For a long time, labour historians have not regarded the activities of soldiers as work. Work was defined as an activity yielding surplus value and the efforts of soldiers were seen as being essentially destructive rather than productive. This assumption that military work is necessarily destructive and does not produce surplus value is debatable for at least two reasons. The first is that soldiers everywhere spend far more time in barracks than on campaign and, while they are garrisoned, they have very often been employed as cheap labour in agriculture or in building works and road repair. Many of the greatest infrastructural works in countries as far apart as France and China – city walls, dikes, canals – would never have been realized except for the massive use of military manpower. Soldiers have frequently been employed in the wake of natural disasters, in which case their labour should be regarded as similar to that of nurses and ambulance drivers. The second, more profound reason is that, as Peter Way has argued, the end result of warfare, if successful, is that surplus value for states and their elites is created through territorial gain or economic advantage.

Whatever the merits of the argument, the result of the view that what a soldier does is not work has been that military labour has not become the object of research in the same way as the labour of, for instance, dock-workers, textile workers, miners, or agricultural workers. One of the very first people to resist this approach was Jan Lucassen of the International Institute of Social History (IISH). As early as 1994, he considered the “proletarian experience” of mercenaries in early modern Europe. That was a pioneering effort, because it is only very recently that the topic of military labour has begun to receive attention from social historians. In 2003, Bruce Scates published “The Price of War: Labour Historians Confront Military History”, in the Australian journal Labour History, and this journal has since continued to show an interest in the subject with the publications of Nathan Wise. However, the scope of the Australian publications had been limited in time and space (mainly the Australian volunteer army of the First World War).