Litigation, credit, crisis: the case of the bill of exchange in the late Habsburg monarchy

In 1910, Karl Renner, the leading social democrat in the Reichsrat, the Lower House of the Austrian parliament, hit upon one of the characteristic features of the Empire's pattern of power. In his speech Renner pointed out that the Habsburg monarchy should rather be called a dyarchie — a system where there are two rulers instead of one. Ever since European monarchists had begun to defend their preferred political system with arguments based on more than just tradition and religion, the unity of decision-making on behalf of the body politic had been fielded as a favourite reason for preferring a monarchical solution. Even in a constitutional monarchy, there were aspects of decision-making where it was considered essential that the final say rested with one single person. For the Habsburg monarchy, with its long tradition as one of the Great Powers of Europe, questions of foreign policy and war formed the very core of these aspects that called for one single person's judgement and command.1

If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive state in the decades before the First World War, they have yet to fully examine contemporaneous European debates about Austria's legitimacy and place in the future world order. As the intertwined fields of law and social science began during this period to elaborate a binary distinction between “modern” nation-states and “archaic” multinational “empires,” Austria, like other composite monarchies, found itself searching for a legally and scientifically valid justification for its continued existence. This article argues that Austrian sociology provided such a justification and was used to articulate a defense of the Habsburg Monarchy and other supposedly “abnormal” multinational states. While the birth of the social sciences is typically associated with Germany and France, a turn to sociology also occurred in the late Habsburg Monarchy, spurred by legal scholars who feared that the increasingly hegemonic idea of nation-based sovereignty threatened the stability of the pluralistic Austrian state. Proponents of the “sociological idea of the state,” notably the sociologist, politician, and later president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish-Jewish sociologist and jurist Ludwig Gumplowicz, challenged the concept of statehood advanced by mainstream Western European legal philosophy and called for a reform of Austria's law and political science curriculum. I reveal how, more than a century before the “imperial turn,” Habsburg actors came to reject the emerging scholarly distinction between “nations” and “empires” and fought, with considerable success, to institutionalize an alternative to nationalist social scientific discourse.

The target of this study is constituted by leading civil officials mainly of the Ministry of Interior (Section leaders and ministerial counselors) as well as members of the local political authority (court counselors, 'Land' presidents and state representatives) in the Cisleithanian part of the Austro Hungarian Monarchy. The research is based on samples of those occupying these positions between 1900 and 1910; in some cases information is given dating back to the 1880ies. The survey extends over geographical extraction, family background, educational path and career of all those in the sample. The official activities of these civil servants are scrutinized following questions raised in the title of the paper. Obviously enough they were above all commit ted to the imperial state. Still there is a number of indicators that they did not remain unaffected - though to variable degrees - by their regional and national connections. These indicators should be thoroughly researched in concrete terms, together with additional references to the final political options of mem bers of our target group after the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. Well, Your Excellency, being a Civil Servant it seems that you have only the choice between being an anarchist or an idiot.1 It may well be that this satirical phrase coined by the eminent writer Arthur Schnitzler can be used with some justification for one or the other individual member among the great number of higher officials serving the Emperor Francis Joseph in the late Habsburg Mon archy. Yet there can be no doubt whatsoever that the High Civil Service as a whole and as a group distinct from others must be regarded as one of the elite groups within the society of the Habsburg Monarchy. It is common knowledge that the power-elite of the High Civil Service - together with the person of the Emperor himself and with the army - formed the very pillar and backbone of

