] Ever since, cultural narratives comprising mercenary figures have treated them with disdain.[6]

More so today than in the Renaissance, the mercenary is regarded as “morally problematic.”[7] After a long period of decline, these combatants returned in postcolonial Africa, quickly developing reputations as cowardly but power-hungry villains.[8] Indeed, the mercenary became a symbol of racism and neocolonialism,[9] prompting the outlawing of mercenarism in international law. In particular, three major pieces of international legislation – the Geneva Convention’s Additional Protocol I (1977), the Organization of African Unity’s Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa (1977), and the UN Convention on Mercenaries (1989) – attempted to demarcate and proscribe mercenary activity.[10]

In academia, an understanding of what a ‘mercenary’ signifies that is closely related to its legal definition remains pervasive. Numerous theorists cling to this definition to make claims about historical universals or a supposed decline of the nation-state system concurrent with the rise of private military and security companies (PMSCs), so-called “modern mercenaries.”[11] Their conclusions, however, have encountered more and more resistance as political scientists and historians challenge the legal definition of mercenary and the concomitant moral disapprobation. Close inspection reveals that the accepted definition of ‘mercenary’ is profoundly ahistorical.

But where does deconstructing and delegitimizing the definition leave scholars? Three schools of thought concerning the place of mercenaries in scholarly discourse have emerged to answer this question. The obvious solution for members of one school of thought has been to develop a new, all-encompassing definition so the term may remain useful. A second school of thought favors abandoning ‘mercenary’ altogether in favor of more historically defensible appellations. And a third school of thought endorses limiting mercenaries and mercenary types to their own historical specificities.[12] Ultimately, this last contextualist historicist approach proves most valuable to address the mercenary question but only when it limits the use of the term to a narrow period defined by the rise of a Westphalian worldview and state-centered moral system. What follows is the standard definition of the term ‘mercenary,’ an overview of the scholarly critiques of that definition, an account of the term’s origin, and an evaluation of the approaches to handling a term that appears so rife with problems.

Pieces of international legislation dealing with mercenarism – written in the 1970s and 1980s – offer subtle variations in their definitions of ‘mercenary,’ but they agree as to the term’s core meaning. Specifically, they designate as mercenary a combatant motivated essentially by the desire for significant private gain, prompted to fight by the promise or payment of material compensation, and neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a party of the conflict.[13] In political science scholarship, the accepted, standard definition of ‘mercenary’ is quite similar. According to that definition, mercenaries are alleged to be transhistorical, they are deemed ‘foreign’ in the sense of being non-citizens/non-nationals lacking legitimate stake in the conflicts they are involved in, and they are motivated by self-interest, most usually of a pecuniary nature.[14]

Implicit in the standard view is a transhistorical understanding of mercenaries. They are posited as figures who have existed since time immemorial and mercenarism is deemed “the second-oldest profession.”[15] If, indeed, a “history of mercenaries…would be very little less than a history of warfare through the ages,” as Anthony Mockler asserts in his book on the return of the mercenary to postcolonial Africa, then grand claims about lessons to be learned by studying this category of fighters is the logical next step.[16] One common claim about mercenaries, promoted by Machiavelli, is that they are ineffective on the battlefield. But while that contention has been popular among nationalist historians since, few scholars accept that argument today. Deborah Avant stresses that mercenaries were not less effective even after the genesis of France’s citizen army following the Revolution of 1789,[17] and Kenneth Grundy maintains that there is no evidence to support the idea that citizen armies in postcolonial Africa are more effective than hired guns.[18] McFate, who worked for DynCorp International, goes so far as to argue that “there is plenty of evidence that private armies are more disciplined and effective than public forces” in parts of Africa.[19]

