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Published by: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

2018_2_Kövér

pdfVolume 7 Issue 2 CONTENTS

The Rothschild Consortium and the State Debt
of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

György Kövér
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
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The state debts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after 1867 consisted of three parts: loans acquired before 1867; loans acquired by the Cisleithanian half of the empire after the Compromise of 1867; and, finally, new state debt generated by the Kingdom of Hungary also after 1867. Between 1873 and 1910, with some exceptions, it was the Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Disconto-Gesellschaft consortium that acted in the role of the state banker in both halves of the dualistic state. The decision in favor of the Rothschilds was based not only on their extensive international network, rapid communications, immense prestige, an enormous amount of capital and a high degree of competitiveness but on the fact that they had long been heavily involved in Austrian financial affairs and in their quasi-monopoly position were able to assess relatively favorable costs. While the international market treated Hungary’s state bonds as the public debt of a sovereign state, it still considered Austria and Hungary to be economically interdependent parts of the same, albeit politically dual, monarchy even as the threat of the dualist state’s dissolution emerged more and more frequently from the turn of the century onwards. After initial hardships, yields on Hungary’s state debt with some lag were able to keep up with the profitability on the again gradually increasing Austrian state debt.

Keywords: Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, State debt, Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Disconto-Gesellschaft consortium, reputation, “empire effect”, “Rothschild effect”

 Empires have written themselves back into history. Such a statement can now be confidently made not only because of the post-colonial turn in writing history or the empire-building aspirations that we currently witness, but also because of the ongoing large-scale reevaluation of the history of past empires. In historiography, the Eastern European empires of the nineteenth century are no longer seen as entities predestined to dissolve, even though this is what was taught to several generations of students after World War I.1 The view that there is, in fact, no diametrical opposition between the ability of the empires to renew themselves and the nation-building processes that emerge within the framework of those empires seems to be gaining an impressive foothold.2 Even those scholars who study the Ottoman Empire, a textbook example of slow, drawn-out erosion, now emphasize the modern nature and the effectiveness of its sweeping imperial reforms.

However, the study of the “empire effect” has generated serious controversy with regard to the five decades leading up to World War I.3 In fact, economists and economic historians analyzing more or less similar data series have arrived at widely diverging conclusions. Of course, there have been differences both in terms of the size of the databases and the econometric methods applied, yet it is difficult to accept that scholars should arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions in evaluating the impact of any given country’s status as a colony in terms of its access to international money markets—in other words, in resolving the issue of whether colonies (without making a distinction between the colonies of white settlers and other types of colonies) were offered more favorable terms than sovereign states when acquiring loans in the London money-market.4 When examining the issue not so much from the perspective of the colonies, but from that of the various sovereign states entering the money markets on very different terms, yet another question arises: did investors in actual fact apply the same criteria in assessing colonies and sovereign states? For in the case of colonies, empirical guarantees proved to be a much more important factor than any financial parameter.5

The shift we see in the historical evaluation of the Habsburg Danubian empire is quite spectacular even though various scholars may not offer converging interpretations or may not necessarily, or fully, consider the quantitative results available in the context of these newly arising questions.6 What’s more, similar inquiries into the key parameters of Austrian and Hungarian government finance have shown that those parameters hardly exerted any “consistent and robust impact on the yields of state bonds.”7

 

* * *

 

From the perspective of the empire, the state debts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after 1867 consisted of three distinct parts: loans acquired before 1867; loans acquired by the Cisleithanian half of the empire after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867; and, finally, new state debt generated by the Kingdom of Hungary also after 1867. The first of these might, in effect, be called the “common debt” of the Monarchy—then again, this terminology would certainly contradict the official Hungarian position, which claimed that, in the context of public law, such debts were generated without Hungarian consent, therefore Hungary could not be held accountable for their repayment. However, as reflected in the wording of Hungary’s acts on the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Hungarian party, “out of fairness and political considerations,” was willing to contribute to the repayment of such debt to an agreed extent, in fact applying the so-called principle of praecipuum in the actual calculations. In other words, the Hungarian government agreed to make partial interest payments with respect to a principal amount that it never acknowledged as its own debt. Then again, this was not the only public-law absurdity in the Dual Monarchy.

Let us set the Hungarian public-law position aside for the time being and consider the following graph, which plots the Dual Monarchy’s state debt:

Graph 1. Austro-Hungarian State Debt (1867–1913)

Source: Clemens Jobst and Thomas Scheiber, “Austria-Hungary from 1863 to 1914,” in South-Eastern European Monetary and Economic Statistics from the Nineteenth Century to World War II (South-Eastern European Monetary History Network) (Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Vienna: Bank of Greece, Bulgarian National Bank, National Bank of Romania, Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 2014), 97.

As a result of the reduction of the interest rate and the introduction of the coupon tax in 1868, the pre-1867, so-called “common debt” temporarily decreased. During the period leading up to the war of 1877–78, the “common debt” exceptionally increased once again, more or less reaching earlier levels. However, from this period on, the “common debt” remained practically unchanged, although it would be more accurate to say that it showed a slightly decreasing trend. After the Compromise of 1867, the two state parties—the two halves of the empire, Cisleithania (Austria) and Transleithania (Hungary)—had access to government loans as separate sovereign states. As a result of the situation that emerged after 1868, the Cisleithanian part of the empire had no access to new loans (the London Stock Exchange barred the trading of Austrian loans, and trading in Hungarian state debt had only been possible at a premium payable on top of the Austrian debts to begin with).8 This means that Hungary, entering first to the London Stock Exchange in 1872, had not only to overcome the difficulties of a newcomer, but also to cover the costs of the Austrian coupon tax on foreign bonds.9 The correspondence of the Austrian Minister-President Friedrich Beust and the head of the Paris House of Rothschild banking family, James de Rothschild, precisely reflects the basic structure of the debtor-versus-borrower game situation.10 James de Rothschild expressed his firm critical opinion; however finally—in contrast to the London Stock Exchange—the Paris Bourse did not exclude the Austrian bonds from the quotation list. At the same time the question increased the tensions among the branches of the Rothschild family, especially between Vienna and Paris.11

It is a fact that with the exception of the years immediately leading up to World War I, the state debt of the Austrian Hereditary Lands significantly lagged behind the indebtedness levels of the Kingdom of Hungary. Enjoying limited sovereignty, the Hungarian state made every effort after 1867 to make up for what it had missed out on due to having lost its own war of independence: during the period between 1849 and the Compromise of 1867, Hungary had not been in a position to issue its own sovereign debt. Plotting the rate of Hungarian sovereign debt accumulation in this first stage generates an unusually steep curve practically until the early 1890s, the second half of the 1880s being the only interim period showing some degree of self-restraint. Then, for about two decades around the turn of the century, Hungarian sovereign debt barely increased at all, or only at a very modest rate. In turn, the half decade leading up to World War I brought rapid sovereign debt accumulation both in Cisleithania and in Transleithania, although by this period the Austrian Hereditary Lands were by far in the lead.

