War as Business

Paper Summary:

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the phenomenon of wealthy communities that hire soldiers to fight its wars, one that is not so confined to the past, as we'd like to believe. Modern day companies offering similar services like Executive Outcomes which guards important economic and diamond mining interests in South Africa or the lure of U.S. Armed Forces' bonus money and paid education primarily targeting recruits on the lower steps of the American economic ladder reminds us that materially all wealthy societies not just the mercantile Italian cities - will eventually seek to outsource and pay someone else to do the dirty business of killing.

From the Paper:

""The priests and other citizens of Italy being unused to military service," laments Niccolo Machiavelli over the martial decline of his people in his famous treatise The Prince, "they started to hire outsiders as soldiers" (82). It was perhaps impossible for him and other Renaissance commentators to fully comprehend the social and economic reasons why the medieval Italians began to hire foreign mercenaries to fight."

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