Moral claims about mercenaries have proved more enduring than claims about their efficacy in combat. Historian Victor Kiernan, for instance, has contended that throughout history, from the Byzantines to Napoleon, despots have chosen to surround themselves with mercenaries, bodyguards of aliens, who act as enemies to republicanism.[20] According to Kiernan’s thesis, Swiss mercenaries filled the historical role of “the chief watch-dogs of tyranny.”[21] Pierre Briant, too, has made ethical claims about the use of soldiers of fortune. In his ‘Greek Thesis,’ which evaluates the use of Greek soldiers by the Persian Empire and the Kingdom of Egypt, he argues the employment of mercenaries signifies a society’s lack of bellicosity and military prowess.[22]

These bold claims rely on an essentialized understanding of mercenaries which strips them of their historicity and for that reason few contemporary historians endorse their conclusions. In recent decades, it is rather among political scientists that a transhistorical conception of mercenaries has found its greatest wellspring of support. In her 2007 book on norms in international relations, Sarah Percy declares that since classical Greece and Rome, mercenaries have been present and are thus indubitably “part of the fabric of the history of war.”[23] Political scientist Peter Singer agrees that the mercenary is an almost ubiquitous type in the history of organized warfare,[24] and Christa Botha labels the ‘armies for hire’ of antiquity, the condottieri of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the ‘soldiers of fortune’ of the 1960s, and modern PMSCs all as mercenaries.[25] Grounded in this transhistorical conception, a host of IR theorists have made claims bold enough to rival those of the historians of decades past.

Perhaps the most striking assertion that such theorists have made – with currency in the field – is that the rise of modern mercenaries in the form of PMSCs signifies the erosion of the state-centric political order.[26] To reach this conclusion, political scientists reflect first on post-colonial Africa. In the 1960s, African states entered a chaotic period as they transitioned to independence and individual foreign fighters saw opportunity to exploit the new states’ weak institutions. These men, later dubbed ‘les affreux,’ the terrible ones, offered their military services and subsequently took part in numerous conflicts on the continent.[27] Commentators at the time construed the apparition of mercenaries in the Katanga crisis of the 1960s as a retrograde throwback, Grundy even comparing ‘les afreux’ to the condottieri, and the criminalization of mercenary activity in international law followed shortly thereafter.[28] The lesson political scientists drew was that gradually outlawing and banishing ‘mercenaries’ provided important conditions for the state’s gradual solidification of its monopoly on the use of force.[29]

The purported reemergence of mercenaries in the form of PMSCs is thus deemed to represent the deterioration of the state-centric order. By 2010, the number of armed contractors associated with the new global industry of private military and security companies in Iraq and Afghanistan had risen to over 30,000 and 24,000, respectively.[30] Elke Krahmann affirms that those companies are “services associated with mercenaries,” but employs a discourse-historical approach to argue that PMSCs have transformed the language associated with them. In so doing, according to Krahmann, they have largely succeeded in presenting themselves as legal and legitimate – they have shed their “mercenary image.”[31] Alexander Spencer agrees the forces in question are mercenaries but argues persuasively that they have not shed their “mercenary image,” despite their efforts.[32] Building off an understanding of PMSCs as mercenaries, McFate has concluded that we have entered an era of ‘neomedievalism,’ a “non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.”[33]

An essentialized understanding of mercenaries as transhistorical actors underpins such a claim, but many political theorists who do not see PMSCs as mercenaries remain uncritical of the term’s standard definition.[34] David Shearer, for instance, contends that the private military industry has frequently been dubbed ‘mercenaries’ by their detractors so as “to discredit them.”[35] Independent military contractors like Sandline, proxy companies like Saladin Security, security companies like Defence Systems Limited, and ‘ad hoc’ forces like the troops employed by Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire in 1997 should not all be classified as mercenaries, according to Shearer. In addition to their distinctive non-mercenary characteristics, such as close integration with Western defense interests, these companies are not morally heinous like ‘les affreux.’[36] At the core of Shearer’s argument is a normative assumption that mercenary activity implies moral transgression.

