Book Review: Crime, Enlightenment, and Punishment: Bureaucratic and Scientific Change in Habsburg Austria, 1750s–1820s Crime, Enlightenment, and Punishment: Bureaucratic and Scientific Change in Habsburg Austria, 1750s–1820s By Sander-FaesStephan. New York, NY: Routledge, 2025. 238 pp. $41.24 (paperback). ISBN: 978-1-032-72260-3

Stephan Sander-Faes. Crime, Enlightenment, and Punishment: Bureaucratic and Scientific Change in Habsburg Austria, 1750s–1820s. New York: Routledge, 2025. Pp. 256.

Abstract This article examines the role of associations as protest and riot brokers during the Badeni crisis of 1897 in Habsburg Austria. Drawing on concepts from political science, it demonstrates how these collective actors acted as crucial intermediaries between political leaders and local communities. Through meetings and rallies, associations facilitated the translation of parliamentary conflicts into street politics, while at the same time enabling demonstrations to escalate into violent riots. The article shows how civil society organizations deployed narratives to legitimize street politics and provided emotional framing and organizational capacity that individual activists often lacked. In doing so, associations expanded political participation in Habsburg Austria by bringing broader strata of society into the political arena, while simultaneously destabilizing it by fostering exclusionary violence. By conceptualizing associations as both protest and riot brokers, the article reinterprets the Badeni crisis not simply as evidence of national hatred but as a manifestation of mass political mobilization in a rapidly modernizing society.

Abstract This article examines the responses of Social Democratic parties in Belgium and the Bohemian lands, respectively, to the challenges of multi-ethnicity and national conflict. Differences in political conditions and organisational structures had an impact on Social Democratic policies, politics and discourses. In contrast to Francophone-dominated unitary Belgium, semi-federal Habsburg Austria (Cisleithania) granted its various ethnic groups specific linguistic-cultural rights. The Belgian Socialists, on the other hand, had more opportunities for political participation and active policy-making. In the Bohemian lands, the party was separate from the trade unions and co-operatives. By contrast, party membership in Belgium was acquired through membership of one of the affiliated organisations (those with an economic agenda dominated). Decentralised structures were able to alleviate ethnic tensions within the party in Belgium, but not in Cisleithania, where an organisational rupture occurred between German-Austrian and (the majority of) Czech Social Democrats. For Austrian Social Democracy before 1918, a deeper theoretical examination of the ‘national question’ was characteristic, linked in particular to Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. The Belgian party, which embraced reformist and pragmatic policies (strongly shaped by trade unions, co-operatives and regional federations), experienced less need for theoretical examination. Differences between Social Democratic discourses on ethnicity are largely due to an asynchronicity of sixty to seventy years between the two countries in their respective processes of ethnolinguistic differentiation and mobilisation, as well as the fact that, before the First World War, the Belgian Workers’ Party was formed largely of Francophones.

ABSTRACT In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Habsburg Austria, regulations permitted residents free movement, while at the same time the government strived for ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance of any change of place and stay. This policy relied on reporting by several parties, such as landlords, innkeepers or employers – and not only the police and local authorities. Registration was based on and created differences and inequalities between citizens and foreigners as well as among citizens, who were subjected to vigilance that was strict in different ways. The article compares various registration practices; it describes social sorting through registration; and it highlights incentives for registering or avoiding registration for legal, material or symbolic reasons and status.

Abstract The riots of 1897 accentuated divides in the society. One of the most visible conflicts erupted between the Habsburg Austrian state administration and self-government. Although existing since the 1860s, the Badeni crisis accentuated the discontent. Local cooperation was essential for maintaining order but often failed due to differing goals, political pressures, and poor communication. Despite broad authority, the state authorities could not rule autocratically. As individuals, district captains relied on local support, exposing the limits of their power. These struggles revealed a shift toward the participatory style of governance, which was driven by societal change and mass politics of Cisleithania.

