Within the three military environments analysed in this book, certain moral standards and values held by the rank and file developed into a moral economy that was, over time, legitimized by officers and accepted as standard practice. As employees of the military, as citizen-soldiers paid to do a job, those rank-and-file men expected certain core principles to be honoured by their officers. Officers would respect and maintain unit cohesion and esprit de corps; and, as much as was practical in the environment of war, they would feed, clothe, and equip their men, and keep them out of unnecessarily risky situations. To the rank-and-file men of those military forces, the importance of that moral economy was so central to the nature of their agreement or contract with authorities that a breach was simply unfathomable and unconscionable. These men were in an extremely dangerous line of work: they frequently risked their lives and suffered extreme hardships, but they typically accepted those risks as part of the demands of military life. They would go into a dangerous battle if called on, endure enemy fire, and accept the hardships of military life; but they would not tolerate a breach in those core principles of the moral economy.

Most previous studies of moral economies have focused on a single environment, be it a peasant community, a workplace, or an economic system. In contrast, this study has sought to compare three different military environments in three different eras. In doing so, it has shown how moral economies developed in those environments, and how they were fundamentally the result of a negotiation between the fundamentally civilian expectations of rank-and-file recruits and their military authorities. New recruits brought their civilian values and attitudes into the military, and they borrowed heavily from their civilian principles in developing their understanding of the military moral economy. While this was a new environment for those men, the foundation of that military moral economy was inherited from those established traditional civilian expectations of the right to subsistence and survival, and thus, the military moral economy developed quite rapidly. Within each of those military environments, the moral economy functioned much as it did in civil societies.