Reviewing Austria’s and Hungary’s state debt curves in parallel, it is not a challenge to notice how the two move in close coordination. From the beginning of the 1870s and into the middle of the 1880s, the dynamic of Hungarian sovereign debt accumulation was, as it were, balanced out—one might be tempted to say, supported from the background—by Austria’s own self-restraint and stability. Then in the second half of the 1880s, the slowing rate of Hungarian sovereign debt accumulation was offset by the increasing rate of Austrian sovereign debt accumulation. At the turn of the decade, the dynamics changed again: while Austria’s accumulation of sovereign debt lost its momentum, this was compensated for by the dizzying rate at which Hungary’s own sovereign debt started to increase. Then, from the period following the currency reform, Cisleithania’s sovereign debt accumulation took center stage once again. Of course, one could interpret this contrapuntal game of sovereign debt accumulation rates as a manifestation of the harmonious cooperation between the two state parties involved, although with some understanding of the nature of the relations between Austria and Hungary at the turn of the century, this would be hardly credible. Not discarding this option entirely, the linkage between sovereign debt accumulation dynamics of the two states may well be rooted somewhere else. In observing the turnover of the securities (mostly through focusing on the interests paid), we have seen the two states as the main—almost only—protagonists. However, there was yet another main protagonist in the context of the debts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, namely, the Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Dictonto-Gesellschaft consortium, the gateway through which the state bonds of the Dual Monarchy gained access to the global international money market. Between 1873 and 1910, with some exceptions, it was this consortium that acted in the role of the state banker in both halves of the dualistic state: it offered short-term bridge loans as well as what were called long-term consolidated government loans. It is therefore a good idea to take a brief look at the behavior of the issuing consortium in relation to the Austrian and Hungarian bonds.

Published sources in financial statistics allow us to rely on fairly accurate data as to where Hungarian state bonds were placed throughout the years.12 The available data is based on the annual interest payments made by Hungary’s Ministry of Finance. Despite the fact that coupons paid in Vienna or Paris do not necessarily belong to Austrian or French investors, this is the data series that literature has tacitly used to illustrate the countries from which the foreign capital financing Hungary’s state debt originated. In fact, it does largely reflect the main trends, but it may be wise to consider that the data series reflects not so much states as, rather, currency zones. Whether the coupons were paid in Paris, Berlin or London was more a function of the agio or disagio of the franc, the mark, or the pound sterling against the Austrian currency (especially before 1892, the year in which the empire adopted the Austro-Hungarian krone as its official currency).

Graph 2. The Territorial Distribution of Holders of Hungarian State Securities as Reflected in the Place of Coupon Payment (1868–1914)

Sources: Fellner, Die Zahlungsbilanz Ungarns, Statement III; Fellner, “Das Volkseinkommen Österreich und Ungarn,” Table VII.

The graph clearly indicates how in the initial stage, during the 1870s, the Viennese money market played a relatively modest role in financing the Hungarian state debt. The proportion of Austrian bond holders started to increase from the 1880s and peaked during the first half of the 1890s; during this same period, the proportion of Hungarian investors stagnated and even decreased. The turn of the century ushered in a new era when investors from abroad (i.e., from outside the Dual Monarchy) and the Hungarian capital market jointly absorbed the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian state debt.

The Monarchy’s state bond market consciously took advantage of the fragmentation of the international capital market. It issued state bonds denominated either in gold or in gold currencies specifically for the international money markets, while its securities denominated in the Austrian bank currency were issued mostly for resident investors. It is possible to track the journey of the various securities one by one from their placement all the way to their payment, but this would go far beyond the limitations of this article. For this very reason, we will now focus primarily on trends in the issue and interest payment of the so-called Austrian and Hungarian four-percent gold rentes and the Austrian and Hungarian five-percent paper rentes especially with regard to the period when the monarchy implemented its currency reform and launched its rente conversion program.

Both the Austrian and Hungarian four-percent gold rentes were denominated in gold forints; accordingly, they were linked to the money markets of the gold currency countries through the gold forint exchange rate (the official exchange rates being 100 gold forints = 250 francs = 200 marks = 10 pounds sterling). Bond issues were strictly tailored to the needs and possibilities of the international capital market. The Austrian Hereditary Lands issued such denominations from 1876, with Hungary following suit in 1880. Already in 1876, partly because of the earlier unification and interest rate reduction, the Cisleithanian lands could reenter the international capital market offering four-percent rentes; in turn, Hungary’s financial situation at the time only allowed the issue of six-percent gold rentes, and it was only at the beginning of the 1880s that Hungary, too, could switch to four-percent gold rentes.

From 1876 until the end of the 1880s, Austria acquired loans in the amount of 340,850,000 gold forints by issuing gold rentes; during the decade of the 1880s, Hungary’s total sovereign debt denominated in this type of security amounted to 592,000,000 gold forints. During the 1880s, both state parties also issued five-percent paper rentes to cover their capital requirements, primarily targeting domestic investors looking for opportunities to place their savings. During the 1880s, the Austrian state issued five-percent paper rentes in a total nominal value of 238,877,100 forints, while the Hungarian state’s bond issues amounted to a total nominal value of 358,487,000 forints.13 As can be seen from these figures, the Hungarian party’s capital needs were significantly higher in the case of both types of rente bonds. In the case of paper rente, at the time of the first issue, both governments made attempts to contract other consortia (in Vienna, Julian Dunajewski contacted the Länderbank group, while in Pest Gyula Szapáry entered negotiations with a consortium led by the Union-bank of Vienna), but eventually both found their way back to the consortium belonging to the Rothschilds, whom they inevitably needed anyway when it came to the issuance of gold rentes. This clearly shows how closely interrelated the various rentes were, not only in terms of the issuing government (Austria or Hungary), but also in terms of their denomination (gold forints versus paper forints).

Already during the second half of the 1870s, Austrian four-percent gold rente prices and Hungarian six-percent gold rente prices were closely interrelated. In a letter written to the management of Creditanstalt and discussing, among other things, the issue of the second tranche, Adolph von Hansemann, general manager of Berlin-based Disconto-Gesellschaft, went as far as making the following—quite straightforward—statement: “as soon as the Austrian gold rente appreciates to 61 percent [. . .] time will have come to issue the Hungarian gold rente.”14

From the time of its very birth, the Hungarian four-percent gold rente was in the limelight of both the domestic and international press. A wide range of factors were put forward in an effort to explain the success of the May 1881 issue of the rente, the improvement in Hungary’s finances being evidently one of the more reasonable explanations. At the same time, many were quick to comment that while the finances of Hungary were in fact improving, its deficit levels remained unchanged, “without much of a guarantee for the country’s political future.” The fact of the matter is that subscribers “put their confidence in the Messrs. Rothschild rather than in Hungary, and, generally speaking have no intention to hold what may be allotted them, but hope to sell at a premium.”15 Even those voicing their indignation or bewilderment about this state of the affairs had to come to grips with the fact that Austrian and Hungarian securities were valued differently, even though the difference in their valuation decreased somewhat over time.16 Even in the very last stage of converting six-percent rentes into four-percent rentes, press commentaries always tried to offer some sort of a rational explanation with respect to the price-level differences between Austrian and Hungarian securities, even though they could only guess the probability of any given future development.17

 

 

Average Price

Profitability*

 

4% Austrian

4% Hungarian

4% Austrian

4% Hungarian

1876

**70.80

 

6.79

 

1877

73.90

 

6.62

 

1878

72.93

 

6.43

 

1879

78.64

 

5.91

 

1880

87.59

 

5.33

 

1881

93.40

90.74

5.00

5.10

1882

94.41

87.29

5.03

5.40

1883

98.69

87.94

4.82

5.40

1884

102.66

92.20

4.71

5.20

1885

108.27

97.90

4.56

5.00

1886

115.60

104.57

4.32

4.70

1887

111.44

100.04

4.49

5.00

1888

110.18

99.43

4.46

4.90

1889

109.98

101.45

4.31

4.60

1890

108.50

102.43

4.25

4.50

1891

109.93

104.46

4.22

4.40

1892

113.28

 

4.19

 

* Profits calculated according to the annual average of the gold agio.