Mass accessible state primary education, without which it is impossible to imagine life in modern societies, began to be established in present-day Slovenia, which was part of Habsburg Austria, at the end of the eighteenth century. Synthesis between Enlightenment ideas, state authorities, and ecclesiastical organizations was key to the expansionof the school network and literacy. The situation in Austrian lands and other Central European environments shows that the social role of education was strengthened by the reform types of Christianity, which, based on the desired harmony between the Church and the state, strove to create a rational, diligent, and morally responsible individual.

Abstract Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire is traditionally viewed through an ethnic lens. Despite a growing literature on ‘national indifference’ that studies nationalism in Habsburg central Europe from a constructivist perspective and advances our knowledge concerning variations in national identifications, the nationalism implied in these works remains largely limited to an exclusionary ethnic type. This reductionist view of central European nationalism mirrors the traditional dichotomy of ethnic ‘Eastern’ versus civic ‘Western’ nationalism. In order to avoid this reduction, this article approaches nationalism as a thin‐centred ideology and explores varieties of nationalism in Habsburg Austria during the long 19th century. Although certain ideational paths made ethno‐nationalism appear, retrospectively, as a quasi‐natural feature of central Europe, the findings show that there developed rival discursive traditions of nationalism and competing representations of nation.

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Reviewed by: Was heißt Österreich? Überlegungen zum Feld der Austrian Studies im 21. Jahrhundert ed. by Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Kurt Scharr Tim Corbett Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Kurt Scharr, eds., Was heißt Österreich? Überlegungen zum Feld der Austrian Studies im 21. Jahrhundert. Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2021. 182 pp. The cover image on this slender volume is striking, at least for those who know what they are looking at: It depicts the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Blown up during the Yugoslav Wars before being reconstructed a decade later, the bridge has become a symbol for the cultural diversity that both unites and divides this region of Europe. So why was this image chosen to illustrate a volume on Austrian studies, a volume dedicated to the simple question: Was heißt Österreich? An answer can readily be found on the jacket, which explains that the doctoral program at Innsbruck University from which this volume emerged is dedicated to an understanding of "Austria" as "ein von unterschiedlichen Gesellschaften produzierter 'Kulturraum' entlang der Zeitachse ausgehend vom Heiligen Römischen Reich, über die Habsburgermonarchie bis in die unmittelbare Gegenwart der Zweiten Republik." Diversity takes center stage in this stimulating volume, both in the cultural diversity of the region under investigation and in the disciplinary diversity of the field dedicated to its study. This is reflected in essays dealing with history, literature, art, music, and politics by authors based in Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Italy, Ukraine, and the United States. Although the volume emerged from a doctoral program, it features the [End Page 112] work of more established scholars, most prominently Pieter Judson, as well as two non-academics (in the narrower sense), namely the essayists Dževad Karahasan and Jurko Prochasko. The volume's fluid understanding of "Austria," which the editors elaborate in their introduction, reflects the postcolonial and transnational turn that has become so characteristic of Austrian studies recently. The interconnectedness of South/East/Central Europe, both historical and contemporary, is then explored by specific reference to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ukraine in the thought-provoking contributions by the above-mentioned essayists, who demonstrate not just the rich multicultural heritage of the former empires (Habsburg and Ottoman) enduring today—evident in forms both tangible, like architecture, and intangible, like post-migratory experiences—but also the lingering potential for conflict, as all too evident in growing tensions in Bosnia and the outright war that is currently ongoing in Ukraine. Pieter Judson goes on to rebuke the enduring hegemony of antagonistic nationalist historiographies in the Habsburg successor states, calling for greater attention to be paid to the considerable continuities evident in all these states with the Habsburg administration of yesteryear and the supranational cultures it once engendered in the region. As such, this essay offers a summary of the closing arguments of Judson's recent magnum opus on the Habsburg Empire. Dagmar Lorenz's contribution will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, as it offers an overview of the origins of the field of Austrian studies, locating these in the transnational space carved out by German-speaking exiles in North America from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Thus, she concludes, the field—for which notably no precise German-language equivalent exists (Österreichstudien?)—can only properly be understood by adopting a position straddling Central Europe and the Anglophone world, its genesis amongst formerly marginalized exiles moreover explaining the field's marked sensitivity to alterity and diversity. Lorenz's overview is notably heavy on literary studies, though this also owes to the original orientation of the field as she explores it here, which today encompasses many other areas of enquiry. Yasir Yılmaz's contribution offers a compelling reversal of the imperial gaze, exploring the nomenclature applied to Habsburg Austria over the centuries by its archenemy, the Ottoman Empire. While the orientalism of western empires has been thoroughly explored, Yılmaz here shows [End Page 113] how Austria was once contemptuously dismissed in Turkey as Nemçe, a loanword from the Slavic languages actually signifying Germany and thus denying Austria any validity as a political entity. While the key points of this contribution could probably have been summarized in fewer pages, Yılmaz...

The article focuses on the specifi c legal status of statutory towns in Austria from the restoration of constitutionalism in 1860 to the end of the monarchy and on the peculiarities of their administration. Special attention is paid to their method of selecting representatives since the mayors of the statutory towns were subject to the approval of the government and the emperor. The article examines the impact of the confi rmation process on the selection of mayors, and to what extent and in what manner the government exercised its option to exclude certain elected individuals from the leadership of the statutory cities. It shows the changes in the approach of the government after the 1870s and concludes in stating the ineffi ciency of this tool. URL: https://www.upjs.sk/filozoficka-fakulta/katedra-historie/10984/

The Habsburg Monarchy and Austria–Hungary Between Global and Comparative History

Abstract From the mid-1890s, Habsburg Austria began to follow European trends and experienced a gradual democratization of voting rights, which involved not only an expansion of the electorate but also an innovation of procedures that attempted to modernize elections. In this context, the article calls for a more systematic study of voting practices and attempts to point at some issues that have thus far received insufficient analysis. These include not only the occasional massive violent conflicts at elections that could accompany democratization until World War I but also the presence of women as voters at local and diet elections and the gradual introduction of polling booths. Measures such as allowing single women to cast their vote personally in a few crownlands or attempting to guard the secrecy of the vote suggest the level of experimentation in this period. The state's objective of orderly, “modern” elections is particularly called into question when we consider the extent to which government agents, including policemen and the army, were involved in election conflicts that resulted in fraud and sometimes bloodshed.

This article considers the rise of provenance in nineteenth-century Europe through a case study of manuscript research. In the early 1850s, Benedictine scholar Beda Dudík was sent to Stockholm and Rome by the Committee of the Moravian Estates in Habsburg Austria to trace manuscript objects abducted from Moravia (Mähren) by Swedish commanders during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). This article considers Dudík’s work with the manuscripts by combining perspectives from book history with those of the history of historiography and the history of ideas and science: I examine the ways in which Dudík worked with classification, and how this work was influenced by source fetishization. Dudík’s work with the manuscripts, recorded in his publications and notes, reveals that provenance is a transformable epistemic category. Moravian interest in provenance reflects their sense of scholarly inferiority, and the changing view of heritage as a public matter, collectively fetishized. In conclusion, the Moravian case illustrates just how significant historical materiality was to people of marginal lands, as inquiries into provenance can be a means of asserting historical existence.

ABSTRACT Attitudes towards education vary between regions and countries. These differences cannot be fully explained by socio-economic inequalities or direct inputs such as teachers or class size. The persistence of historical institutions is also an important issue. In this paper, regional differences in attitudes towards education are investigated in reference to events that took place in 19th century Polish territories when Poland was partitioned by Prussia, Russia, and Habsburg Austria and their educational systems were imposed. The results of the quantitative and qualitative research suggest that historical processes have created different attitudes towards education. In some regions, education is seen as a key for gaining general knowledge, yet in other parts of the country, it is seen as a tool for improving practical and technical skills.

