The shadow agents of war are those men, women, children and other animals who sustain war by means of their preparatory, auxiliary, infrastructural, or supplementary labour. Shadow agents often work in the zone between visibility and invisibility, existing in the shadows of history at moments when the crisis of war tends rather to police and polarize human categories and distinctions. This collection of essays contributes to the history of these obscured actors: women in combat, in defence of home and hearth, acting as foragers, but also as military managers; heralds and bureaucrats in key organizational roles; ancillary service workers such as armourers, merchants and arms dealers; and traditionally marginalized groups such as refugees, slaves, and animals forced into war-related activity. It is a history which is largely unwritten but can contribute to studies of agency, to the vexed and complex relationships between state, society and war, civil and military spheres, and to the history of war more broadly.

By highlighting the work of those who crossed between civil and military areas of life the contributors to this volume map out a largely hidden world and in doing so complicate models of the relationship between the soldiers and civilians which have underpinned master narratives of the rise of the nation-state, the militarization of society and the exercise of ‘total’ war. Broadly speaking, how do the histories of para- or non-state actors in war challenge the primary role assigned to formal state institutions, including centralized bureaucracy, in the exercise of violence? To what extent do the shadow agents of war affect or respond to military institutions and to the broader militarization of society? How is the boundary between soldier and civilian constructed or complicated by these shadow agents and how might this shed light on the exercise of warfare? Indeed, how might this evidence answer the question: ‘What was the military in the early modern period?’

The essays in this volume have been written with two distinct, but overlapping, research themes in mind. The first theme focuses on labour in recognition of the fact that war demands so much work. In addition to the labour of soldiers, the war machine has often been driven by the labour of animal bodies and by the bodies of builders, sappers, sex workers, and others.