** First issued on December 22, 1876.

 

Table 1. A. The Annual Average Price and Profitability of Austrian and Hungarian Gold Rentes

 

 

Average Price

Profitability (Yields)

 

5% Austrian

5% Hungarian

5% Austrian

5% Hungarian

1881

95.48

88.35

5.24

5.6

1882

91.48

86.28

5.46

5.7

1883

93.20

86.59

5.36

5.7

1884

95.81

88.76

5.22

5.6

1885

98.98

91.03

5.05

5.4

1886

101.52

94.45

4.92

5.2

1887

96.26

87.83

5.19

5.7

1888

95.54

88.04

5.23

5.6

1889

99.99

95.79

5.00

5.2

1890

101.63

99.55

4.92

5.02

1891

102.09

101.22

4.90

4.93

1892*

101.14

 

4.94

 

 

Table 1. B. The Annual Average Price and Profitability of Austrian and Hungarian Paper Rentes

* After the decision concerning bond conversion(s).

Sources: Statistische Tabellen zur Währungs-Frage der Österreich-Ungarischen Monarchie, 306; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik (Vienna, 1893), 253; A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok, 115.

Economic history literature has also dedicated a lot of attention to the question of the price difference between Austrian and Hungarian state securities (and the moderation of such difference around the time of the currency reform) through the work of authors such as John Komlos, Marc Flandreau, and, most recently, Michael Pammer.18 The quantitative analysis carried out has helped discard many factors that had been given serious consideration earlier, when the discourse on these issues had been still mostly based on guesswork. However, some archival sources, such as, first and foremost, the correspondence between the banking and finance houses of the Rothschilds still offer further opportunities. In addition to highlighting the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between the Rothschild consortium and the Austrian and Hungarian governments, they also reflect the conflict and rivalry characterizing the internal life of the consortium. As a typical episode manifesting such rivalry, we might mention the apprehensions of the Rothschilds of Vienna about how the Berlin banks and especially A. Hansemann, general manager of Disconto-Gesellschaft, aspired to gain a leading role in the transactions; they were of the opinion that in issues of currency regulation and gold procurement, London and Vienna should be granted exclusive leadership. At the same time, they had no doubts about the fact that, when it comes to loan negotiations, the finance ministers of Austria and Hungary would favor the Rothschild consortium over any other financial group.19 In a much broader sense than it was originally used by Flandreau and Flores we could speak about a “Rothschild effect.”20

Throughout the period, the primary target of Austrian gold rente issues was increasingly Germany (by 1898, Germany’s total share reached 60 percent). The French money market played a significant role initially, but its share gradually dwindled away, with German investors moving in to take over;21 Belgium and Switzerland, in turn, never held significant amounts. In the meantime, the proportion of Austrian bondholders increased from one-fifth to one-fourth. During the 1890s, Austrian capital carved out a dynamically increasing share for itself among Hungarian four-percent gold rente holders; here, it was the Austrians who took over the role of the quickly retreating French bondholders. It may be worth mentioning that there was no change in the proportion of Hungarian gold rentes held by Germans, British, or Hungarians during the period. Consequently, taking a look at changes in the placement of Austrian and Hungarian four-percent gold rentes in parallel, we can conclude that while French bond holders pulled out of the bond markets of both governments, those who entered these markets in their place were primarily German investors in the case of Austria and Austrian investors in the case of Hungary. In other words, the increase in the share of Austrian investors in Hungary was mostly made possible by the placement of Austrian securities in Germany (the crowding-out effect).

A look at where Hungarian five-percent paper rente coupon payments were made around the turn of the 1880s and 1890s also offers interesting lessons. It may be worth adding that in the case of this type of security, the Hungarian finance minister placed special emphasis on making sure that the largest possible portion of the securities were held by Hungarian investors. Not even the banks’ archives allow us to reconstruct the sale of paper rentes in a fully detailed fashion, but it seems to be beyond any doubt that sales in Hungary showed a declining trend. In 1882, as much as 45 percent to 47 percent of the securities were sold in Hungary; by 1887, the rate dropped to less than 30 percent, with sales in Austria ramping up to over 60 percent.22 All this occurred despite the fact that the Hungarian member of the consortium, the General Credit Bank of Hungary, increased its own share from ten percent in 1882 to eleven percent in 1887. When negotiations started about the 14th issue in 1887, and the minutes of Credit Bank’s board of directors meeting recorded the fixed-price takeover of a package of five-percent paper rentes in a total nominal value of 23,000,000 forints, the following comment was made nearly routinely: “Our participation is eleven percent, although we transfer two percent of the entire transaction to financial institutions with whom we are closely affiliated.”23 On the day of closing the transaction, the head of the Vienna Rothschilds sent off first a telegram and then a detailed letter to his cousins in Paris informing them about the terms of the deal: a package of Hungarian paper rentes in a total nominal value of 23 million forints was to be taken over at a fixed price of 85¾ (the quoted daily price being 88¾). He did not believe that a public subscription would be necessary; however, the bonds became available over the counter (Schalterwege) in Vienna, Pest, and Berlin the very same day. Negotiations with the Austrian finance minister also started the very same week.24 The option for the next tranche arising from the contracts was formulated by Creditanstalt’s board of directors in even greater unison under the brief title Consortien für Oesterreichische und Ungarische Papierrente.25

However, financial statistics on coupon payment suggest that Hungary held on to its share of 44 percent to 46 percent in 1886 as well as in 1890, and that, in fact, the proportion of Hungarian investors increased to 63 percent by 1892 (while the proportion of Austrian investors dropped to less than one-third just before the conversion of the paper rentes). The scarce statistical data we have on the coupon payment of Austrian paper rentes seems to indicate that all payments were made in Austria, even though this is somewhat difficult to believe in the light of the aforesaid. What may have happened at most is that certain old views lingered on within the system of financial statistics, treating the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as a unified entity in this respect.26

As far as the Austrian gold rente strategy of the Vienna Rothschilds is concerned, the stock book itemizes, at best, certain occasional purchase or sale transactions related to high or increasing price levels or designed to influence price levels on an ad hoc basis. In the long run, they expected Hungarian gold rente prices to increase. They gradually increased their stock in this type of bond as prices rose, and when price levels peaked, they sold off an overwhelming part of the stock of bonds they had held. Also noteworthy is to what extent their expectations depended on international arbitrage; this link is clearly demonstrated not only by the fact that they kept bonds on deposit with Bleichröder but also by their speculation on the Berlin parity.