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 362 in purging language of its conventional banalities, obscurantisms and falsities, purifying everyday discourse, while simultaneously redeeming the obscene and the blasphemous from degradation, and the common people from disregard and disdain. These trends have inevitably resulted in the enactment of state censorship laws and the decision of groups such as the Belarus Free Theatre to choose self-exile. The situation in Ukraine and Belarus is complicated by issues of language. The prioritization of the Russian language in countries now perceived to have been Russian ‘colonies’ in the past means that the practitioners of the New Drama are caught in a double bind between needing audiences both at home and in the former Soviet Union while, at the same time, registering the need to reclaim ownership of their own native languages at the risk of losing both a wider audience and revenue. Given the current situation whereby cultural activities tend to be funded by the state, fringe organizations need to find means of self-funding or seek financial support from abroad, as well as the kind of moral support already received from internationally renowned theatre people. This may mean that the days of New Drama are numbered. If so, their actions in clearing the ground may well have prepared the way for other, more structured and less iconoclastic dramatic forms to take root and flourish. In the meantime, this present volume serves as worthy testimony to the authenticity and vitality of a critical moment and movement in the theatrical history of all three nations. London Nick Worrall Świątek, Adam. Gente Rutheni, Natione Poloni: The Ruthenians of Polish Nationality in Habsburg Galicia. CIUS Press in cooperation with Księgarnia Akademicka, Edmonton, AL, Toronto, ON and Cracow, 2019. 633 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). The book under review is a translation of Adam Świątek’s Polish-language monograph of 2014. Published under the auspices of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, this book deals with the duality of the so-called gente Rutheni, natione Poloni Ruthenians (Ukrainians) who felt a kinship with Polishness. Świątek looks into the transformation of the Ruthenians of Polish nationality in Habsburg Austria from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Starting with the Renaissance humanist and writer Stanisław Orzechowski, Świątek employs a wide array of studies by his predecessors, including Stanisław Kot, Henryk Litwin, Janusz Tazbir, David Althoen, Serhii Plohy, Natalia Yakovenko and Marin Mudry. The REVIEWS 363 chronological and geographical scope of the study, terminology and source base are discussed in the introduction to the book which comprises eight chapters, bibliography, list of illustrations, and various indices. The book opens with a preface authored by Frank E. Sysyn, who himself studied the phenomenon of gente Ruthheni, natione Poloni in the early modern period. Chapter one looks into the characteristics of the formation of gente Rutheni, natione Poloni (pp. 55–147). By referring to such terms as ‘ethnicity’, ‘nation’ and ‘identity’, Świątek offers a detailed survey of the various social layers of the Ruthenian population of Galicia and their relation to the identity type of gente Rutheni, natione Poloni: the landed gentry, the gentry, the intelligentsia, the Greek Catholic clergy and the peasants. By analysing the structure of the two-tier (dual) identity of Ruthenians of Polish nationality, Świątek places this phenomenon within time and geographical expanse (pp. 55–149). The reader learns about family, the Uniate Church, school, language of instruction, especially at institutions of higher education, conflict situations with Ruthenians of other political persuasions (pp. 132–42). Chapter two, ‘Rus’ in the Historical Consciousness of Poles’, examines the literature (Adam Mickiewicz, Józef Bohdan Zaleski, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and especially Platon Kostecki), art (Jan Matejko) and historiography (Joachim Lelewel, Henryk Schmitt) which determined the development of the identity of the gente Rutheni, natione Poloni. One must also mention the textbook for secondary schools in Galicia which, prepared by Anatol Lewicki and reprinted a dozen or so times (the very last time in 1999), propagated the free-willed union of Poland, Lithuania and Rus’ (pp. 190–93). The genesis of political demands made by Ruthenians of Polish nationality...

