Though fighting is clearly hard work, historians have not paid much attention to warfare and military service as forms of labor. This collection does just that, bringing together the usually disparate fields of military and labor history. The contributors - including Robert Johnson, Frank Tallett, and Gilles Veinstein - undertake the first systematic comparative analysis of military labor across Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East, and Asia. In doing so, they explore the circumstances that have produced starkly different systems of recruiting and employing soldiers in different parts of the globe over the last five hundred years.