Captivity, migration, and labor markets—rather than “civilizing” missions or anarchic state evasion—defined the southwest frontier of the Ming Empire. Reframing James C. Scott’s Zomia thesis, this article shows that communities in the inhospitable highlands did not simply flee the Ming state; they competed with it by acquiring people, labor, and expertise. Obtained via forceful capture, targeted recruitment, or voluntary defection, some newcomers were valuable for their manual labor, others for their military or reproductive capacities or knowledge of statecraft. This article uses two case studies to illustrate this labor economy. Duzhang, initially acephalous, turned to regime-building through large-scale raiding in the sixteenth century, absorbing Han and non-Han captives and defectors who supplied it with skills and legitimacy. Bozhou, long ruled by tributary chieftains (tusi), drew willing Han migrants and advisers; the Ming countered not just with arms but with litigation, weaponizing law to fracture the Bozhou polity before the decisive war of 1599–1600 that ended with its “barbarization.” Across the frontier, Miao mercenaries leveraged their military prowess to secure valuable resources like land, women, and silver from the highest bidders. The result was a hybrid political field where coercion and consent were blurred, migration surged, and rival regimes—imperial and indigenous—vied fiercely for control of human labor. Ming imperial expansion emerges not as an inevitable conquest but as a pragmatic, improvised, and contingent reaction to relentless competition for labor at its margins.

This article considers the role of Greek war workers, often called “mercenaries,” in the transmission of culture from the Near East and Egypt to Greece, as well as the impact of their activities on the formulation of their own ethnic identity, from the eighth to the sixth century BCE. It opens with a discussion of the scholarly terminology applied to foreign war workers from ancient Greece to the present, showing its ambiguities and limitations. The evidence for the presence and activities of Greek war workers in the eastern Mediterranean is then presented in a comparative framework, leveraging case studies from other periods, with special attention paid to the army of the Neo-Assyrian kings and the role of Scandinavians in the Byzantine army of the Macedonian dynasty. In conclusion, a broader overview of ethnic formations and subdivisions within imperial armies, drawing on case studies from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and beyond, makes it possible to reevaluate the formation of an Ionian identity in the archaic eastern Mediterranean.

Focusing on two books that seek to renew the study of Native North American history, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen (2022), and The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (2023), this review article offers an opportunity to survey the current state of the field. Both authors raise two of the major questions that animate the scholarship: that of Native Americans’ agency, widely acknowledged and accepted by the historical community, and that of their rationale for action, for which contrasting visions divide historians. Here, I consider the extent to which Blackhawk’s and Hämäläinen’s emphasis on Native agency may in fact have the effect of obscuring reflection on those logics. Although Hämäläinen, unlike Blackhawk, insists on the risks of teleology and strives to highlight the variety of modes of colonial intrusion, the two historians are united in their renouncement of a form of anthropology that once sought to render the cultural integrity of Native Americans. The analytical lexicon they propose (for example, the term “empire”) sometimes leads to an erasure of cultural difference and a distortion of history. This article therefore argues for a renewed complementarity between history and anthropology.