Renaud Morieux. The Society of Prisoners

While many scholars have followed in the footsteps of Michel Foucault, Gresham Sykes, and Erving Goffman in studying the history of prisons and prisoners, few historians have analyzed these concepts from the perspective of international law or war captivity. Renaud Morieux’s The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century seeks to address this gap through a transnational, comparative approach that examines prisoners of war in France and Britain’s metropoles and colonies. Morieux argues that war captivity offers a lens to understand the complex, ambiguous nature of the law of nations in the eighteenth century, the development of the early modern state, and the entanglement of prison societies and outside local communities. The Society of Prisoners is organized around three key questions regarding prisoners of war, which Morieux addresses over six chapters and an epilogue. The first question is a definitional one: What was a prisoner of war in the eighteenth century from a legal standpoint? Morieux devotes most of his first chapter to explaining how the “prisoner of war” compromised a contingent and ever-changing category in the eighteenth century. “At any given time,” Morieux explains, “the prisoner of war could signify different things for different people” (6). The vocabulary of “foreigner,” “national,” “combatant,” and “noncombatant” was just emerging in this period. Delineations between the categories of prisoner of war, penal prisoner, slave, and pirate only became more complex when international wars intersected with civil wars, when wars occurred at sea, or in the immediate aftermath of peace agreements. Overall, Morieux argues that aside from what canonical treatises might have proposed, there existed no neat coherence of certain international legal principles and definitions in actuality. Normative legal categories fail to describe the social complexity of war captivity, and the state was not the only protagonist that mattered in this context. Instead, Morieux suggests, officials of various standings determined the administrative category of prisoner of war, while nonstate actors and the prisoners themselves “maintained the capacity to shake off the labels that were applied to them, and sometimes created new ones” (76).

Ancient history · Criminology · Political science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies