The Habsburg Monarchy: From ‘Military-Fiscal State’ to ‘Militarization’

The introduction firmly restores the upkeep of a standing army in war- and peacetime to the center of the Habsburg government’s concerns in the early modern period. After a brief discussion of the peculiarities of Habsburg historiography, it argues that the idea of ‘composite monarchy’ (J.H. Elliott) best encapsulates the complex political framework within which a Habsburg fiscal-military state operated within its own borders. A review of the recent literature shows that the Habsburg Monarchy has figured more in the literature on ‘fiscal states’ than on ‘fiscal-military states’. Based on current knowledge, the introduction posits four major shifts in the Habsburg Monarchy’s fiscal-military arrangements between the 16th and 18th centuries. By the early 18th century, it is furthermore argued, a ‘fiscal-military core’ had emerged in the relatively well-coordinated and regularized fiscal-military activity occurring in the Bohemian and Austrian lands. Its three key facets constituted the rigorous use of primarily older forms of direct taxation, credit mobilization, and recruitment.

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

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.

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.

:<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

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.

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

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.

Scholars have used the concept of fiscal–military state to study the importance of finance in the development of the states in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The term was first used in the late 1980s by John Brewer in a study on eighteenth-century Britain. It has since been employed widely, notably in a comparative context. The term was apposite to describe the evolution of states and their fiscal systems to meet the demands of larger armies and more expensive equipment. A central question was the effectiveness with which economic resources could be mobilised. For Brewer, to cover the increasing costs of warfare, a fiscal–military state had to be able to raise funds through both credit and taxation. Further, a good administrative structure was necessary to support its fiscal and military activities. This became particularly relevant in the eighteenth century when the costs of warfare in Europe increased significantly. Recently, the relevance of a fiscal–military state has also been examined for the Habsburg monarchy in the eighteenth century.

Conditions of Democracy in German Austria and Hungary, 1918–1919

In Pursuit of Greater Hungary: Eugenic Ideas of Social and Biological Improvement, 1940–1941

Soldiers, Taxes, Debts. Lower Austria as Part of the Habsburg Fiscal-Military State. In the 18th century, the Habsburg Monarchy and its heartland Lower Austria underwent a development that has rightly been described as a process of quantitative and qualitative militarization. The article focuses on the changing methods of supplementing the standing army with “fresh” recruits, on the resistance and opposition to this expressed in self-mutilation, draft evasion and desertion, the organization of marches and quartering of troop units, the construction of barracks (the first were opened in 1723 in Ybbs, Krems, Stockerau and Vienna), and the military academy founded in Wiener Neustadt in 1751. Finally, some financial-historical aspects of the subject are briefly discussed, namely fundamental changes in the tax system and the credit and debt system of the Habsburg Monarchy, with particular attention to the important role played by the Lower Austrian provincial estates. Keywords: military history, Estates of Lower Austria, standing army, recruitment, barracks

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.

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.