Babylon ran a draft under Hammurabi, and people already dodged it
Nearly four thousand years ago, Babylonians owed the king service called Ilkum: soldiering in war, labour in peace, in exchange for land. Some hired substitutes, some traded the obligation, some simply left town. Compulsory service has shaped armies ever since, though its modern mass form dates only to revolutionary France.
Around the reign of Hammurabi, in the 18th century BC, eligible Babylonians served in the royal army during wartime and worked on state projects in peacetime. In return they gained the right to hold land, possibly specific plots granted by the state. Evasion was common enough to leave records. Hiring a substitute was banned by the Code of Hammurabi yet seems to have happened anyway, and selling Ilkum land along with its duties was likewise forbidden for most people.
Medieval Europe relied on levies. In France the arrière-ban summoned every able-bodied man aged 15 to 60, noble or commoner, to arm himself according to his wealth. Scandinavian kingdoms conscripted free farmers into seasonal coastal fleets, the leidang. Anglo-Saxon England had the fyrd, and the 690s laws of Ine of Wessex fined each social class differently for skipping service. The historian David Sturdy warns against seeing the fyrd as a people's army, arguing that the idea was invented by antiquarians to justify modern conscription.
Another tradition bought or seized its soldiers. From the 820s and 830s the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim built a corps of Turkic slave-soldiers, and the mamluk system lasted nearly 1,000 years; mamluk factions eventually ran their own sultanate in Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517. The Ottomans filled their Janissary Corps partly through the devşirme, a levy of mostly Balkan Christian boys, although the status it brought led some poor parents to bribe officials to take their sons.
The near-universal draft of young men took shape during the French Revolution in the 1790s, and most European states adopted it, with active duty of 1 to 8 years followed by reserve service. It has always stirred objections from conscientious objectors and critics of men-only drafts; in the 2010s Norway and Sweden began conscripting women on equal terms. The United Kingdom ended conscription in 1960 and the United States stopped enforcing it in 1973, yet Finland, Switzerland, Austria and Greece still keep it, and many states that dropped it reserve the right to bring it back.
Source: Conscription