In terms of strategy, the strongest similarities are seen between Hungarian gold rentes and Hungarian paper rentes, even though in the case of the latter, expectations focused not on selling the paper rentes, but specifically on their conversion into krone rentes. However, the price difference between Austrian and Hungarian state bond issues never entirely disappeared even after transition to the krone.27

It seems especially worthy of our attention that the prices of the Austrian and Hungarian state bond issues remained interlinked even after the Rothschild consortium lost its monopolistic position in Cisleithania as far as Austrian state bonds were concerned.28 One way to interpret this is that the influence that the Rothschild consortium retained on Hungarian state bonds even after Albert’s death provided additional safeguards against any major diversion from the internationally accepted terms. It would therefore appear that while the international market treated Hungary’s state bonds as the public debt of a sovereign state29 (there seems to exist no other worthwhile explanation as to why the price difference, moderating at times but always reappearing, persisted), it still considered Austria and Hungary to be economically interdependent parts of the same, albeit politically dual, monarchy even as the threat of the dualist state’s dissolution emerged more and more frequently from the turn of the century onwards. The influence wielded by the Rothschild consortium certainly played a supporting role in ensuring that neither of the constituent states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy went bankrupt.

 

* * *

 

Customarily, there are a number of relative indicators in use to measure the rate of the sovereign debt of Austria and Hungary: the sovereign debt expressed in absolute terms is taken in relation to the size of the population (public debt per capita) or to the rate of GDP growth (on the basis of Max Schulze’s data),30 while Marc Flandreau analyzed interest burden data in the light of government revenues.31

This latter method of calculation has its own difficulties. For one, in order to establish the actual amount of interests paid, the contribution paid by both Austria and Hungary towards their “common debt” must also be considered. It must also be mentioned that Austria and Hungary followed very different practical standards when recording the revenues and expenditures of state companies for the purposes of public finance accounting.32

 

Graph 5 a-b. Austrian and Hungarian Debt Service and Government Revenues (1875–1912)
in Millions of Forints

Source: Flandreau, “The Logic of Compromise,” 31.

 

In the Austrian Hereditary Lands—which bore the brunt of paying back the “common state debt”—the debt-service ratio fluctuated by around one-fourth during the 1870s and all the way through the 1890s. It was only successfully decreased to a level lower than one-fifth around the turn of the century. By 1912, right before World War I, it was under 15 percent. Referencing Graph 1 once again, this was obviously only possible due to the fact that government revenues increased much more dynamically than the country’s debt service, and as Table 3 allows us to conclude, there was no deterioration in the terms of issue of state bonds. During the 1870s and the 1880s, Hungary’s debt-service ratio hovered around one-third, and it was only pushed under the critical threshold of 30 percent around 1890. However, the debt burden slowly but surely grew in both halves of the empire. In Hungary, annual government revenue levels varied wildly around the turn of the century, primarily because of poor crops and years of economic crisis. Consequently, the relative burden of the country’s debt service was never lower than one-fifth until after 1906, although by 1912—just as in Austria—it was lower than the 15-percent threshold. Thus, during the 1890s—after an ominous start, in the wake of its currency reform and debt conversions—the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy finally broke out of the zone (a debt service ratio of over 25 percent) that was typical of heavily indebted states.33 And this is where the Rothschild consortium’s role in debt consolidation merits more of our attention among other factors pertaining to the international money market.

The credit that a state can obtain on the international money market depends on several factors. Recent economic, economic-history and even international political-science analyses have placed particular significance on the role that the reputation of an indebted country plays in determining its creditworthiness. The reputation of a country is based not only on its past, that is, whether it has previously taken out loans, whether it has repaid loans promptly or has perhaps become insolvent (or asked for rescheduling of its debt), but on the estimation of whether under exceptional circumstances (natural catastrophe, war, economic crisis, etc.) it will prove capable and inclined to maintain its solvency. It is important to be familiar with the motives of the creditors (bankers and investors) in each given situation: the information they possess when evaluating requests for credit; the network of connections and amount of capital that capital-market players have at their disposal, the degree to which they are committed to participating in the transaction (are they trying to cut their losses as the result of endangered previous engagements, are they going after their money?). The standing of an indebted country in the international money-market hierarchy determines its position—its degree of access to the primary market centers (which in the nineteenth century were London and Paris).

The Austrian Empire had the reputation as a bad debtor already before the Compromise of 1867. The decision of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1868 to unify and convert the banknotes in which its debt was denominated and to introduce a coupon tax in the interest of stabilizing its state finances served to further impair this reputation. The aforesaid measures cast a shadow upon Hungary as well just as the country was entering the international market. The semi-sovereign Hungarian state claimed in vain that the so-called “old debts” had been accrued without its consent and that it thus had no debts of its own, since potential creditors did not have a positive historical judgement of its behavior as a debtor and it even seemed to be conceivable that the state could declare insolvency at any time. Indeed, the Transleithanian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy began to accumulate sovereign debt so rapidly that it was nearly forced into sovereign default in 1873. The commitment of Hungary to the Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Disconto-Gesellschaft consortium played a decisive role in averting such default. The decision in favor of the Rothschilds was based not only on their extensive international network, rapid communications, immense prestige, enormous amount of capital and high degree of competitiveness, but on the fact that they had long been heavily involved in Austrian financial affairs and in their quasi–monopoly position were able to assess relatively favorable costs.34 Cisleithania, however, was forced under its post-1868 financial circumstances to refrain from rapidly accruing debt and, in fact, assumed the role of creditor within the internal market of the Dual Monarchy. However, the influence of the Rothschilds was not unlimited: for example, they attempted for almost a half century to rescue Spain from insolvency, though when the country’s debt was nevertheless rescheduled in the 1870s, they withdrew from the Spanish government-bond market and sought—and found—compensation in various enterprises (railway and mining).35 By contrast, after initial hardships, yields on Hungary’s state debt with some lag were able to keep up with the profitability on the again gradually increasing Austrian state debt. Hungary’s state debt did not follow the typical path of newcomers.36 It was able to forge benefit from its initial handicap via the integration of the Dual Monarchy’s money markets, particularly after the adoption of the Limping Gold Standard in 1892. The Hungarian money-market—through its close connection with the Wiener Börse and the Austo-Hungarian Bank—was able to gain admission to the “financial clique” at the forefront of the international network. Without this affiliation, Hungary would have unlikely been able to emerge from its peripheral position.37

Bibliography

Primary sources

Historisches Archiv der Bank Austria Creditanstalt (BA-CA)

CA-Verwaltungsrath-Protokolle (CA-V)

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637 – 1 – 7

637 – 1 – 45-51

637 – 1 – 163

637 – 2 – 3

 

A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok, [Statistical data regarding foreign-currency affairs]. Budapest: M. Kir. Pénzügyminisztérium, 1891.

A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok (1892–1901) Manuscript [PM], 1904.

Clarke, Hyde. “On the Debts of Sovereign and Quasi-Sovereign States, Owing by Foreign Countries.” Journal of the Statistical Society 41 (1978): 339–41.

Jobst, Clemens, and Thomas Scheiber. “Austria-Hungary from 1863 to 1914.” In South-Eastern European Monetary and Economic Statistics from the Nineteenth Century to World War II [SEEMES], 55–100. Athens–Sofia–Bucharest–Vienna: Bank of Greece / Bulgarian National Bank / National Bank of Romania / Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 2014.

Statistische Tabellen zur Währungs-Frage der Österreich-Ungarischen Monarchie, 1892.

Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik. Vienna: Verf. k. k. Finanz-Ministerium, 1893.

Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, FM. 2nd edition, 2nd part. Vienna, 1900–1904.

