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Columbia Encyclopedia entry: conscription

Conscription, compulsory enrollment of personnel for service in the armed forces. Obligatory service in the armed forces has existed since ancient times in many cultures, including the samurai in Japan, warriors in the Aztec Empire, citizen militiamen in ancient Greece and Rome, and aristocrats and their peasants or yeomen during the Middle Ages in Europe. In England, compulsory military service was employed on the local level in the Anglo-Saxon fyrd as early as the 9th cent. In the 16th cent. Machiavelli argued that every able-bodied man in a nation was a potential soldier and could by means of conscription be required to serve in the armed forces. Conscription in the modern sense of the term dates from 1793, when the Convention of the French Republic raised an army of 300,000 men from the provinces. A few years later, conscription enabled Napoleon I to build his tremendous fighting forces. Following Napoleon's example, Muhammad Ali of Egypt raised a powerful army in the 1830s. Compulsory peacetime recruitment was introduced (1811–12) by Prussia. Mass armies, raised at little cost by conscription, completely changed the scale of battle by the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The institution of conscription, which was increasingly justified by statesmen on grounds of national defense and economic stimulation, spread to other European nations and Japan in the 19th cent. At the outbreak of World War I, Great Britain adopted conscription and used it again in World War II; it was abolished in 1962. Though little used in the United States prior to the Civil War, conscription was used by both sides in that war and in most large-scale U.S. wars since, often with great controversy. Most of the important military powers of the 20th cent. have used conscription to raise their armed forces. China, because of its large population, has a policy of selective conscription. Impressment is the forcible mustering of recruits. It lacks the scope and bureaucratic form of conscription. Many countries throughout the world, such as Israel, have mandatory military service; a few allow for alternate civilian service or release for conscientious objectors. See also selective service.

Wikipedia search results for: Conscription

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Conscription, also known as the draft or national service, is the compulsory enrollment of people and the term typically refers to their enlistment in a country's military. Conscription, Merriam-Webster Online. It is known by various names, for example, the most recent conscription program in the United States was known colloquially as "the draft". Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues to the present day. It was used by the Royal Navy between 1664 and 1814 but was called impressment, or "the press". Pages 16 - 19 Conscription, sometimes termed compulsory service, usually enrolls young men of a given age, commonly 18 to 26,...more »

Columbia Encyclopedia search results: conscription

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draft riots
Draft riots, in the American Civil War, mob action to protest unfair Union conscription. The Union Conscription Act of Mar. 3, 1863, provided that all able-bodied males between the ages of 20 ...
impressment
Impressment, forcible enrollment of recruits for military duty. Before the establishment of conscription, many countries supplemented their militia and mercenary troops by impressment. In Engl...
census
Census, periodic official count of the number of persons and their condition and of the resources of a country. In ancient times, among the Jews and Romans, such enumeration was mainly for tax...
militia
Militia, military organization composed of citizens enrolled and trained for service in times of national emergency. Its ranks may be filled either by enlistment or conscription. An early prot...
Brown, Joseph Emerson
Brown, Joseph Emerson, 1821–94, U.S. public official, b. Pickens District, S.C. As governor of Georgia during the Civil War, Brown quarreled with Jefferson Davis over conscription and the susp...
banner system
Banner system, Manchu conscription system. Companies of Manchu warriors were grouped (1601) into brigades, each with a distinctive banner. The banner system integrated former tribal units into...
Ralston, James Layton
Ralston, James Layton, 1881–1948, Canadian cabinet minister, b. Nova Scotia. In the first Mackenzie King administration, he was minister of national defense (1926–30); in the second Mackenzie ...
selective service
Selective service, in U.S. history, term for conscription.Conscription was established (1863) in the U.S. Civil War, but proved unpopular (see draft riots). The law authorized release from ser...
Boyen, Hermann von
Boyen, Hermann von, 1771–1848, Prussian field marshal. After the Prussian defeat by Emperor Napoleon I and the disastrous treaties of Tilsit in 1807 (see Sovetsk), he assisted Scharnhorst in t...
Dillon, John
Dillon, John, 1851–1927, Irish nationalist. A supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell, he entered Parliament in 1880 and was arrested several times for his advocacy of boycotting and agrarian agi...

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