Resisting the “Enslaving Design”: Conscription and the Radical Politics of the Body in England’s Atlantic Empire, circa 1647–1660

Over the course of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution, the English state made forced military labor an essential technology of empire building through a political process forged in conflict. The political stakes here were high, as resistance to the press for soldiers and sailors, animated by radical republican principles linking bodily liberty to popular sovereignty, sparked two constitutional crises during the last decade of the English Revolution.