Magyar Pénzügy, 1882, 1889.

The Statist, 1881, 1884.

Secondary sources

Accominotti, Olivier, Marc Flandreau, and Riad Rezzik. “The Spread of Empire: Clio and the Measurement of Colonial Borrowing Costs.” Economic History Review 64, no. 2 (2011): 385–407.

Berger, Stefan, and Alexei Miller. “Introduction: Building Nations in and with Empires—A Reassessment.” In Nationalizing Empires, edited by Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, 1–31. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2015.

Cameron, Rondo. France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800–1914: Conquests of Peace and Seeds of War. Princeton–New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961.

Chapman, Stanley. The Rise of Merchant Banking. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984.

Chapman, Stanley. Raphael Bicentenary 1787–1987. London: Raphael Zorn, 1987.

Corti, Egon Caesar Conte. Das Haus Rothschild in der Zeit seiner Blüte 1830–1871. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1928.

Eddie, Scott. “Limits on the Fiscal Independence of Sovereign States in Customs Union: Tax Union Aspects of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, 1868–1911.” Hungarian Studies Review 9, no. 2 (1982): 7–28.

Fellner, Friedrich. Die Zahlungsbilanz Ungarns: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von der internationalen Zahlungsbilanz im Allgemein. Vienna–Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1908.

Fellner, Friedrich. “Das Volkseinkommen Österreich und Ungarn.” Statistische Monatschrift, 42 (1916): 485–625.

Ferguson, Niall. The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. London: Widenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.

Ferguson, Niall. “Political Risk and the International Bond Market between the 1848 Revolution and the Outbreak of the First World War.” Economic History Review 59, no. 1 (2006): 70–112.

Ferguson, Niall, and Moritz Schularlik. “The Empire Effect: The Determinants of Country Risk in the First Age of Globalization, 1880–1913.” The Journal of Economic History 66, no. 2 (2006): 283–312.

Flandreau, Marc, and Clemens Jobst. “The Ties that Divide: A Network Analysis of the International Monetary System, 1890–1910.” The Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (2005): 977–1007.

Flandreau, Marc. “The Logic of Compromise: Monetary Bargaining in Austria-Hungary, 1867–1913.” European Review of Economic History 10, no. 1 (2006): 3–33.

Flandreau, Marc, and Juan H. Flores. “The Peaceful Conspiracy: Bond Markets and International Relations During the Pax Britannica.” International Organization 66, no. 2 (2012): 211–41.

Gille, Bertrand. Histoire de la Maison Rothschild, vol. 2, 1848–1870. Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1967.

Komlos, John. The Habsburg Monarchy as a Customs Union: Economic Development in Austria-Hungary in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Komlosy, Andrea. “Imperial Cohesion, National Building and Regional Integration in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1804–1918.” In Nationalizing Empires, edited by Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, 369–427. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2015.

Kövér, György. “The London Stock Market and the Credit of Austria-Hungary.” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarium Hungaricae 34, no. 2–3 (1988): 159–70.

Kövér, György. “Centripetal and Centrifugal Economic Forces in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.” In Der Markt im Mitteleuropa der Zwischenkriegszeit/The Market in Interwar Central Europe, edited by Alice Teichova, Alois Mosser and Jaroslav Patek, 341–47. Prague: Karolinum Press, 1997.

Kövér, György. “A bécsi Rothschildok és az 5%-os magyar papírjáradék (1881–1893)” [The Viennese Rothschilds and the five-percent Hungarian paper rente, (1881–1893)]. Aetas 16, no. 3–4 (2001): 140–58.

Kövér, György. “Kincstár és konzorcium: a magyar aranyjáradék-konverzió mérlegei, 1881–1884” [Treasury and consortium: Balance sheets of the Hungarian gold rente conversion, 1881–1884]. Aetas 19, no. 1 (2004): 74–99.

Le Bris, David. “Why Did French Savers Buy Foreign Assets before 1914? A Decomposition of the Benefits from Diversification.” Recherches économique de Louvin 79, no. 3 (2013): 71–89.

López-Morell, Miguel A. The House of Rothschild in Spain, 1812–1941. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

Michel, Bernard. Banques et banquiers en Autriche au debut du 20e siècle. Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1976.

Pammer, Michael. “The Hungarian Risk: The Premium on Hungarian State Bonds, 1881–1914.” Financial History Review 24, no. 1 (2017): 23–52.

Parent, Antoine, and Christophe Rault. “The Influence Affecting French Assets Abroad Prior to 1914.” The Journal of Economic History 64, no. 2 (2004): 328–62.

Ránki, György. “Le capital français en Hongrie.” In: La position international de la France: aspects économiques et financières XIXe-XXe siècles, edited by Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, 235–42. Paris: Edition de l’EHESS, 1977.

Tomz, Michael. Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries. Princeton–Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.

1 Kövér, “Centripetal and Centrifugal Economic Forces.”

2 Berger and Miller, “Introduction: Building Nations.”

3 Ferguson, “Political Risk;” Ferguson and Schularlik, “The Empire Effect;” Accominotti, Flandreau, and Rezzik, “The Spread of Empire.”

4 Ferguson and Schularlik, “The Empire Effect.”

5 Accominotti, Flandreau, and Rezzik, “The Spread of Empire.”

6 Komlosy, “Imperial Cohesion.”

7 Pammer, “The Hungarian Risk,” 37.

8 Kövér, “The London Stock Market,” 168–69. Hungary’s finance ministry contracted the financial group of the Erlangers in an effort to circumvent Vienna and the Rothschilds. On the Erlangers, see Chapman, The Rise of Merchant Banking, 85–86.

9 In his estimations on the risk premium of newcomers, Michael Tomz does not take Hungary into consideration, presumably because the Hungarian five-percent bond was issued in London by Raphael and Sons only in 1872. Tomz, Reputation and International Cooperation, 59–60. The nominal interest rate was 5 percent, the issue price 81, so the yield (6.17 percent) was considerably below the average yields of newcomers at that time (8.6 percent). Clarke, “On the Debts of Sovereign,” 317–18. On Raphaels Bank, see Chapman, Raphael Bicentenary 1787–1987.

10 “Ich hoffe, daß Sie uns ein wenig mit ihren Rathschlägen un mit Ihrem Einfluß unterstützen werden.” Friedrich Beust to James de Rothschild, May 28, 1868. Quote from Corti, Das Haus Rothschild, 434. James Rothschild, in one of his last letters (he died in November 1868), explained his position: “Je comprends parfaitement qu’aujourd’hui l’Autriche veuille établir son budget sur les revenues du pays et non sur l’emprunt, mais ce serait tomber dans une exagération regrettable que de répudier absolument pour l’avenir le système des emprunts.” James de Rothschild to Friedrich Beust, June 2, 1868. Quote from Gille, Histoire de la Maison Rothschild, vol. 2, 486.

11 Ferguson, The World’s Banker, 690.

12 Fellner, Die Zahlungsbilanz Ungarns; Idem, “Das Volkseinkommen Österreich und Ungarn.”

13 Statistische Tabellen, 316–18; A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok, 106–14; Kövér, “A bécsi Rothschildok.”

14 “Wenn die Österreichische Gold Rente auf 61% geht, wird allgemein sich das Gefühl Bahn brechen, daß der richtige Zeitpunkt für die Emission der Ungarische Goldrente zugekommen sein wird.” A. v. Hansemann – CA, Berlin, 7 Jun 1877. 7. Rothschild Archive, London (hereafter RAL) 637 – 1 – 45.