Reviewed by: Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria by Scott O. Moore Ewa Siwak Scott O. Moore, Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria. Central European Studies. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2020. 292 pp. If in the first half of the twentieth century Habsburg scholars doomed the monarchy as a relic having outlived its time, incapable of reform and too fossilized to deal with the multiple nationalisms of its various people, historians have since reinterpreted the Empire's disintegration. Rather than blaming it on long-standing internal causes, more recently historians like John Deak have shifted focus to wartime developments in Austria that resulted in political control being vested in the military elites, eager to erase constitutionalism and punitively distrustful of ethnic minorities. Scott Moore's book Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria, one of several English-language studies timed around the centenary of the Empire's dissolution, also calls for the rehabilitation of [End Page 156] Austria-Hungary. His volume makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussions whether the monarchy produced solutions that would position the state to withstand the incendiary questions of its era. To contest the notion that the Habsburg administration did not adequately respond to the challenge of nationalisms, Moore reviews the pivotal decades between 1867 and 1914, examining the state-sponsored civic education in elementary and secondary schools of the Empire's Cisleithanian half. As Moore convincingly shows, the Austrian administration assembled a rigorously curated political narrative to disseminate Austria-Hungary's historic two-pronged mission as defender of Christian civilization from the East and guardian of West European order, as well as to advertise the monarchy as a family of nations. Moore's book presents us a public education system impressively supported, even from a contemporary perspective: well-trained teachers taught solid curricula grounded in educational psychology and served as resident intellectuals in their communities; schools were required to have large windows and gardens; the Ministry of Religion and Culture funded field trips and school hikes. The Ministry controlled and coordinated representations of the Empire's past and present through the school curriculum as well as through official celebrations, museum commemorations, and monument design, assuring political and pedagogical alignment between classroom education and public events (the Kronprinzenwerk would have been a welcome addition to Moore's study). A crucial strategy in building patriotism was to encourage a gradual evolution: younger pupils were taught to love their regional/ethnic Heimat, developing a broader self-identification as Austrians in higher grades. By fostering what Moore terms a "layered identity," the monarchy sought to integrate potentially divisive regional loyalties into a supranational patriotism. Relying on sources not considered before in discussions of the Empire's political strategy, such as textbooks, school inspection reports, and educational journals, Moore shows that any extant assumptions of the ineffectuality of Austria's civic education should be put to rest: The administration met the challenge of nationalism through coordinated efforts to mold a cohesive supranational identity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, civics assumed a vital role in school curricula in Europe and in the United States. In need of ideas that could bind together all citizens, history lessons taught about common myths and heroes. To accommodate liberal demands, textbooks explained how the state operates and taught the rights and obligations of citizens. Moore examines [End Page 157] the design and implementation of civic education, the selection of state heroes to model patriotism for all Austrians, and the historical narratives presented in lessons and commemorations. The last chapter traces a conflict between the state and teachers, inevitable with the emergence of civil society: the Ministry regarded school personnel as bureaucrats bound to political neutrality; in contrast, teachers understood themselves as citizens with political rights, often turning into vocal leaders in their ethnic communities. The Ministry's prohibition on political activity, which extended to all organizations, not just nationalists, could play a role in hiring or transfer decisions as teacher scrutiny intensified during the dualist period. Moore's scope has its limits: his research considers only Germanlanguage schools, and the exclusively German-language primary sources generally...

Book review: Jakub Benes: Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Book review: Jakub S. Beneš, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 268 pages. ISBN 978-0-198-78929-1

Abstract This article analyzes the role of urban civic militias (burgher corps) in Habsburg Austria from the end of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War I. Far from a remnant of the early modern past, by the turn of the twentieth century these militias were thriving local institutions. They fostered dynastic patriotism and participated in the growing promotion of shooting among the population in the lead-up to the conflict. But they also played a major role in upholding the bourgeois ideals of protection of social hierarchies and property. In the context of the rise of the workers' movement and social unrest, the militias saw themselves as bulwarks of social order and bastions of bourgeois virtue. They reflected an exclusive conception of armed citizenship opposed to the egalitarian notion of the citizen-soldier that survived into the twentieth century. The sensory experience of burgher corps parades during the patriotic or church celebrations was supposed to convey stability and express hierarchies in the urban space. This article also links the practices of armed civilians before the war to the paramilitary groups that emerged in 1918 and emphasizes the legacy of local conceptions of armed defense of property and of notions of “good” citizenship in the aftermath of the war.