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy by Tim Buchen Joshua Shanes Tim Buchen. Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Translated by Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller. New York: Berghahn, 2020. 326 pp. In 1898, anti-Jewish violence exploded in over four hundred communities across western Galicia, an ethnically mixed province on the outer rim of the Habsburg Empire. Throughout the spring, Polish Christians attacked their Jewish neighbors, destroying and looting Jewish-owned homes and businesses. By late June, the emperor had declared a state of emergency in thirty-three counties and martial law in two others, and over 5,000 perpetrators were charged in court. [End Page 213] Tim Buchen's fascinating book is one of a few recent publications that finally address this understudied episode. Buchen uses this moment to rethink the nature of antisemitism itself, offering a new methodological approach that sees it as a "social process" rather than as an object or ideology. Following Rogers Brubaker's postmodern reframing of nations as "a situational experience that must be constantly reproduced, each time differently," Buchen presents antisemitism similarly, as a "process" enacted by non-Jews in an evolving dynamic of speech and action. This perspective follows David Engel's pathbreaking essay, "Away from a Definition of Antisemitism," which argued similarly that the term has been too reified by historians, though Buchen surprisingly does not engage with Engel here. Buchen identifies three foci of power in Habsburg Galician discourse—print media, physical violence, and the imperial diet—each of which, in turn, constitutes one of the three main chapters of the book: agitation, violence, and politics. The chapters are roughly chronological—negative ideas about Jews are introduced and encouraged, leading to violent conflicts on the ground that then play out on the imperial stage—but Buchen emphasizes that they overlap as processes resulting from the "interplay between political meaning-making and social practice" (27). Chapter 1 focuses on the first leg of power, agitation, "speech or writing that addresses a public with the intention of inciting it to act" (44). Buchen moves quickly from 1868—when the Galician diet overwhelmingly voted to confirm Jewish emancipation at the provincial level—to the rise of new peasant and Catholic political parties in the 1890s. The breakdown of the feudal order and loosening of traditional economic roles of Jews and Christians might have led to a notion of Polishness that included Jews, but instead—as Brian Porter has documented—it went the other way. New economic rivalries and the centering of the Polish peasant in nationalist agitation led to antisemitism forming the basis of the entire spectrum of Polish politics, most obviously with the rise of three competing Polish peasant parties, all of which defined themselves as anti-Jewish. Whereas Polish nationalists in the 1860s expected Jews to assimilate into the Polish nation, as many Jewish elites intended to do, a generation later they feared and rejected such assimilation, deliberately seeking out tension with Jews in the only venues they could then access: popular newspapers and rural meetings. Buchen then moves to discuss the violence itself, which he argues was a kind of "theater," almost literally a drama following a script with roles assigned to perpetrators and victims that allowed them to make sense of their new world. In one case, the end of an incident of looting was literally announced with a blast of a trumpet (139)! In other words, he argues, the violent outbreaks were not primarily a result of economic tensions between Christians and Jews due to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but rather were spectacles that served to define Christian communities. The pogroms, he insists, did not reflect a breakdown in Jewish-Christian relations and did not intend to inflict permanent destruction, but rather were a performance designed to define Christian communities in this new environment. "By jointly committing crimes against the others," he writes, "the Christian peasants experienced themselves as a community. They became a village unit" (150). He particularly emphasizes the role of rumors in this regard, [End Page 214] especially the rumor of warrant by the state...

This chapter explores the ‘electronification’ of bills of exchange in connection with their use as credit and payment instruments in international trade. The chapter observes that the infinite number of international trade participants spread throughout the globe at different stages of technological development militates against the feasibility of a common, universal, and worldwide technological platform for handling electronic bills of exchange. Instead, particularly by reference to the extensive experience in the US in relation to the ‘electronification’ of cheques, the chapter proposes that a robust and flexible legal frameworkbe implanted in the Bills of Exchange Act, and used as agreed, to cover electronic presentment of bills of exchange and the exchange and negotiation of substitute bills, bills images, and electronic bills.