15 The Statist, May 20, 1881.

16 Contemporary commentators remained puzzled about the price difference for quite some time. “Perusing the official stock exchange listings, one cannot but sadly note that Hungarian state securities are underpriced by 5% as compared to Austrian state securities. The reasons for this phenomenon are truly beyond explanation and may root in the circumstance that European markets have been familiar with Austrian government issues for longer than they have been with Hungarian government issues. They have forgotten about the coercive levying of taxes on coupons and financial gains.” The author of this quote, József Steiner, believed such market attitude was “comical and frivolous” in light of the fact that “the Hungarian state offered more guarantees in each and every respect.” “Államadósságok szaporítása” [The increase in state debt], Magyar Pénzügy, April 16, 1882. The decrease in the price gap did not serve to mitigate the perplexity either: “While the most recent price changes significantly decreased the price gap between Hungarian and Austrian rentes, it nevertheless remains quite wide; by now, any difference whatsoever can only be seen as political absurdity and financial injustice [. . .] costing the state millions year after year.” “A magyar államhitel alakulása” [The trend in Hungarian state loans], Magyar Pénzügy, May 2, 1889.

17 “It should be borne in mind that although separate accounts are kept of the finances of Hungary, as distinguished from those of Austria, yet both are equally under the auspices of the same Imperial-Royal Government of Austro-Hungary, and the security for each is ultimately identical. Consequently, there is no reason why there should be so great a difference in the market value of the Austrian Four per cents and those of Hungary, except that the latter are not yet placed. It is not at all improbable that when the Hungarian Sixes are all withdrawn, and the Fours all absorbed, that the latter will take rank with the Austrian 4-s, now quoted at 86. Those, therefore, who get into the Hungarian Fours at the price of 75, may before long have good reason to congratulate themselves on their pluck and foresight.” “The Hungarian Debt Conversion,” The Statist, March 29, 1884.

18 Komlos, The Habsburg Monarchy as a Customs Union, 173–84; Flandreau, “The Logic of compromise”; Pammer, “The Hungarian Risk,” 23–52.

19 RAL 637 – 2 – 3. Albert Rothschild, Wien – NMR, London, 29 Jan 1892.

20 The authors distinguish “clean” state bond issues from “tainted” ones. “For new clean bonds the Rothschilds’ yield premia are about 300 basis points lower than average for the category. This is an enormous effect: the Rothschilds could bring new borrowers to the market at very attractive terms. Seasoned tainted issues when they were taken in by the Rothschilds also enjoy a reduction of 100 basis points, meaning that prestige could restore credit.” Flandreau and. Flores, “The Peaceful Conspiracy: Bond Markets and International Relations During the Pax Britannica,” 226.

21 On the “relative stagnation and depression” in French Current Account balance between 1882 and 1897, see the following classic work: Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 79–82. On the political and economic motives that impelled the withdrawal of French capital, see Ránki, “Le capital français en Hongrie.” Earlier the political explanation was dominant in the French capital export movements, although currently the rationality of investor decision-making has regained its appropriate role among the arguments. Parent and Rault, “The Influence Affecting French Assets;” Le Bris, “Why Did French Savers Buy Foreign Assets.”

22 RAL 637 – 1 – 46-51. See Kövér, A bécsi Rothschildok, 148.

23 Hungarian National Archive State Archive (hereafter MNL OL) Z 50 9. cs. 3. t. MÁH igazgató tanács jk. April 25, 1887. On the very same occasion, under the next agenda item, it was decided that the consortium would take over Austrian five-percent paper rentes in the amount of 24 million forints. Hitelbank had a share of six percent in this package. Ibid.

24 RAL 637 – 1 – 50 S. M. Rothschild – Rothschild frères, Vienna, March 28, 1887. (Curiously, the letter is addressed to “Meine lieben Vettern.”)

25 The matter discussed was taking over Austrian Märzrente in the amount of six million forints and Hungarian paper rentes in the amount of five million forints. BA-CA, CA-V, CA – Verwaltungsrath-Protokoll vom 24 Mai 1887.

26 Imperial and Royal Finance Ministry, Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, 276–77. Referencing Ottomar Haupt, another source understands that the placement of Austrian paper rentes showed the following distribution: Austria, 81 percent; Hungary, 9 percent; and third countries, 10 percent. Flandreau, “The Logic of Compromise,” 17.*

27 The fear of the Monarchy’s dissolution is analyzed as a political factor from various points of view and using various methods in Flandreau, “The Logic of Compromise,” 14–19, and Pammer, “The Hungarian Risk,” 40–43.

28 Michel, Banques et banquiers en Autriche, 127–35. The overall picture is too complicated to allow any oversimplification of the process as a one-way-street or cul-de-sac. Cf. Ferguson, The World’s Banker, 935–38.

29 Flandreau, “The Logic of Compromise,” 18.

30 Pammer, “The Hungarian Risk,” 32–37.

31 Flandreau, “The Logic of Compromise.”

32 Eddie, “Limits on the Fiscal Independence.”

33 Accominotti, Flandreau, and Rezzik, “The Spread of Empire,” 401.

34 Flandreau and Flores, “The Peaceful Conspiracy,” 220–29; López-Morell, The House of Rothschild, 361–64.

35 López-Morell, The House of Rothschild, 191–213, 362–81.

36 Cf., Tomz, Reputation and International Cooperation, 39–69.

37 Flandreau and Jobst, “The Ties that Divide,” 988–92.

78237.png
78216.png
78275.png

Austria

Hungary

Graph 3. Changes in the Territorial Distribution of Austrian and Hungarian Four-Percent Gold Rente Coupon Payments Made in International Money Markets (1886–1898)

Sources: Statistische Tabellen zur Währungs-Frage der Österreich-Ungarischen Monarchie; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, 1893; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, 2nd edition, 2nd part (Vienna, 1900–1904); A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok, 1891; A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok (1892–1901) (manuscript) (Budapest, Hungarian Royal Finance Ministry, 1904).

78508.png

Graph 4

The Territorial Distribution of Hungarian Five-Percent Paper Rente Coupon Payments (Austrian Forint Currency, Percent)

Source: A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok (Budapest, 1891), 80–86; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, 2nd edition, 2nd part (Vienna, 1900–1904). 466, 484.

