Introduction: The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State

This volume offers a fresh interpretative agenda for thinking about the Vienna-based Habsburg Monarchy’s development, coherence, functionality, and domestic legitimacy under the impact of enduring international rivalry and armed conflict across a period spanning nearly two centuries, from the Thirty Years War to the Napoleonic wars. It does so in a wider European comparative perspective and by engaging closely with the concept of the ‘fiscal-military state’, rendering it both greater depth and precision and elaborating heuristic potential. This volume firmly returns the maintenance of a permanent standing army to the centre of the Habsburg government’s concerns between 1648 and 1815. In an exemplary way, it spotlights a broad range of structures, practices, and actors on both the financial and military sides that sustained the Habsburg fiscal-military state over time. These include the General War Commissariat, foreign subsidies and other external support, the provincial Estates and diets, taxation and borrowing, recruitment and the enrolment of officers, supply and provisioning as well as individual noble families, brokers, and contractors. In also applying the idea of ‘composite monarchy’ to the Habsburg polity, the volume additionally calls attention to both symmetries and asymmetries in the processes of state formation that occurred under the impact of fiscal-military exigency. Consolidation was accompanied by the emergence of new forms of particularism.

Though weakened by recent scholarship, the paradigm of “absolutist state-building” remains embedded in the thinking about Habsburg history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The “emasculation” of traditional elite groups such as the Estates by the reforming “state” of the eighteenth century is an especially tenacious assumption. The present study utilizes recent concepts for large, compound political entities in an international context including “fiscal-military state” and “composite monarchy” to throw light on the relationship of government and society over time. It anatomizes the impact of fiscal-military exigency on the relationship between the rulers in Vienna and the Estates of the archduchy below the river Enns (Lower Austria), which geographically, politically, and financially was one of the central Habsburg lands. The thesis is posited that the Habsburg monarchy’s composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Estates constituted an increasingly vital, if changing, element of Habsburg international success and resilience.

This chapter focuses on the seventeenth century, because in this century the Habsburg Monarchy underwent a process of growing integration inside and of separation vis-a-vis the Empire 'outside'. The Monarchia Austriaca was consolidated as a territorial state and separated from the Empire in fields of high importance within the state building process, such as the development of central (court) authorities independently from the authorities of the Empire to manage warfare, finances, and the postal system. The 'modern' fiscal-military state on the soil of the Holy Roman Empire came into being at the level of the territories, not at that of the Empire. In the long run the political future belonged to the major territorial states such as Brandenburg-Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and, not least, the Habsburg Monarchy, and not to the 'pre-modern' and 'pre-state' political system of the Empire. Keywords:Habsburg monarchy; Holy Roman Empire; Monarchia Austriaca ; political system; Separation; Seventeenth Century

Contents: Introduction: the fiscal-military state in the a longa (TM) 18th century, Christopher Storrs The fiscal-military state and international rivalry during the long 18th century, Hamish Scott The Habsburg monarchy from 'military-fiscal' state to ' militarization', Michael Hochedlinger Prussia as a fiscal-military state, 1640a 1806, Peter H. Wilson Russia as a fiscal-military state, 1689a 1825, Janet Hartley The French experience, 1661a 1815, JoAl FA(c)lix and Frank Tallett The triumph and denouement of the British fiscal state: taxation for the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1793a 1815, Patrick Karl O'Brien The Savoyard fiscal-military state in the long 18th century, Christopher Storrs Index.

This chapter presents the Savoyard state more clearly within the debate about the nature and even the existence of the fiscal-military state. It considers the significance of those payments, not least in terms of how far they stimulated or retarded the achievement of a full fiscal-military structure in the Savoyard state. The Savoyard polity also benefited enormously from its crucial strategic position, controlling the routes across the Alps, in an age dominated by war between Bourbon and Habsburg. The extent to which the Savoyard fiscal-military state triggered a social transformation that benefited the 'non-noble bourgeoisie' is by no means clear; it may mistakenly apply inappropriate concepts, labels or social classifications of a later age to the eighteenth-century Savoyard state. In wartime Victor Amadeus II and his successors benefited from the subsidies made available by allies in order to sustain the Savoyard army and fund an increase in its strength.

