Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić (eds.): Habsburg Natures

 Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić (eds.): Habsburg Natures. Imperial Governance and Environment in Central Europe, 1850-1918. New York: Berghahn 2025. ISBN  978-1-83695-227-5 (available for preorder)

Description

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.

Contents

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

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).

Iva Lučić is an associate professor of history at Stockholm University and a Pro Futura Scientia Scholar at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. Previously, she held a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and a Linneaus-Palme Fellowship with Kolkata University. Lučićs first and award-winning monograph Im Namen der Nation (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018) examines the mobilization process for the political elevation of Muslims in Socialist Yugoslavia. Her second monograph, Gebrochenes Brot (Anton Pustet Verlag, 2020), analyzes the role of religion as a social practice among Roman Catholic noblewomen after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy.