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The Habsburg Empire’s development into a modern nation state was, necessarily, bound up with the emergence of a vast bureaucratic network of civil servants. Responsible for addressing diverse social problems in areas such as education, public transportation, and health services, these officials enabled the Habsburg monarchy to maintain rule over geographically disparate domains. While Habsburg civil servants were often maligned as instruments of an oppressive regime, this volume provides a new perspective on their lives during the nineteenth century, spotlighting how they simultaneously constituted and challenged the state. In doing so, Habsburg Civil Servants reconceptualizes our understanding of the boundary between the realms of the state and the public.
“This is an innovative and deeply researched collection of studies on the bureaucracy of the Habsburg Monarchy. Generalizations about the bureaucracy of central Europe abound, often casting it in a negative light as facelessly monolithic or menacing. This volume, by contrast, brings the Habsburg civil service to life, exploring its responses to various pressures and challenges across the sprawling central European state.” • Jakub Beneš, University College London
“This [book] is of excellent quality concerning both the general approach and the wide array of topics in terms of the different institutions and fields of administrative practice and their geographical focus.” • Klemens Kaps, Johannes Kepler University Linz
Alexander Maxwell is Associate Professor at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Prior to taking up his position at Victoria University, he taught at universities in Swansea, Wales and Reno, Nevada, gaining his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia (London, 2009),Patriots Against Fashion (London, 2014) and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary (Berlin, 2019). Currently working on a book about the language-dialect dichotomy in government administrations, he has guest-edited issues of Nationalities Papers, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, The New Zealand Slavonic Journal, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics.
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Habsburg Civil Servants between Civil Society and the State
Daša Ličen, Alexander Maxwell
Chapter 1. Austrian Officials and the Making of the Polish-Ruthenian Divide, 1815-1848
Hugo Lane
Chapter 2. Habsburg Officials and the “Slavic Language”
Alexander Maxwell
Chapter 3. Identity Choices among State and County Officials in Late Habsburg Transylvania
Judit Pál, Vlad Popovici
Chapter 4. To Promote and Protect: Everyday Monarchism among Teachers and Prosecutors in the Bohemian Crownlands, 1869-1914
Marco Jaimes
Chapter 5. The Social Base of the Habsburg Bureaucracy: From Dalmatian Sektionschefs in Vienna to
Bohemian Foresters in Korčula/Curzola
Wolfgang Göderle
Chapter 6. The Civil Service in the Factory: Trade Inspectors and Working-Class Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1884–1914
Zdeněk Nebřenský
Chapter 7. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Prague Police during the Street Politics around 1900
David Smrček
Chapter 8. Civil-Military Relations on the Eve of the Great War: A Crisis in Habsburg Dalmatia?
John Deak
Chapter 9. The Right Man in the Right Place? Hans Loewenfeld-Russ and the Austrian Nutrition Office, 1914-1920
J. Alexander Killion
Index