Shearer, then, exemplifies Aaron Ettinger’s contention that ‘mercenary’ is “less a class of combatant than it is a political judgement” with embedded norms about a hierarchy of ‘rightful’ combatants.[37] Ettinger is one of many researchers who has scrutinized the ahistorical assumptions about the transhistorical nature of the ‘mercenary’ in academic scholarship.[38] Indeed, the term’s standard definition collapses when applied to different eras since it inadequately contextualizes and historicizes past instantiations of ‘mercenaries.’ As Hin-Yan Liu and Christopher Kinsey have put it, imbuing mercenarism with stable and universal features is to “misunderstand its fluid and adaptive nature.”[39] Likewise, Malte Riemann regrets how mercenary literature renders the “otherness of the past invisible,”[40] and Helene Olsen alleges that one cannot say “anything meaningfully about ‘mercenaries’ that is true regardless of historical and socio-political context.”[41]

While many of the scholars challenging the mercenary moniker are political scientists, historical claims lie at the core of their arguments. In particular, they take issue with the universal nature of the two chief characteristics of mercenaries: namely, that mercenaries are ‘foreign’ and motivated by ‘self-interest.’ Applying the concept of foreignness to pre-Westphalian mercenarism is anachronistic, and projecting ‘self-interest’ onto actors purported to be mercenaries in past ages is similarly questionable.

The contemporary legal formulation of mercenaries as foreign actors relies on a decidedly modern and state-based conception of ‘foreign.’ Ettinger argues that defining mercenaries as lacking citizenship or residency to a state depends on a modern conception of the political space which enshrines a state-based conception of foreignness and presumes that states enjoy the exclusive right to wage war.[42] Applying this conception to the past is misleading at best. In the Middle Ages, sometimes characterized as a historical era in which mercenaries flourished, the idea of ‘foreignness’ was alien. Riemann outlines how Europe’s Middle Ages lacked a clear distinction between a “domestic” and “foreign” realm, between an “inside” and an “outside,” between a “public” and “private” sphere.[43]

Applying modern ideas of foreignness to the ancient world is a similarly anachronistic exercise. Riemann convincingly demonstrates how a modern understanding of the mercenary falls short upon analysis of the ancient Greek xenos, a contemporary designation often translated to ‘mercenary.’ Although a xenos always denoted an outsider, becoming one entailed a process of ritualized friendship, xenia, that joined the outsider into the community for which he was to fight. Through the institution of xenia, a xenos “had the right to be drawn into someone else’s community”; a nation state-centric notion of ‘foreignness’ clearly cannot apply to this group of fighters.[44]

Xenia involved the exchange of goods and services between individuals originating from separate social units, but it differs greatly from our modern conception of paying foreign soldiers. Where the latter is carried out in a mercantile spirit, the same cannot be said of the former since xenia created something like a “moral obligation” to the guest-friend.[45] The xenos, Riemann concludes, citing historian Hans van Wees, “‘was sought out and rewarded for a specific task, but he was still a friend, not merely a hired man.’”[46] Evidently, attributing a financial motive to the xenos would be to misunderstand the reality of its historical nature.

The idea that those soldiers deemed ‘mercenaries’ in the Middle Ages were motivated by self-interest is likewise ahistorical. A major complication is the fact that almost all actors offering military service in the era fought for pay, rendering any attempt to distinguish mercenaries from other combatants nigh impossible.[47] But on a deeper level, many medieval historians have argued that “a sense of self-interest did not exist” prior to the 18^th century, as human action was believed to be discerned from the parameters of divine Providence.[48] In other words, theoretical and methodological monism did not allow for acknowledgement of free will, a prerequisite to self-interest.

The problems with defining mercenaries as foreign and motivated by self-interest are not limited by their unsuitability to pre-modern or extra-European contexts. A few additional cases suffice to highlight the inadequacy of the definition given. Were Protestant Britons of the 1620s and 1630s who joined the religious wars in France, the Netherlands, and Germany mercenaries if they were motivated out of a desire to aid their continental coreligionists?[49] What about the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, border-crossing jihadists, or the Gurkhas?[50] Are members of a diaspora ‘foreign’ to a conflict involving their ethnic community? Can a soldier not be motivated by both attachment to a cause and by the promise of financial compensation? Answering these questions in either way via appeal to the standard definition leaves one on uncertain ground. Even the legal definition of mercenary provided in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions is so replete with holes that “any mercenary who cannot exclude himself from this definition should be shot – and his lawyer with him!”[51]