HARDLY A CHAPTER goes by in novels like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860) or Our Mutual Friend (1864) or Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) or The Way We Live Now (1875) without money being invoked. Generations of critics have noted that almost every relationship between characters comes with a pound sign attached. Thus The Last Chronicle of Barset belies its most esteemed and truthful character, Mr. Harding, when he says, “Money is worth thinking of, but it is not worth very much thought” (447; ch. 49). He is correct to the extent that money alone fails to do justice to the complexity of most of the relationships in the novel. In the first place, money is only a component of a broader and more pervasive set of connections that can be described as exchanges of capital. Indeed, as this essay shows in the case of The Last Chronicle of Barset, if one stands back from more than a few novels of the mid-Victorian decades, one can see that the intersections and progressions of fictional lives that they portray are couched within a larger pattern of interaction and exchange of which capital is the protagonist.Such a reading is implicit, if not explicit, in recent studies that analyze representations of circulation, whether of money, gossip, blood, or language itself. I am thinking particularly of Beer, Shell, Smart, and Trotter. If this formulation seems extreme, it is only one step beyond the arguments of recent studies that money is “perhaps the most common theme in nineteenth-century fiction” (Vernon 14) or that “the universal, leveling power of money is a theme intrinsic to, perhaps even definitive of, the novel form itself” (Brantlinger 23). The intensity of the nineteenth-century novelistic fascination with money in particular and capital in general can be explained in part by demonstrating, as Mary Poovey and James Thompson respectively have, that novelistic discourses emerged in eighteenth-century Britain in conjunction with the emergence of the discourses of political economy. Similarly, the fact that the mid-Victorian decades in particular produced such a large number of works organized around exchanges of capital is understandable in relationship to historical developments within capitalism. I have in mind especially the finalization in the 1830s of the long transition from gold to paper – from wealth as treasure to the exchange of capital – and the complete formalization in the first half of the nineteenth century of the central institutions of finance capitalism, namely the joint-stock company and the stock market.I mark this finalization with the standardizing of currency on the Bank of England note in 1833; only in 1844 were other British banks banned from issuing their own notes (Vernon 32). The London Stock Exchange was established in its modern institutional form in 1802 (Baskin 207). Also indicative of the period is that “[t]here were eight million pounds more paper money in circulation in 1825 than in 1823, with no corresponding increase in trade and industry to justify it”; at the same time, “there had developed a vast extension of private credit – the ‘new currency of the age’ – and the market was flooded with bills of exchange, promissory notes, and similar paper” (Russell 45). I of course am not claiming that paper money or stock trading did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. Rather, I am claiming that finance capitalism reached society-wide dissemination in the first half of the nineteenth century and only then took on the institutional forms that still are in place in the twenty-first century. As Ermarth remarks in this regard: “Market-places may be old; but the market-system, which ‘is a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society’ is a fairly recent invention, as new as the humanist conception of the species ‘man’, as new as ‘the profit motive’, and as new as the idea of gain conceived in terms of capital” (121). These contextual factors set the stage on which mid-Victorian novels in particular struggled to interpret and re-express the meaning of human relationship for a society increasingly organized by and obsessed with exchanges of capital. The first goal of this essay is to describe, more thoroughly and precisely than has been done to date, exactly how capital circulates through mid-Victorian novels, taking The Last Chronicle of Barset as a representative case. The second goal is to demonstrate how exchanges of capital are not only thematically significant but actually constitute the plot structure of this novel. Finally, the third purpose is to challenge certain recent critical arguments that continue to posit – even while critiquing – a separation in the nineteenth century of the domains of the novel and of political economy, a separation that reproduces the Victorian notion of “separate spheres” and underestimates the cultural work of mid-Victorian novels.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the cultural, social and political factors that can influence the mergers and acquisition (M&As) decision. Our study analyze if the investors perception towards investment in an economy can be influenced by these factors. The results show that social factors like public spending with health, literacy rate or people skills and abilities, cultural factors like the perception of the bureaucracy and new businesses or political factors like tax rates and democratic development are key determinants of M&As decision. These factors can be also explained in terms of investors' behaviour in making new investments in a specific economy.

