Description: In the long nineteenth century, officers were held as prisoners of war, but it meant pawning personal honour in exchange for freedom of movement and other privileges-in-captivity. Jasper Heinzen investigates how captives, statesmen, and humanitarians understood honour in this context, and the implications on our understanding of early modern war.
Review Quotes: "Heinzen's book offers such a rich collection of details and such an intriguing argument that, for me, it is a must read in the history of prisoners of war." -- John A. Lynn II, International Review of Social History
"Prisoners of War and Military Honour is not an easy book to review. It is scholarly in the very best sense of the word. Its author, Jasper Heinzen, has consulted archives in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. He has the linguistic competence to match this geographical range, and he constantly probes his sources, testing them not only comparatively, but also against a vast array of secondary literature. The result is a range of aperçus which make for original insights and ensure that the book should attract readers with wide interests. It may have war at its heart but it is not military history in any narrow sense. It is also about common cultures, and their readiness to use violence on some occasions and not on others." -- Hew Strachan, First World War Studies"Jasper Heinzen has produced an impressive history of the role of honour in European warfare. ... It is rigorous, scholarly, and an excellent example of the kinds of insights that can be derived from an ambitiously comparative and multilingual study that transcends narrow national frameworks." -- Mark Condos, International Journal of Military History and Historiography"Heinzen's book, then, is not only an extremely important contribution to POW studies, but also has wider implications, some of them immediately obvious and others requiring further thought and exploration." -- Matthew Stibbe, English Historical Review