Evidently, the standard definition of ‘mercenary’ is rife with problems. Yet that begs the question: how did the definition – with all its negative connotations – emerge? It has already been noted that ‘foreignness’ and ‘self-interest’ are decidedly modern concepts embedded with statist ontology. And indeed, tracing the history of the processes, practices, and discourses around the rise of the Westphalian state order elucidates the origins of our contemporary antimercenary norm. Ultimately, that norm – and the standard definition of ‘mercenary’ in general – appeared in conjunction with the genesis of citizen armies at the time of the French Revolution.[52]

The American and French revolutions exemplified and catalyzed dramatic shifts in Western epistemology that had begun to take shape as part of Enlightenment thinking, at least according to John Lyons, building off the writings of Foucault.[53] It is only in that era, Lyons avows, that the ‘self’ came to be conceived as “that which chooses” and the idea of a self-interested individual became possible.[54] As self-interest is a fundamental characteristic of the mercenary, this epistemological shift is a crucial part of the story of the origin of a modern conception of ‘mercenary.’ There does, however, remain significant debate around when the idea of self-interest developed,[55] so it is more fruitful to investigate the less controversial historical consensus concerned with when the modern conception of ‘foreign’ combatants emerged.

Beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, an incipient idea about sovereignty gradually gained authority across Europe and thenceforth across the globe. That idea, enshrined in international law to this day, confirms that the nation state alone has a monopoly on legitimate violence. A narrative on the progressive modernization of states and armed forces towards this so-called Westphalian model hails the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as decisive breakthroughs to modernity, in which every citizen must be a soldier, and every soldier a citizen.[56] While in the 1570s 70% of the French royal army came from outside the kingdom, and during the Thirty Years War up to 80% of Swedish manpower came from abroad,[57] after the French Revolution, it was “considered correct that every man should fight for his own country and dishonorable that a man should serve under another flag.”[58]

Deborah Avant’s analysis of the rise of citizen armies demonstrates how the nationalization of war making transpired. The process was not achieved because it made militaries more effective[59]; rather, it succeeded because Enlightened reformers successfully argued such militaries would be or were more effective and their arguments gained traction following shocking military defeats.[60] As republican ideals and norms took hold over Europe, a new relationship between citizens and state developed.[61] Revolutionaries insisted every soldier be a citizen, and the idea of ‘foreign’ soldiers increasingly clashed with the ideal of national sovereignty and new concepts of neutrality emerging after 1815. As politics lurched left in the long nineteenth century, as for instance in the 1830 Revolution, mercenaries fell further and further out of style until their virtual disappearance around 1871 when Prussia’s astounding victory over France rendered conscription armies the norm.[62] The nationalization of military labor was thereby achieved, and mercenarism became treason to the nation.

It is clear that ‘mercenaries’ arose in a very particular context, one that laid the foundation for the current world order and its military norms. The universal nature of the ‘mercenary’ figure is evidently suspect, if not untenable. How, then, do scholars move forward? To be sure, many authors who employ the term mercenary are aware of its inadequacies. Indeed, Sarah Percy, a figure oft criticized for employing mercenary in a transhistorical fashion, agrees that it is problematic to define mercenaries as foreigners willing to fight for financial gain.[63] Anthony Mockler, also targeted for inappropriately employing the term ‘mercenary,’ is similarly aware of its shortcomings. He asks whether one is to say that the minority of fighters in Katanga “who fought for other reasons [than for money] were not mercenaries? That would be an absurdity. The professional too…fights for money.”[64]