In this decision the 9th Civil Chamber of the German Federal Supreme Court changed its case law on the validity of a standard form contract providing a universal guarantee, and followed the 'causation' line of case law of the 5th and 11th Civil Chambers. The judgment was based on the following set of facts: The plaintiff savings bank provided a property company, a Kommanditgesellschaft, with an overdraft. In 1984 the defendant, a shareholder in the company, agreed to become personal guarantor of the credit advanced to the property company under a standard form of agreement with no restrictions on the time period or amount of the guarantee. Under Condition 1(1) of the Conditions of Guarantee, the guarantee was 'to provide security for all existing and future claims of the savings bank against the principal debtor, including conditional and time limited claims, … which arise out of their business relationship (in particular out of overdraft, credit and loan facilities of all kinds and bills of exchange) as well as out of bills of exchange which are submitted by third parties, guarantees, assignments or by way of subrogation.' In October 1985, the defendant parted from the company and in January 1986 the plaintiff raised the company's overdraft facility to 2.5 million DM and in addition granted it loans of 2 million and 1.5 million DM. The defendant gave notice of the termination of the guarantee in 1990, and shortly thereafter the company became bankrupt. The plaintiff claimed a sum of more than 10 million DM from the defendant as guarantor, and asserted an initial part claim in court for 1 million DM. At first instance and on appeal the claim was allowed. An appeal in cassation in the Supreme Court led to the quashing of the decision of the appeal court and the reference of the case back for a rehearing. In a departure from its earlier jurisprudence, the 9th Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court held that the clause in question was invalid, for breach of § 9 of the Law on General Conditions of Contract, and possibly of § 3 of the same Law. § 767 (1) of the German Civil Code required the guarantee to be limited. In a case where an overdraft facility was guaranteed, the extent of the overdraft allowed at the time the guarantee was given provided the limit within the meaning of this provision. The broad declaration of scope contained in the Conditions of Guarantee was by contrast inconsistent with this interpretation of § 767 (1) of the Civil Code and the purpose of the contract, because under it the guarantor was obliged to stand security for new extensions of credit, provided by the lender without any action on the part of the guarantor and exceeding the level of credit authorised by the lender at the time the guarantee was given. In addition, the standard form extension of liability to all existing and future commitments of the principal debtor was entirely surprising if the guarantee was given in order to encourage the grant or maintenance of a specific overdraft of a given amount, or the raising of the overdraft limit to a certain amount (causation principle). The standard form extension of the liability of the guarantor to all existing and future commitments of the principal debtor arising out of its relationship with the bank had not become a part of the contract of guarantee, therefore, but the declaration of scope remained valid in so far as it concerned the overdraft up to the limit agreed at the time the guarantee was given. The clause could therefore be partly maintained: it was not an impermissible reduction of the contract in an attempt to preserve it. The following comments analyse the decision from the point of view of Belgian (De Wilde), Swiss (Belser) and Greek (Tzouganatos) law.

ABSTRACTTreason is a ubiquitous historical phenomenon, one particularly associated with regime instability or wartime loyalties. This paper explores the practice and prosecution of treason in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy with a special focus on some notorious wartime treason trials. It first sets the rhetoric and law of treason in a comparative historical context before assessing the legal framework supplied by the Austrian penal code of 1852. Although the treason law was exploited quite arbitrarily after 1914, the state authorities in the pre-war decade were already targeting irredentist suspects due to major anxiety about domestic and foreign security. In the Great War, the military were then given extensive powers to prosecute all political crimes including treason, causing a string of show-trials of Bosnian Serbs and some leading Czech politicians. By 1917–18, however, this onslaught on disloyalty was backfiring in the wake of an imperial amnesty: as loyalties shifted away from the Habsburg regime, the former criminals themselves proudly began to assume the title of ‘traitor’. The paper is a case-study of how regimes in crisis have used treason as a powerful moral instrument for managing allegiance. It also offers a new basis for understanding instability in the late Habsburg monarchy.

