The draft and draftees in Italy, 1861-1914 Marco Rovinello According to the Oxford English Dictionary , conscription is “compulsory en- listment for state service, typically into the armed forces”, while a conscript and a volunteer are respectively “a person enlisted compulsorily” and “a per- son who freely enrolls for military service rather than being conscripted”. 1 Seemingly straightforward terms like these become, however, much trickier in the eye of the historian, who is always striving to historicize and compare apparently ubiquitous taxonomies and phenomena. This chapter faces both challenges starting from the nineteenth-century Italian conscription experience. It will brief ly analyze the draft system of pre-unif ication states, and then will reconstruct the evolution of Italian recruitment laws and practices from La Marmora’s draft act (1854) to the eve of World War I. On the one hand, attention will be paid to the supposed shift from a professional-dynastic militia toward a draft-based army, in order to verify its linearity and the universality of Italian conscription. The chapter will show in particular how much the draft changed according to current political concerns and internal security needs. At the same time, it will highlight some constants in Italian conscription, such as the discriminatory nature of the system and the government’s ambiguous attitude toward draftees. On the other hand, the chapter will approach military service in terms of labor relations between the army and reenlisted people. From this perspective, it will investigate who opted for soldiering as a form of employ- ment and why, while trying to establish to what extent forced/voluntary and commodif ied/noncommodif ied military labor can be identif ied and disaggregated in the experience of nineteenth-century Italian soldiers. A nation-state in progress: the long road to unif ication 1814-1858 Although most pre-unif icat ion Italian states relied on semiprofessional dynastic militias and mercenary troops, the postunif ication draft did not start from scratch, and its history is inseparably linked to that of the previ- ous recruitment systems in force on the peninsula. 1 See http://oxforddictionaries.com (accessed 23 March 2011).