The school of thought that these authors sanction as solution to the mercenary problem is to redefine the term. Percy defines the mercenary as one who not only engages in combat for financial gain and “without being under the control of a state or other legitimate authority,” but who also “engages in combat without a cause.”[65] The inclusion of this latter part of the definition addresses the mercenary status of actors like the Mujahideen or the members of the International Brigades, definitively excluding them from that characterization. Nevertheless, Percy’s new definition fails to address the problem associated with defining a group of fighters as motivated by financial gain. While she skirts the issue of describing mercenaries as ‘foreign,’ identifying “legitimate authority” in history may prove to have its own challenges, especially since the idea of such an authority is rooted in the Christian concept of ‘just war’ as well as in the statist view of history.[66]

Mockler, meanwhile, redefines mercenary to mean a combatant who is distinguished by “a devotion to war for its own sake.”[67] To Mockler, the professional soldier differs from a mercenary because he is devoted to the trappings of the military profession while the mercenary is devoted to the actual fighting. This new definition is attractive in one sense because it speaks to the heart of what has historically made mercenaries the object of so much disdain: their base reasons for killing other people. But while it is plausible that there have always been individuals who have devoted themselves to war for its own sake, that group aligns imperfectly with figures traditionally conceived of as mercenaries. Mockler’s own account of the history of mercenaries alludes to the imperial bodyguards of Byzantium, Charlemagne, and Persia, but certainly many of those men were motivated by other reasons than a devotion to war, and certainly many members of national armies were devoted to war for its own sake but could not plausibly be branded as ‘mercenaries.’ 

Ultimately, any redefinition of mercenary faces several overwhelming challenges. One difficulty would be attaining widespread scholarly acceptance of a new definition, a possible but trying undertaking. That undertaking would, however, almost certainly fail because no definition of mercenary that characterizes a transhistorical category of actors would be adequate. In the popular imagination, mercenaries encompass a host of unique actors: ancient Greek xenoi, Italian condottieri, German Landsknechte, the Byzantine Varangian Guard, French routiers/cotereaux, and Japanese samurai. Yet as has been discussed, distinguishing such a broad and diverse range of historical figures from other combatants is difficult, and grouping them into one category limits one’s ability to grasp their true historical natures.

For these reasons, employing a new term as a replacement for mercenary – a second school of thought – is equally unhelpful. Ettinger proposes the alternative “freelance militant” which, he writes, “avoids the pejorative connotations” of mercenary.[68] Additionally, the new term evades the ontological predisposition of ‘mercenary’ that defines the ethics of political violence in statist terms. Despite these advantages, however, “freelance militant” still suffers from inadequately addressing the historicity of the concept of “freelance” work. What does freelance mean in the ancient world? Can it be pinpointed to one group of combatants in the Middle Ages?

While Ettinger is attempting to revivify the universal nature of mercenaries by replacing the terminology, historian Peter H. Wilson rejects the transhistorical nature of that group of combatants and promotes a new appellation limited to a specific historical context. Rejecting the term ‘mercenary’ because of problematic aspects inherent to its definition, Wilson nevertheless stresses that the term may carry analytical utility in some contexts. When writing about Europe’s fiscal-military system from the early sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, he prefers employing the term “foreign soldier.”[69] The new term is more appropriate for his purposes since the limited context about which he writes evades transhistorical declarations. Further, it provides conceptual space to explore the meaning of ‘foreign.’ While ‘mercenary’ entails non-citizen or non-national fighters, Wilson offers a political definition of foreign meaning “alien to the jurisdiction of the war-making power” employing the soldiers in question.[70]

Although Wilson does not expound upon the contexts where ‘mercenary’ may be analytically useful, his narrowed focus on describing mercenary-like actors in a specific historical context exemplifies a third school of thought to addressing the mercenary problem. Influenced by the Cambridge School of intellectual history, the contextualist historicist approach investigates social phenomena and discourses within historical specificities of the past without assuming a continuity between past and present.[71] By studying actors retroactively or contemporaneously deemed ‘mercenaries’ in the context of their own temporal setting, one avoids anachronistic and presentist interpretations of history. One avoids pressing extra-European and pre-modern combatants into a universalizing Westphalian European concept.[72]

