Definition
A person delivered into the custody of an opposing power as living security for the performance of an obligation between belligerents. In classical international law usage, a hostage was not a prisoner of war but a voluntary or state-designated pledge: so long as the promising party fulfilled its commitment — payment of ransom, observance of a treaty, withdrawal of troops — the hostage retained freedom and often considerable dignity. Failure of the promising party placed the hostage's liberty, and potentially life, at the creditor-power's discretion.
Modern law has largely abandoned the term's international-law meaning as a transactional mechanism between states and repurposed it primarily in criminal and humanitarian law contexts:
1. CRIMINAL LAW: A person seized and held by a private actor or group against their will, typically to compel a third party (government, family, institution) to meet a demand. Federal and state statutes criminalize hostage-taking as a discrete offense, distinct from kidnapping, often with aggravated penalties when the act crosses state or national lines.
2. INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW: The taking of hostages is categorically prohibited as a war crime under the Geneva Conventions (1949) and their Additional Protocols. This prohibition is the direct legal inversion of the historical usage — what was once a recognized and regulated practice of nations is now a serious violation of the laws of armed conflict.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To hold someone hostage, especially to constrain or control them, or to exchange for something else. Used both literally (a person seized) and figuratively (holding a budget hostage to political demands).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A person given as a pledge or security for the performance of treaty conditions or other stipulations, to be released upon performance. Webster's illustrates the term with Bacon's famous metaphor — "he that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune" — showing the word's comfortable extension into ordinary figurative speech.
The gap between common and legal meaning is historically significant but has narrowed. The common understanding has always tracked the core idea of a person held as security. What has shifted is the legal valuation of the practice: common usage treats the word as morally neutral or even dignified (as in Bacon), while modern law — both criminal and international humanitarian — frames hostage-taking as an inherently coercive and criminal act. A researcher reading a 17th- or 18th-century source that describes a government "giving hostages" should not read criminal or wrongful conduct into that phrase; it was a recognized diplomatic instrument.
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Common Confusion
HOSTAGE vs. PRISONER OF WAR: The historical dictionaries are careful on this point, and researchers should be too. A prisoner of war is seized by the enemy; a hostage, in the classical sense, is surrendered by one's own side as a guarantee. The hostage's status depended on the promising party's conduct, not on military capture. Modern criminal and humanitarian law usage has blurred this distinction in practice, but the legal frameworks governing each remain distinct.
HOSTAGE-TAKING vs. KIDNAPPING: In modern domestic criminal law, these offenses overlap but are not identical. Hostage-taking statutes typically require a demand directed at a third party as a condition of release; kidnapping statutes vary in their elements by jurisdiction and may not require a third-party demand. The distinction matters for charging decisions and for treaty-based jurisdiction over international incidents.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term spans at least three distinct legal eras, and a researcher must be alert to which one a source is operating in.
HISTORICAL SOURCES (pre-19th century): Treat "hostage" as a technical term of the law of nations — a regulated, quasi-contractual mechanism. Bouvier's note that a hostage's death did not discharge the underlying contract is a substantive legal point, not a curiosity. Ransom-bill cases in English admiralty reports will use the term in this sense. Kent's Commentaries (cited by both Burrill and Bouvier) remains the best American entry point for the classical framework.
19th-CENTURY TRANSITION: The laws of war were being codified and reformed throughout this period. Sources from the American Civil War era onward show growing unease with hostage-taking as state practice. The Lieber Code (1863) addressed hostages explicitly, treating the practice with significant restrictions. Researchers working in this period will find the term in transition.
MODERN SOURCES (post-1949): The Geneva Convention (IV) prohibition on hostage-taking is absolute under Article 34. Any modern source using "hostage" in a non-criminal, transactional sense — as a state security mechanism — is either writing historically or operating in bad faith legally. Researchers encountering the term in modern treaty law, criminal statutes, or humanitarian law scholarship are in a wholly different framework than the one the historical dictionaries describe.
CORPUS CONNECTIONS: Entries on ransom, prisoner of war, parole (in its historical sense of a released prisoner's oath), and safe conduct are all closely related in the historical law-of-war corpus. The shift in "hostage" tracks the broader shift from customary laws of war to codified international humanitarian law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries present a remarkably unified picture, which itself tells the researcher something: by the time Black's, Burrill's, and Bouvier's were compiled, the term had a settled, classical definition in international law, and that definition was essentially uncontested.
All four definitions share three elements: (1) the hostage is delivered into enemy possession; (2) the context is public war between belligerent powers; (3) the hostage serves as security for a specific obligation. Bouvier adds the most practically useful detail — the ransom-bill context and the rule that the hostage's death did not discharge the debt — pointing to actual reported cases (3 Burr. 1734; 1 Kent 108).
What all four historical sources miss entirely is the modern reversal: none anticipates that hostage-taking would become not merely disfavored but criminalized as a war crime. They describe a practice that international law would spend the next century dismantling. A researcher using only these sources would have no awareness of the Geneva Convention prohibition or the domestic criminal statutes that now dominate the term's legal meaning.
Burrill's citation to 1 Kent's Commentaries at page 106 is worth following; Kent gives the most thorough treatment of the classical doctrine available in American legal literature of that era.
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Jurisdictional Note
In U.S. federal law, hostage-taking is a distinct federal offense under 18 U.S.C. § 1203, implementing the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages (1979). State kidnapping statutes cover much of the same conduct but may differ in elements, penalties, and jurisdictional reach. International humanitarian law applies as a matter of treaty obligation and customary law in armed conflict contexts, creating a parallel legal regime that operates independently of domestic criminal law.
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