Throughout the nineteenth century states enhanced the extent and depth of their coercive capacity while also expanding the privileges and numbers of citizens. Rulers developed increasingly efficient and centralized administrative apparatuses to monitor and extract manpower from the countryside, but they had to appease citizens who were also voters and to ensure the cooperation (or at least avoid the resistance) of those whose services they sought, whether voters or not. Nearly all the European, North American, and Antipodean states – democratic or autocratic – devised new equilibrium policies to define the mutual obligations of citizens and government actors. In terms of military policy, the problem for modernizing states was how to develop an effective fighting force more embedded in national society than the absolutist armies of Europe or the local militias of the new countries of North America and the Antipodes.

The substantive focus of this chapter is on the disappearance of various forms of buying one's way out of military service if conscripted: commutation, a fee paid to government; and substitution and replacement, payment to someone else to take one's place.