The article examines the formation of central government bodies and the system of administrative-territorial organization of the Austrian Empire of the specified period. The political-legal system and administrative structure of the Kingdom of Hungary are analyzed, as well as the process of its incorporation into the Habsburg Monarchy. The territorial changes of the Austrian state as a result of the three divisions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are studied. It is stated that the political system of the empire for a long time was based on the absolute power of the monarch under a strictly estate-based system of society, and the process of centralization of state administration in it began to intensify especially in the 18th century. It is argued that the Pragmatic Sanction (1713) was formally the first regulatory act regarding all Austrian lands. The legal status of the emperor and the scope of his powers are analyzed. It is stated that the management of the internal affairs of the Austrian Empire was carried out by the Privy Council and the Privy Chancellery. The process of evolution of these bodies is shown, as well as the formation of the Cabinet of Ministers, which at that time was responsible for managing four areas: internal affairs, international relations, education and military affairs. The Habsburgs equalized the rights of all confessions, considering their leaders as a specific category of civil servants. It is stated that the act of constitutional content was the Pragmatic Law of 1804, by which the emperor recognized his title and the unity of the state as hereditary for himself and his descendants. The territorial changes of the Austrian lands as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the decisions of the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) are analyzed. It is stated that since that time the territory of the Habsburgs was clearly delineated and remained unchanged until 1918. The model of the relationship between the governorships and the Court Chancellery as the central governing body is determined. The structure of the system of sources of law of the Austrian Empire and the procedure for their publication and bringing to the attention of the population are analyzed. The process of ennoblement (obtaining nobility) in the estate-based Austrian Empire is studied. It is stated that at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. in the Habsburg monarchy, the formation of modern bureaucracy, the formation of official law, the introduction of the «candidate style» took place. At the same time, it is noted that, having turned into a holistic system, the bureaucracy began to be characterized by typical negative features. It is established that the impetus for the renewal of the bureaucratic system was given by constructive transformations of the middle of the 19th century. The activities of civil servants were placed under the control of newly created legislative and representative bodies and civil society. Own conclusions are proposed from the analyzed material.

This article begins by exploring – and insisting upon – the difference between a ‘fiscal-military state’ and a ‘fiscal state’, concepts often amalgamated by historians. It then explores how the idea of a fiscal-military state in 18th-century Britain has evolved since the term’s invention in 1988, paying particular attention to its impact upon Ireland and Scotland and on relations between central and local government. It goes on to suggest that the concept might profitably be applied to the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy during its Heldenzeit (‘Age of Heroes’) between the 1670s and 1720 and, more generally, during the long 18th century, when many financial and administrative innovations resembling those in Britain were introduced due to the impact of regular and large-scale warfare, above all the development of a system of structured borrowing supported by public bodies and by fiscal innovations.

What are our next moves in the analysis of war history numbers? For separate wars and battles there are plenty of data. Old and new dictionary-encyclopedias of warfare are as loaded with numbers as the most numerate fields of historiography. The fascination for keeping the score, for quantifying wins and losses, continues. The 'war and society' historians are currently adding new dimensions by calculating the impacts of army and navy growth rates since the middle ages and assessing the economic and political pressures exerted by the rise of the 'fiscal-military state'.l What are the prospects for extending their approach to other aspects of war history? Is it possible, for a start, to quantify the long term importance of two fundamentals: superiority of numbers in winning and the casualty costs of both winning and losing? This article surveys both expert opinion and the authoritative numbers in six standard library reference section dictionary-encylopedias, to test the possible patterns in numerical superiority and casualty rate figures over the earlymodern period in Europe. The focus is the era of one-day battles among uniformly armed and ordered land combatants between the 1490s and the 1780s, when the numbers calculations are both detailed but also relatively simple. Perhaps the greater complexities of later wars, on land and sea and on other continents as well, may be examined subsequently, as may earlier battles and armed contests between culturally diverse or otherwise unequal sides. Meanwhile,