 

4% Austrian Gold Rente

4% Hungarian Gold Rente

5% Hungarian Paper Rente

 

Nominal Value (Thousand ft)

Quoted at (%)

Real Value at Quotation Price (ft)

Nominal Value (ft)

Quoted at (%)

Real value at Quotation Price (ft)

Note

Nominal Value (Thousand ft)

Quoted at

Real Value at Quotation Price (Thousand ft)

Note

Jan 1888

 

 

 

520,000

96

499,200

249,700 forints deposited with Bleichröder

890

80

712

 

Jan 1889

 

 

 

500,000

95.78

478,895

 

900

93

837

 

Jan 1890

5

108

5,400

600,000

100

600,000

Berlin parity

500

97

485

 

Jan 1891

 

 

 

600,000

102

610,000

deposited with Bleichröder

1,250

100

1,250

guarantee bond:
950,000

Jan 1892

 

 

 

600,000

106

636,000

 

1,250

100

1,250

 

Jan 1893

 

 

 

100,000

91.60

91,600

 

2,060

100.25

2,064

 

Feb 1893

 

 

 

 

 

 

from conversion 17,900

 

 

 

converted into 4% Hungarian korona rente

Jan 1894

372

118

438,960

117,900

116

136,764

100,000 forints deposited with Bleichröder

 

 

 

 

Jan 1895

 

 

 

117,900

121

142,459

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 1896

 

 

 

117,900

121.50

143,248

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 1897

 

 

 

117,900

120.50

142,070

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 1898

 

 

 

117,900

119.70

141,126

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 1899

 

 

 

117,900

115.30

135,938.70

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 1900

 

 

 

50,000

116.60

**116,600

** Korona

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2. Austrian and Hungarian Bonds in the Stock Books of S. M. Rothschild Vienna

Source: RAL 637 - 1 - 163; 637 - 1 - 7

 

 

 

Austria

Hungary

Note

Year

Month

Type

Amount Issued for Subscribing (K)

Issued at

Effective Annual Interest Rate

Type

Amount Issued for Subscribing (K)

Issued at

Effective Annual Interest Rate

1893

I

4% state bond

519,298,000

93.50

4.28

 

 

 

 

 

 

I

4% amortizable railway bonds

120,000,000

96.00

4.21

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

4% gold rente

*60,000,000

98.50

4.06

4% gold rente*

*18,000,000

96.20

4.16

* gold forints

 

II

 

 

 

 

4% Krone rente

1,062,000,000

92.50

4.32

 

1894

III

4% gold rente

*40,000,000

97.75

4.09

 

 

 

 

 

1897

V

3½ % state bond

116,901,000

93.50

3.74

 

 

 

 

 

1898

III

 

 

 

 

3½ % Krone rente

60,000

92.50

3.78

 

1900

V

 

 

 

 

4% Krone rente

70,000,000

91.00

4.39

 

1901

VI

4% Krone rente

125,000,000

95.00

4.21

 

 

 

 

 

1902

IV

 

 

 

 

4% Krone rente

1,087,470,000

96.50

4.14

 

1910

IV

 

 

 

 

4% Krone rente

112,550,000

92.50

4.78

 

1911

I

 

 

 

 

4% state bond

200,000,000

91.60

4.37

 

1912

I

4% Krone rente

130,000,000

98.50

4.56

 

 

 

 

 

 

I

4% Krone rente

200,000,000

90.25

4.43

 

 

 

 

 

1913

IV

4½ % amortizable state bond

**122,800,000

93.00

4.90

 

 

 

 

** marks

1914

II

 

 

 

 

4½ % amortizable state bond

500,000,000

90.45

5.08

 

 

Table 3. The Prices and Interest Rates of Austrian and Hungarian Consolidated Government Loans at the Time of Subscribing (1893–1914)

Source: MNL OL Z 51 MÁH 16. cs. 226. t.

78420.png

2018_2_Callaway

pdfVolume 7 Issue 2 CONTENTS

The Battle over Information and Transportation: Extra-European Conflicts between the Hungarian State and the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry

James Callaway
New York University
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 Historians have written much about the conflict within Austria-Hungary between the Hungarian state on one side and the Cisleithanian state and/or Austria-Hungary’s joint institutions on the other. Historians have paid far less attention to how these conflicts unfolded beyond Europe, particularly in Africa. This essay examines the conflict between the Hungarian state and the Foreign Ministry over the empire’s trade relations with Morocco and Mexico. It shows that the Hungarian state and the Foreign Ministry perceived trade in different terms. These conflicting understandings of the purpose of trade fueled a battle between the Hungarian state and the Foreign Ministry over the information and transportation on which Austria-Hungary’s trade development was based. The Hungarian state’s success in this battle forced Austria-Hungary to pursue a much less imperialistic approach to global integration than the other great powers.

Keywords: Africa, Austria-Hungary, global, information, Mexico, trade

Introduction

As Emperor Francis Joseph’s envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Sultan of Morocco, Leopold Graf Bolesta-Koziebrodzki endeavored to preserve what he believed to be Austria-Hungary’s interests in northern Africa.1 On May 31, 1908, the dutiful consul informed Foreign Minister Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal that the cargo ships of Adria, the Hungarian national shipping company, had unloaded goods from the ports of Trieste and Fiume at Gibraltar, but refused to continue to Tangier. The imposition, Koziebrodzki argued, forced Austro-Hungarian merchants to contract with foreign companies to transport Austro-Hungarian goods to Moroccan markets, which allegedly were expanding. His missive to the minister included a 43-page report (the seventh he had written) entitled “The New Organization of Shipping Service between the Habsburg Monarchy and Morocco.”2 Koziebrodzki claimed to have discussed the issue with Cisleithanian trade and industry councils, concluding that the absence of service by an Austro-Hungarian company to Morocco’s western coast threatened the empire’s trade. On the report’s final page, he urged the Foreign Ministry to compel Adria to extend its lines to Tangier at least and to create a new shipping company with service between Oran and the Spanish colony of Rio de Oro only. Notwithstanding the supposed interest of Cisleithanian businessmen, Koziebrodzki admitted that the proposed cabotage line would require a significant subsidy and would likely be unprofitable. The empire required Adria’s extended lines and the cabotage line, Koziebrodzki stressed, “in order for the Austro-Hungarian flag, which in Tangier is so exceedingly rare and on the western coast never at all seen, to fly constantly in the waters of Morocco.”3

Sándor Paczka saw no such connection between the empire’s trade and its flag. Paczka, a correspondent of the Royal Hungarian Trade Museum stationed in Veracruz, Mexico, had reported in January of the same year on trade possibilities between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Mexican Republic after he had returned from Budapest, where he had consulted with over thirty Hungarian companies (including Adria) to determine import and export possibilities. To accommodate new trade, such as the export of Hungarian beer and mailboxes and the import of coffee and vanilla, he proposed that the Hungarian state commission the Spanish company Transatlantic Espanola to operate the longest section of the proposed shipping route between Fiume and Veracruz. Adria would ship goods from Fiume to Genoa, then Transatlantic Espanola would transport Hungary’s goods from Genoa across the Atlantic to Veracruz, stopping at Barcelona, Cadiz, New York, and Havana. Hungary required this arrangement, Paczka argued, to ensure that Hungarian merchants “prefer Fiume and neglect Hamburg,” which was the nexus between Hungarian factories and Mexican markets at the time.4 Unlike the consular officer in Morocco, Paczka was willing to name the companies. Without the names and details of the companies, the report would have had little value for him and the Hungarian Ministry of Commerce, which requested data to justify suggestions to increase exports and imports. It had to be clear that an established market existed in Mexico for current Hungarian exports. Paczka mentioned neither the Austro-Hungarian nor the Hungarian flag.

This essay examines how tensions between the Foreign Ministry and the Hungarian state played out on the global stage, particularly over Austria-Hungary’s trade relationships with Morocco and Mexico. It shows how many imperial bureaucrats and supporters of imperialist global policies based their expectations of trade with Morocco and Mexico on the presumption that Austria-Hungary had the right to an undefined and dormant trade which would materialize with a combination of sufficient “can-do spirit,” the development of “virgin land,” and connections to exclusive markets. The politics of dualism regulated much of Austria-Hungary’s national shipping in the western Mediterranean and South and Central America to Hungary’s national shipping company, Adria, which proved unwilling to make the financial sacrifices that this “can-do spirit” required, provoking over a decade of conflict with the Foreign Ministry. Hungary’s trade relationship with Mexico in the early twentieth century highlights the Hungarian state’s use of Hungarian trade museums to work around the empire’s consular offices. The paper concludes by highlighting how our understanding of Austria-Hungary’s global history changes if we look at it through the lens of the Hungarian state rather than the Foreign Ministry.

