The Prisoner of War and the Eighteenth-Century Prison

Extract

Britain and France were at war with each other for over half of the long eighteenth century. This period of sustained conflict produced immense changes, in both countries, in the character of the state and the course of economic development. Yet one of the most obvious ways in which contemporaries would have encountered the war was in the presence of large numbers of prisoners of war held by their country. Early in the century there were thousands of such captives, and by its end they numbered in the tens of thousands. Renaud Morieux takes this neglected topic for the focus of his multifaceted study. These prisoners created challenges that were legal and diplomatic, as well as administrative and financial. The citizens of each country found themselves having to learn to live with captives of a nation with which they were at war. In a work that is both theoretically informed and exhaustively researched, Morieux offers fresh insight into the consequences of war for European society.