ABSTRACT
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, conscription is “compulsory enlistment for state service, typically into the armed forces”, while a conscript and a volunteer are respectively “a person enlisted compulsorily” and “a person who freely enrolls for military service rather than being conscripted”. 1 Seemingly straightforward terms like these become, however, much trickier in the eye of the historian, who is always striving to historicize and compare apparently ubiquitous taxonomies and phenomena.
