ABSTRACT
The second half of the seventeenth century saw significant changes in the structures of the most important military organizations on the European continent. Collectively, these changes are commonly labelled as the introduction of standing armies. These changes certainly had a deep impact on the terms as well as the conditions of military labour. However, it needs to be discussed whether these developments should be understood as a categorical transformation, putting military labour in a typological framework of its own, or whether it would be more appropriate to stress the aspects of continuity and to embed these aspects of change in a more evolutionary interpretative framework. This chapter will argue that several changes of particular importance altered the face of military labour so that it hardly could be equated with the classical era of mercenaries in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, the components were still tied to various traditions and did not constitute a completely innovative system that could be compared with the later transformations initiated by the French Revolution – though even the revolutionaries, of course, could not avoid being based on existing forms of military institutions.