De wortels van de Randstad. Overheidsinvloed en stedelijke hiërarchie in het westen van Nederland tussen de 13de en 20ste eeuw

De wortels van de Randstad. Overheidsinvloed en stedelijke hiërarchie in het westen van Nederland tussen de 13de en 20ste eeuw

:<i>The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State: Contours and Perspectives, 1648–1815</i>

William D. Godsey / Petr Maťa (Hg.): The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State. Contours and Perspectives 1648–1815

GODSEY, William D. – MAŤA, Petr, eds. THE HABSBURG MONARCHY AS A FISCAL-MILITARY STATE. Contours and Perspectives 1648–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 369 s

The Habsburg Monarchy in its last century was one of the largest European polities by area and population, and was, as we shall see, a major player, a ‘great power’, at least in theory, until its demise in 1918. Yet it is not often studied at the forefront of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European History. There are several reasons for this. It was not a successful nation-state, unlike France, Germany or Britain, or, in various forms, Russia. In its nineteenth-century manifestation the ‘Monarchy’ was the archetypal Central European state, so it did not fare well as a subject during the Cold War, when there was no Central Europe, only binary ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ halves. There is also the consideration that after 1918 it no longer existed, and it is always an extra reach to study something that has no obvious and significant successor, as is the case with the Habsburg Monarchy. There is even some reason to think that neither students nor professors are particularly attracted to study a subject with such an atavistic, ‘feudal’ moniker. In a world where democracies and republics are the norm (even when the most successful democracies tend to be constitutional monarchies), and empires, such as the Habsburg Monarchy was, are frowned upon, getting anyone to pay attention to a Monarchy named after an aged, and by now rather obscure, dynasty is always going to be a hard sell. The fact that the very identity of the subject is the cause of all sorts of confusion cannot help either. The history of the lands ruled by the Habsburg dynasty (from 1780, Habsburg-Lorraine) is such a long and convoluted one that it is best to call them by its ruling agent, hence the rather anodyne title of ‘the Habsburg Monarchy’ used by both Charles W. Ingrao, the author of the first volume, covering the early modern period of 1618–1815, and by myself in the sequel for the more ‘modern’ period of 1815–1918. Yet that territory and that history are also often named ‘Austria’ and ‘Austrian’, partly because the Habsburg dynasty had adopted the name of the House of Austria centuries before, when its main territory had indeed been in what is now part of the Austrian Republic, and partly because that is what contemporaries called this political entity for most of its premodern and modern career.

Emigration from Slovenia represents an integral part of European migratory movements. Slovenia’s strategic geographic position between the Pannonian, Mediterranean, and Alpine worlds as well as the Karst region fostered lively mobility within an ethnically heterogeneous population at the cross-roads of economic and cultural influences. During the twentieth century, the region belonged to several different state and social systems, which triggered both voluntary and forced migration. While Slovenia until the mid-twentieth century was an emigrant country, it became also an immigrant country during the Titoist decades, especially due to the arrival of workers from the other Yugoslav republics. Emigration peaked in the period of mass emigration to the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The main destinations of Slovenian emigrants between the world wars were France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. As a result of the Second World War, many refugees and “Displaced Persons” left or did not return to their home country. The last mass migration occurred from 1965 to 1973 and was directed mainly towards Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden. During the time of the second Yugoslavia, also daily migration to Italy and Austria was frequent. However, during the whole period under examination Slovenian emigrants result ethnically rather unrecognisable, as all three states, i. e. the Habsburg monarchy as well as the first and the second Yugoslavias, statistically classified them according to citizenship rather than to nationality. The same was true for the registration procedures in the states of destination. Only rarely did they ask about ethnic affiliation or mother tongue. As a result, quantitative analyses of Slovenian emigration prove difficult.