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.

摘要

雇佣军的历史似乎与有组织的战争本身的历史差不多。从有记载的历史开始到最近私人军事公司的兴起，雇佣军似乎是一个历史常数，它使学者们能够就世界历史中的武力组织提出宏大的历史主张。本文对这种观点提出警告，相反认为，由于不加批判地接受雇佣军是跨历史事件，未能对雇佣军的概念进行充分的历史化和语境化，从而影响了对该行为者的分析。在历史主义语境方法的指导下，我展示了雇佣军概念的两个基本特征，即威斯特伐利亚对“外国”的理解和对“自利”的现代解释，在 18 世纪之前的时期是如何缺失的^世纪。我通过分析古希腊和中世纪的“雇佣兵”来证明这种缺失，揭示了与我们当代对雇佣兵的理解相比，这些演员在他们自己的历史背景下的问题化如何显示出根本的差异。通过这样做，本文提高了对这一看似普遍的概念的历史特殊性的认识，并警告不要将这一概念不加批判地向后投射到过去。