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Within the Habsburg Empire of the late nineteenth century, nature became a central focus of political, economic, and scientific attention. A source of valuable natural resources and a platform for consolidating wider, territorial rule, its management and control was subsumed into a broader system of imperial governance. In this exacting analysis of the correlation between the environment and power, Habsburg Natures explores how the natural world fundamentally shaped the political and economic landscape within the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1850 to 1918. Ranging from forestry and coal-mining to river politics and natural disasters, this volume spotlights how deeply intertwined the histories of environmentalism and empire are.
“[This] is the first book that I am aware of that explicitly intends to explore the relationship between the Habsburgs as an empire and environmental history. The synthesis of the new imperial history, new Habsburg history, and environmental history in the introduction is very useful and should serve as a departure point for future environmental histories of the Habsburg Empire.” • Marc Landry, The University of New Orleans
Jawad Daheur is a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), focusing on economic and environmental history. His main interest is the interaction between human societies and nature in nineteenth-century Central Europe, with a particular focus on the German-speaking regions (Prussia, Austria-Hungary) and Poland. His recent publications include a special issue of Global Environment, entitled ‘Extractive Peripheries in Europe: Quest for Resources and Changing Environments (15th-20th centuries)’ (2022), and the article ‘Cheap Labour on the Timber Frontier: Migration of Forestry Workers from Austria-Hungary to Southeast Europe, ca. 1880–1914’ (Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 2024).
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Towards the Writing of an Environmentally Inspired History of the Late Habsburg Empire
Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić
Part I: (Inter/Intra) Imperial Entanglements
Chapter 1. Riparian Rivalries and River Politics: How the Danube Question Influenced Diplomatic Relations and Domestic Policies in the Late Habsburg Monarchy
Robert Shields Mevissen
Chapter 2. Improving Landscapes, Peoples and the Habsburg Empire: A Cooperative History of Melioration
Jana Osterkamp
Chapter 3. Logging the Borderlands: Transborder Forest Conflicts and Contestations in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in the Nineteenth Century
Selçuk Dursun
Part II: Cooperation and Conflict
Chapter 4. Natural Resources as the Empire’s (Dis)integrative Force: The Case of Bosnian Timber Exports in the Late Habsburg Empire
Iva Lučić
Chapter 5. Get Out of Our Forest! Rural Societies, National Mobilization, State-Building and Modern Forestry in Late-Habsburg and Post-Habsburg Transylvania
Gábor Egry
Chapter 6. The Demilitarization of the Croatian-Slavonian Military Border as an Example of Imperial State Forest Management
Robert Skenderović
Part III: Engineering Nature
Chapter 7. A Natural History of the Global Habsburg Empire: Indian Mongooses and the Production, Circulation and Management of Animal Knowledge in the Adriatic Periphery
Wolfgang Göderle
Chapter 8. The Golden Age of the Bark Beetle: Aristocratic Landowners, Imperial Governance and the Ips typographus in the Šumava Region (1868–1876)
Kristýna Kaucká
Part IV: Managing Resources
Chapter 9. Resource Governance in Time of Drought: Conflicts over Fodder Exports in Austria-Hungary at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Jawad Daheur
Chapter 10. Fuelling the Diversity: A Regional Perspective on Coal in the Late Austro-Hungarian Empire
Ségolène Plyer
Chapter 11. The Industrialization of Forests: The 1852 Imperial Forest Act as an Intervention Towards a Modern Forest Regime
Simone Gingrich and Martin Schmid
Conclusion: Late Habsburg History Revisited
Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić
Index