Habsburg Civil Servants

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.

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.

Daša Ličen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maribor and a researcher at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She completed her PhD at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2021. Specializing in the fields of cultural anthropology, ethnology, and history, she is currently writing a book on late Habsburg Trieste's bourgeoisie.

“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