Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats

Philippe Rogger, Dr (2011), is Senior Scientist at the University of Bern. He has published on mercenary trade, elite formation, diplomacy and political unrest in early modern Switzerland, including Geld, Krieg und Macht: Pensionsherren, Söldner und eidgenössische Politik in den Mailänderkriegen, 1494-1516 (2015).André Holenstein, Dr (1989), was Professor of Older Swiss History and Comparative Regional History at the University of Bern. His research interests include collective memory and historical thinking, the cultural history of economic knowledge, administrative history, constitutional history, social history, and transnationality in Swiss history. He is the author of Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte (2014).

""Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats” offers a compelling framework for rethinking the relationships between war, state formation, and society in the early modern world. By foregrounding the military entrepreneur as a central actor, the volume illuminates an underexplored field of inquiry and provides conceptual and empirical tools for further research. The history of warfare should no longer be confined to sovereign decisions or institutional reforms; it must include those who mobilized resources, negotiated risks, and made war a viable (and often profitable) enterprise. On this front, the volume achieves a significant historiographical advance.”Rafael Torres-Sanchez,Universidad de Navarra, in H-Soz-Kult, 10.09.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-151082.

• AcknowledgementsFigures and TablesNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Mobilising Resources for War: Early Modern Military Entrepreneurs and Their Transnational Fields of ActionPhilippe Rogger, André HolensteinPART 1: Chances and Challenges: Actors and Forms of the EnterpriseSECTION: Military and Non-Military Entrepreneurs1 Logistics, Politics, and War: The Military Entrepreneur Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and Supplying the Army from the Swiss Confederation in the Thirty Years’ WarAstrid Ackermann2 Feeding Breisach: Hans Ludwig von Erlach’s Fortress Management and Military Enterprise in the Thirty Years’ WarPhilippe Rogger3 “Quelques malhonêtes particuliers”? Army Suppliers and War Commissaries as Profiteers of the Seven Years’ WarMarian Füssel4 Intergenerationality as a Challenge: The Swiss Guard Company of the Erlach Family, 1639–1770Benjamin Ryser5 Beyond Gender Boundaries: Women’s Involvement in Military Careers in the Swiss Foreign Service (18th–19th Centuries)Jasmina CornutSECTION: Public-Private Partnership, Feudal Patterns, and the Relativity of ‘State’ and ‘Private’6 Military Enterprise and Civil War: Private Armies and Warfare in France around the Fronde, 1641–52David Parrott7 Merchant of Death: Maximilien Titon (1632–1711) and the Supply of Arms in Louis XIV’s FranceGuy Rowlands8 The Officer as Military Entrepreneur in Miles Perpetuus: Examples from the Armies of the Empire 1650–1800Alexander QuerengässerPART 2: Transnational Fields of ActionSECTION: Networks, Hubs, Markets9 A Polity Full of Contractors: The Swiss Cantons and Their Business of War (15th to 19th Centuries)André Holenstein and Philippe Rogger10 The Republic of Geneva as a Fiscal-Military Hub, 1685–1709: Finance, Information, and EspionageJohn Condren11 At the Crossroads of Population and Capital: Recruiting in Geneva for the French Service under the Ancien RégimeSébastien Dupuis12 Foreign Military Labour in Early Modern EuropePeter H. Wilson13 Civilian Trade and War Business in the Early Modern MediterraneanThe Case of Genoese Military Transporters in the War of Spanish SuccessionMichael Paul Martoccio14 Military Money Men: The Toils of Entanglement and the Business Model of Harley & Drummond, Remittance ContractorsTim NeuSECTION: Diplomacy and Patronage15 From Private Entrepreneurship to State MonopolyContracting Swiss Soldiers for Dutch Service under Ancien Régime Fiscal-Military Practices (1693–1829)Michael Depreter16 A Career Before the Career? On the Emergence of the ‘Créature’ Peter StuppaKatrin Keller17 The Besenval Family: Constants and Changes in Its Military Entrepreneurial Activities (1650–1800)Julien GrandComment: The Sinew of WarRegula SchmidIndex