One proposed path forward is to move the focus of analysis away from specific actors and onto the contexts which rendered certain combatants problematic within their own historical specificities. Hinged on the idea that the mercenary is always accompanied by “a norm against mercenary use,” this proposal promises to recenter actors into their own particularities while also maintaining a transhistorical link.[73]

According to this approach, therefore, rather than studying characteristics of the Greek xenos alone, historians would prioritize explaining how the xenos came to be stigmatized in its own time. Riemann affirms that by the 5^th century BC, the communal structure of the polis had superimposed itself upon older, personal networks based on ritualized friendship.[74] Xenia gradually came to be equated with bribery and, concurrently, the decision to not accept gifts came to be viewed as a hallmark of the ideal citizen.

In the Middle Ages, too, a group of actors can be distinguished due to their being considered morally problematic by broader society. With ultimate authority in the medieval period, the Church determined what was and was not justified killing, and the excommunication of mercenaries by the Lateran Council of 1179 singles out the routiers/cotereaux.[75] These bands of free companies terrorized the French countryside and distinguished themselves from combatants who might otherwise be considered mercenaries because they fought for themselves rather than fighting on behalf of lords or kings. Whether a fighter was a mercenary in the medieval period, therefore, depended on whom he fought for rather than on his status as foreign or self-interested.[76]

If the rules of jus ad bellum discriminate between fighters who can justifiably kill and those who cannot, or mercenaries, then as norms change those who qualify as mercenaries also change. Departing the medieval era, Italian humanists came to enshrine the idea of the city and civic spirit. Since the condottieri prevented citizens from having to support the cause of the state, they became mercenaries, objects of moral condemnation.[77] The religious leader Zwingli, too, came to condemn Swiss mercenaries for sacrificing divine human souls for mere financial gain after witnessing the Battle of Marignano, in which the Swiss lost 10,000 men.[78]

Through this contextualist historicist approach which centers analysis on why certain groups of fighters were problematized within their own historical specificities, one is able to better appreciate both the actors in question and the societies in which they existed. Riemann’s analysis of the Landsknechte challenges that group’s classification as mercenaries according to the conventional definition while revealing the moral problems they raised in their own time. Lasting from at least the Flemish Revolts (1482–1493) until the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the Landsknechte fought in countless European battlefields, earning both immense prestige and pronounced condemnation.[79] In the Renaissance world they inhabited, a normative framework endorsed a tripartite division of society into those who worked (laboratores), those who prayed (oratores), and those who fought (bellatores). Additionally, the Renaissance episteme insisted on unity and stability, ordering things according to their resemblances to one another with the chain of resemblance extending from base matter all the way to God.[80]

In such a context, the Landsknechte proved problematic. For one thing, members were drawn from all three estates of society and their ritualistic entry into a new community of Landsknechte challenged the tripartite division of the Renaissance world.[81] More, their attire undermined the socio-political order of the Renaissance world. Dressed in flamboyant, brightly colored pantaloons and puffy, slashed sleaves made of extravagant material, the Landsknechte adopted expensive dress that had formerly only been the prerogative of those at the top of the social hierarchy.[82] Ultimately, as Riemann convincingly argues, the Landsknechte were not problematized in their own time for their ‘foreignness’ or their pecuniary self-interest, but rather they were characterized as guilty of “abandoning an appointed station in life, neglecting communal obligations, and thereby violating the divinely ordained order.”[83]

These past examples of combatants who were stigmatized in their own time demonstrate the value of the contextualist historicist approach to revealing the historical reality of figures subsumed under the broad brush of the term ‘mercenary.’ But it is troubling to continue to label these combatants as mercenaries based on the mere fact that they were problematized within their own historical and socio-political contexts. One issue is that there is disagreement about the extent to which such groups were truly considered threats to the normative moral systems in which they existed. Mockler, for instance, contends that neither ancient Greeks[84] nor Renaissance Italians[85] stigmatized the xenoi or condottieri. Additionally, other types combatants than those deemed ‘mercenaries’ today were also problematized in their own time. The Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, faced deep reproach in the decades leading up to their disbandment by Sultan Mahmud II but have not been characterized as ‘mercenaries.’

