Early modern Central Europe was densely populated, violent, and contained numerous political entities. It was therefore an ideal exporter of mercenaries throughout Europe and around the world. Der Krieg der Anderen analyzes German subsidy troops between the aftermath of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the American Revolution (1765–1783), including in the service of the Republic of Venice. Subsidy troops are troops who are raised, trained, and equipped as a unit on behalf of a third party in exchange for some form of reimbursement, such as money or political alliance. Although mercenaries in the broad sense reemerged as an object of study after 2002, much modern historiography has argued that the role of subsidy treaties for German principalities has been overestimated. Der Krieg der Anderen, like Friedrike Baer's recent Hessians [2022], disagrees. This book is worth reading not only for its exploration of seventeenth-century Italian war-making and ties between Italy and Central Europe, which are understudied, but also for its analysis of social networks of mercenary officers. Although this richly informative work fails to prove one element of its central thesis, the whole remains worthwhile reading.

Early-modernists have been noticing similarities between the early-modern period and the contemporary world for a while. These similarities influence Flurschütz da Cruz's argument, which frames the actions of mercenary officers in terms of social networks and their access to resources. Human beings are also a resource: since formal drill was rare in Europe in the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, political entities prized experienced soldiers. The international market in these men was glutted after the Thirty Years War (110), which suggests that war's emergence as a political option in late seventeenth century international relations might have been a side effect of manpower's availability (112). The siege of Candia began when it did in part because Venice hired soldiers as European armies demobilized. In short, the soldier market influenced strategic calculations.

Flurschütz da Cruz's turn to the social network as the object of analysis puts him at the leading edge of early-modern conflict studies. He argues that networks of minor nobility were essential as “idea-makers, brokers, enablers, translators, displayers, and exporters of innovative violence” (23). Within a transnational context that was structurally similar to the present day in the freedom of action afforded some individuals, Flurschütz da Cruz depicts these marginal nobles as “influencers” of war: they facilitated communication between the political entities from which they came and those for which they raised and led troops. Yet these people were never truly free agents; they were symbiotic with states, raising subsidy payments for their homelands and troops for their employers. Knit together by ties of blood, friendship, and marriage, transnational networks of minor nobility flanked and strengthened the network of the European high aristocracy (520).

In the book's most compelling section, Flurschütz da Cruz demonstrates the importance of officer social networks through interlocking case studies of Peter Melander (1589–1648), Ferdinand Geizkofler (1592–1653) Christof Martin von Degenfeld (1599–1653) and his children, and Claus Dietrich von Sperreuth (c.1600–1653), who formed networks of patronage which raised troops for Venice out of small German political entities like Württemberg. These colonels not only knew and aided one another, but many of the people in their networks were related to one another. Compared to the military situation in Central Europe or the Low Countries, the forces they prepared for Venice were minuscule: assembled at great cost and negotiated with great care, one regiment at a time. Flurschütz da Cruz introduces a subtle study of class and different kinds of capital when he discusses the precarious positions of the men and women in these networks. German officers in Venetian employ received reputation, honor, and titles, but no land. The actual officering (as it was most of the time during the Thirty Years War) was a money loser; what these officers got was social capital, which over time improved the chances that their networks could carry them into the families of elite land-owning nobility. The cost, however, included the death in war of almost every male Degenfeld(302).

Flurschütz da Cruz's perspective adds detail and depth to our understanding of the rise of the state, for it was through agents like these that the government monopoly on force was maintained. From the mid to the late seventeenth century, the fiscal-military strategies of their social networks, and of the states that used them, solidified: owners of regiments began to function as interchangeable representatives of their house, while political entities set policy that bypassed not only individual colonels but also individual members of government. By the end of this process, what counted was not the person, but the network: the family/friend group, the regiment, the principality, the republic (298). By implication, this argument also presents the modern state as a byproduct of the development of a military policy that could handle a regiment over a period longer than the life of one of its colonels.

The agents of subsidy troop warfare also changed over time, as networks of marginal nobles and their families yielded to small or medium-sized states. The best known was Hesse-Kassel, the only German state for which revenue from subsidy troops exceeded military expenditure. Hesse-Kassel is famous in the United States for selling troops to the British crown during the American Revolution, but it was during this war that public opinion of subsidies changed starkly. In the first place, it threatened to depopulate some of the smaller German states: every sixth or seventh able man in Hesse-Kassel took part in it (511). But subsidies had also become unpopular out of sympathy for the Americans and the late-Enlightenment change in belief about what military service should be. Raising subsidiary troops was “patriotic” in the 1690s (375); a hundred years later, it was mercenary in the pejorative sense.

Yet although Flurschütz da Cruz states that subsidy troops were raised by semi-private individuals in the seventeenth century and states in the eighteenth century, he never demonstrates how this change happened over time, but only places the two modes next to each other. What is the relationship between the mid-seventeenth-century semi-free agents and the eighteenth-century dynastic subsidy states? Did the former enter the leadership of the latter through advantageous marriages and social climbing? Did the social network of the latter shut the former out? Der Krieg der Anderen had the potential to provide an analysis of class formation as a product of the expansion and linking strategies of social networks, like David Sabean's work on the family in German village life (Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 [1991]; Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 [1997]) but the discussion of the Waldecks does not fully persuade (331). Instead, we have two books: one on the Melander network's work for Venice and one on Hesse-Kassel. The book also covers all eighteenth-century subsidy states in an extremely capacious manner, which detracts from the unity of the author's argument. However, this makes it a useful reference.