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”. 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.

This chapter faces both challenges starting from the nineteenth-century Italian conscription experience. It will briefly analyze the draft system of pre-unification states, and then will reconstruct the evolution of Italian recruitment laws and practices from La Marmora's draft act (1854) to the eve of World War I. On the one hand, attention will be paid to the supposed shift from a professional-dynastic militia toward a draft-based army, in order to verify its linearity and the universality of Italian conscription. The chapter will show in particular how much the draft changed according to current political concerns and internal security needs. At the same time, it will highlight some constants in Italian conscription, such as the discriminatory nature of the system and the government's ambiguous attitude toward draftees. On the other hand, the chapter will approach military service in terms of labor relations between the army and reenlisted people. From this perspective, it will investigate who opted for soldiering as a form of employment and why, while trying to establish to what extent forced/voluntary and commodified/noncommodified military labor can be identified and disaggregated in the experience of nineteenth-century Italian soldiers.

A nation-state in progress: the long road to unification 1814-1858

Although most pre-unification Italian states relied on semiprofessional dynastic militias and mercenary troops, the postunification draft did not start from scratch, and its history is inseparably linked to that of the previous recruitment systems in force on the peninsula.

Starting in 1815, roughly 30,000 Italian-speaking subjects from Lombardy and Venetia were recruited yearly into the Habsburg army (8.5-10 per cent of the peacetime force), and normally served for eight years in Italian garrisons. In the Duchies of Modena and Parma, the law stated that young men were obligated to fulfill their military service in person. In practice, however, the armies were composed primarily of volunteers and substitutes – namely, men paid to replace draftees in the service.