Helene Olsen’s analysis of the dialectical construction of mercenaries in late 18^th century Britain reveals a further problem with identifying as mercenaries those groups of combatants problematized in their own historical circumstances. She demonstrates how British parliamentarians dialectically constructed the same group of hired German soldiers as acceptable in the Seven Years War but then as morally transgressive ‘mercenaries’ in the American Revolutionary War.[86] The reason for the discrepancy is that the former conflict was a war against a foreign power while the latter was imagined as a civil war. Employing foreign soldiers to fight British subjects was “disgraceful…unjust and unnatural” in the words of MP David Hartley[87]; employing such soldiers to defend against the French, however, was morally permissible. If an effectively identical group of combatants is sometimes deemed ‘mercenaries’ and sometimes not, then hoping to identify ‘mercenary’ groups in history by means of whether they were problematized in their own time or not is impossible. That is, unless one is to claim that Hessians in 1756 were not mercenaries but those in 1776 were.

The approach to identifying mercenaries outlined above certainly offers insight into what different societies viewed as just or unjust fighting. But it is considerably less helpful in identifying ‘mercenaries’ in history, suffering as it is from an adherence to the belief that mercenaries are transhistorical insofar as they represent groups of combatants stigmatized in their own contexts. Ultimately, by shedding that adherence, the contextualist historicist approach to identifying ‘mercenaries’ in history does expose the proper way to employ that term in scholarship. In particular, the term ‘mercenary’ should be limited in its application to the context in which it developed, which is to say between about 1790 and 1870 as national states consolidated and citizen armies became the norm. That process, outlined earlier in this paper, constructed both the mercenary and the modern antimercenary norm.

How, then, should scholarship treat those groups of combatants long considered mercenaries? In cases such as those of the xenoi, the condottieri, the Landsknechte, and the Samurai, it is advisable to follow the approach which Wilson advocates. Namely, historians and political scientists should use historically defensible appellations free from the modern connotations entrenched in the term ‘mercenary.’ In so doing, scholars would be able to make more accurate conclusions in their analyses – conclusion which are neither ahistorical nor presentist. But where does this leave PMSCs and claims about the demise of the state-centric order? Today, evoking mercenaries or asserting the rise of ‘neomedievalism’ may serve some utility: it may help journalists get their articles published, for instance.[88] More seriously, doing so may be useful for opening a productive dialogue about how modern warfare is changing. However, earnestly announcing the return of the medieval mercenary in the guise of the private military contractor is erroneous and should be avoided, both by political scientists and by historians.

This article began by providing the conventional definition of ‘mercenary’ employed both in scholarship and in international law. That definition posits the mercenary as a transhistorical figure characterized by pecuniary self-interest and foreignness to the conflicts in which he takes part. Yet a critical examination of putative mercenary groups in history exposes the inadequacies of the standard definition. It was only around the time of the French Revolution when the modern concepts of ‘self-interest’ and ‘foreignness’ emerged, as the Westphalian state achieved ultimate legitimacy over monopolizing the use of force and as states enshrined republican-style citizen armies as the ideal. Aware of the deficiencies in the consensus definition, scholars have proposed several paths forward. One school of thought seeks to redefine ‘mercenary’ itself, while a second school hopes to replace ‘mercenary’ with another label. Yet such paths do not effectively address the core challenge: the impossibility of identifying a transhistorical group of combatants that encompasses groups today deemed ‘mercenaries.’ A final school of thought pursues a contextualist historicist approach to identify and historicize the mercenary. This last path forward succeeds when it rejects any lingering attachment to transhistorical assertions and instead limits the use of ‘mercenary’ to a narrow period defined by the rise of a Westphalian worldview and state-centered moral system. By historicizing the ‘mercenary,’ one cautions against the uncritical transfer of analytical concepts across time and unsettles what is considered normal in our contemporary framing of the world: its division into public and private, civil and military, and just and unjust.

 

 

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