Armies recruited marginal peoples to minimize political risk to the monarchy

Evidence

In the armies of the sixteenth century, native recruits distributed among the foreign mercenaries were also chosen with an eye to minimizing the political and social risks of the monarchy and its allied nobility. In France, the army “drew its volunteers from the least ‘national,’ most nondescript types, the dregs of the poorest classes,” Kiernan informs us. In Spain, the hills of Aragon and the Basque provinces served a similar function. In Britain, until the mid-eighteenth century, the Scottish Highlands were the most frequent sites of recruitment; and the Welsh soldier’s skills became legendary. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 192

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of state-building and center-vs-periphery dynamics — recruiting from internal margins to control risk prefigures how capital would later draw labor from colonized and racialized populations.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how states and empires repeatedly staffed their violent arms from internal ‘others’ — from Scottish Highlanders to French Foreign Legion — and what this reveals about the logic of racialized military labor.