Drafting Italy: Conscription and conscripts from 1814 to 1914

The military and the civil sphere are partially overlapping and inextricably interconnected. Consequently, studying a crucial topic of the Italian military history such as conscription means studying a relevant part of the Italian modern history tout court. In fact, the book’s main purpose is not only to understand how the Italian recruitment systems changed over time, but also how they fitted in the political-institutional and socio-economic framework in pre- and post-unification Italy. Moreover, the book combines top-down and bottom-up perspectives. Conscription implementation and the military service are investigated not only through recruitment laws, public debates, regulations, military codes, and COs’ memoirs, but also through ego-documents, folklore materials (ex-voto, nursery rhymes, tales, games, etc.), deeds, and other sources that can shed some light on conscripts’ and civilians’ perception of the military obligations and the life under the flags. Last but not least, the book analyses the Italian conscription in the light of the transnational worldwide circulation of recruitment models, practices, and military cultures in the 19th and early 20th century. Actually, this work is not a transnational history book. Nevertheless, it adopts a comparative approach to the Italian case study, which enables me to put the Italian recruitment policies, military pedagogy, and everyday military life into the wider context of other European and extra-European recruitment systems, military cultures, and debates on the composition/tasks of the modern standing armies.