"The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Edited by Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky. (New York, N.Y.: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp.x, 246. $90.00.)." The Historian, 72(3), pp. 680–681

Modern citizenship embodies a triad of dimensions: a legal status granting rights, a principle underpinning democratic self-governance, and a conception of collective identity and membership [Joppke 2010]. This nuancedconcept of citizenship was partially introduced to the successor states following the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. In the 19th century, the right of domicile (Heimatrecht) exhibited certain characteristics akin to modern citizenship but also served as a “technology” [Cruikshank 1999] for the practical management of mobility, encompassing both impoverished individuals and migrant workers. Political debates and policies regarding mobile populations during this period were pulled in two conflicting directions. On one side, there was a drive to control and secure the movement of these “dangerous” population groups. On the other, there was a need to meet labor demands, which necessitated greater freedoms [cf. Foucault 2007]. Immigrant men and women, particularly those experiencing temporary unemployment, improper behavior, incapacity to work, poverty, chronic illness, or those seeking access to local, municipal, and provincial politics, faced discrimination based on the right of domicile. They were often subjected to close scrutiny by municipal authorities and native-born residents. A change of residence within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy could lead to an individual’s perception of themselves, and by others, as foreigners, regardless of the high mobility and multicultural nature of urban centers such as Vienna and Trieste. Nevertheless, the concept of “foreignness” is a variable construct, changing according to political, economic, and social circumstances and networks. Following the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, the exclusionary tools of pertinency automatically granted citizenship to certain individuals, irrespective of their workplace or long absence from their domicile municipality. However, this right of pertinence also caused significant social trauma across post-Habsburg Europe, leaving many at risk of statelessness (Kirch-ner-Reill et al.). Despite the extensive and varied application of the right of domicile in different social contexts within the late 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, some recent historical analyses reduce its meaning to a mere “legal mechanism that communities used to avoid the costs and presence of persons considered socially undesirable.”

The question of how to categorize and study sciencein multicultural empires has in recent years increasingly occupied historians of science and of empires. Issues of intercultural mediation, brokerage, or cultural translation have been particularly influential in the study of science in colonial empires. However, the question for continental empires was about science as a reaction to pluricultural reality. Ernest Gellner, Deborah Coen, and Johannes Feichtinger, among others, have taken a similar approach to the Habsburg monarchy, which notwithstanding its legal status as a monarchy shared several characteristics of an empire. These reactions to empire also included nationalisms, which, as recent publications have shown, largely defined the shape of the late-nineteenth-century scientific landscape in Central Europe. In this article, I want to look at the imperial scientific landscape from yet another perspective, concentrating on itinerant scholars and the circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. In my view, this constitutes an imperial culture of its own that has not yet been thoroughly analyzed.

The Habsburg monarchy, according to the old textbook standard, was a political archaism too brittle to withstand the centrifugal power of ethnic nationalism. The repressions of 1849 and the empire'...

This essay examines the effectiveness of the network of relatives and friends in providing support and information to Austrian transatlantic migrants under the Habsburg Monarchy, in attempt to broaden the historical study of migrant networks. It claims that these networks determined migrant movement collectively rather than individually, and sprung up in order to minimise the risk to migrants crossing the Atlantic. It analyses passenger shipping records, particularly data relating to the ports of Bremen and Hamburg in 1910, in order to draw the conclusion that social networks of migration under the Habsburg Empire did not solely rely on family ties, but also the established conventions of the migration process and the social status of the migrants themselves. It calls for further research into the role of families in migrant networks.

The overwhelming majority of historical work on the late Habsburg Monarchy has focused primarily on national movements and ethnic conflicts, with the result that too little attention has been devoted to the state and ruling dynasty. This volume is the first of its kind to concentrate on attempts by the imperial government to generate a dynastic-oriented state patriotism in the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. It examines those forces in state and society which tended toward the promotion of state unity and loyalty towards the ruling house. These essays, all original contributions and written by an international group of historians, provide a critical examination of the phenomenon of “dynastic patriotism” and offer a richly nuanced treatment of the multinational empire in its final phase.