The Foreign Ministry and the Networks of Trade Museums

The conflict between Koziebrodzki’s and Paczka’s understandings of the role of national shipping companies in connecting Austria-Hungary to overseas markets represents a larger struggle between the Hungarian state and the Foreign Ministry over the strategy and the purpose of the empire’s global integration. Scholarship over the past two decades on Austria-Hungary’s relationships with the world beyond Europe and North America has revolved predominantly around Cisleithania and the Austrian State Archives.5 In the late imperial age, “Austrians,” Alison Frank explains, “thought of their empire as a Great Power and aspired to belong to the club of imperial powers that exported their goods, their culture, and their civilization to the rest of the world.”6 This aspiration helped foster within the empire, particularly within the Foreign Ministry, an ideology of imperialism which in many ways defined the five decades before World War I. The definition of imperialism used here is the late nineteenth-century battle royal on the global stage among the great powers for economic, political, military, and cultural advantages.7 The claim to extra-European territories to which the European powers could export goods, culture, and civilization featured prominently in late-nineteenth century imperialist ideologies. The governments of Europe began to view territory (its possession, as well as its accessibility) as “a source of resources, livelihood, output, and energy.”8 Koziebrodzki viewed Adria as a vital weapon in the great power competition for protected relationships with these vital sources because it offered Austria-Hungary the opportunity to stake a claim to Moroccan territory.9

Since before the end of the empire, many contemporaries considered Hungarians apathetic about the extra-European world. A notable few felt that Hungary required a global or at least a regional empire.10 Among these imperial enthusiasts, there was a general feeling that Hungarians possessed a dangerous lack of curiosity about the world beyond the kingdom’s borders.11 During the interwar period, conservative politician Count Kunó Klebelsberg decried the fact that before World War I, the state “carried on with politics as if we had been living on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Very few people could see beyond Vienna. There was a great deal of incredible naïveté in our judgment of foreign affairs.”12 The notion of Hungarian disinterest in the world beyond Europe appears to have captured the historical imagination.13

It is true that great-power status, civilizing missions, and claims to exclusive markets meant far less to Budapest than to Vienna and the Foreign Ministry.14 The argument that the empire required direct, national shipping lines to Morocco and Mexico to establish secure markets for the empire failed to persuade the Hungarian state to pressure Adria to establish these shipping lines. But Budapest had a global strategy. The Hungarian state’s approach to greater economic integration beyond the borders of the empire focused on connecting the Hungarian economy via Fiume, Hungary’s sole port, to established global markets. This strategy consisted of three areas: the direction of domestic and Balkan goods to Fiume, the assurance of a hospitable social and political environment within Fiume, and the export of goods from Fiume. The final area focused on shipping to complete the supply chain. An important part of the state’s plan to encourage shipping through Fiume was simply to allow foreign companies to operate shipping routes throughout the Mediterranean. The largest foreign company to service Fiume was the Austrian Lloyd. Adria served to entice Hungarian exporters when market forces and foreign companies alone could not redirect Hungarian trade to Fiume.

The Hungarian state established a subsidy in 1880 for Adria to ensure regular service to the United Kingdom, Belgium, Holland, France, and Brazil to make it more financially beneficial for Hungarian companies to ship goods through Fiume rather than by rail and through northern European ports.15 An 1892 agreement between Adria and the Austrian Lloyd (Austria-Hungary’s two largest shipping companies) which was backed by the governments in Budapest and Vienna, divided the empire’s global shipping route.16 Adria monopolized the empire’s routes to Western Europe, and the western Mediterranean. The Austrian Lloyd dominated routes to the eastern Mediterranean, India, and East Asia. Both companies could go to the Black Sea, but only Lloyd had the right to the Constantinople-Batumi and Constantinople-Odessa lines. Lloyd had the Levant, Egypt, and Indo-China. Adria maintained lines to Brazil, but the companies shared routes to other South American ports.17 The critical part of the deal for this story is Adria’s right (but not obligation) to maintain trade routes between Austria-Hungary and Morocco, as well as the possibility for the company to establish routes to Mexico.

Since Adria was a Hungarian national company subsidized by the Hungarian state, the Foreign Ministry proved incapable of pressuring it to establish unprofitable routes to Morocco and Mexico. But the ministry, through its control of the consular offices, had significant influence over the information that Adria required to determine the most efficient routes. The late nineteenth-century expansion of global shipping networks all over the globe required networks of merchants, agents, and officials to facilitate the flow of trade to, from, through, and between ports.18 These networks also provided data and impressions about the economic potential of new markets. Austro-Hungarian consuls were central pillars in the networks which underpinned most of the empire’s business networks. But as Koziebrodzki’s proposed trade strategy shows, the consuls could not separate foreign policy and commercial policy. Consular commercial reports reflected the Foreign Ministry’s preoccupation with secure and dormant markets, civilizational status, and prestige, complicating the Hungarian state’s and Adria’s explorations of profitable trade ventures. To focus on trade development, the Hungarian state had to find a way around the consuls’ monopoly on information.

The Hungarian state found the answer in trade museums. After the 1885 National Exhibition in Budapest, the Hungarian national industry councils wanted an institute that would assist producers in shifting from domestic to international markets. In response, in 1889 the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce founded the first trade museum in Budapest to exhibit Hungarian products and establish libraries of sources on international markets. In 1890, the museum established on office to report on the credit worthiness of companies in international markets, as well as the various fees associated with international exports. In 1899, the museum handed over the operation of foreign centers to the Hungarian Stock Exchange.19 The museum’s library contained all major business listings, trade statistics, and a list of services available to merchants abroad, including over 160 up-to-date domestic and foreign journals and the current Foreign Trade Booklets. These materials were open to the public. The museums endeavored to notify the Hungarian public of all pertinent developments in global and Hungarian commerce.20 The museum staff analyzed sources from all over the globe, including all Austro-Hungarian consulate reports, and it produced a report about the political and economic situations of target countries. In addition, the museum maintained a list of domestic and foreign rail and shipping rates, provided free information by phone to merchants, and translated business letters up to two pages long for free and longer materials at moderate rates.

To help explore potential markets and stimulate exports, the state established museums all over the world. The first museums outside Budapest, listed here in chronological order, were established in Belgrade, Sarajevo, Sofia, Fiume, Philippopolis (Plovdiv), Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Malta, Bucharest, Mostar, Banja Luka, Ruse, Venice, Bombay, Surabaya, Alexandria, New York, and Monastir (Bitola).21 By 1902, museum correspondents were stationed throughout the Ottoman Empire, including in the cities of Aleppo, Tripoli, Beirut, Jaffa, and Baghdad.22 In 1903, the museums stationed a correspondent in Khartoum for the first time.23 Four years later, the museums had expanded to Johannesburg, Harar, Shanghai, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, Buenos Aries, and Lima.24 The museums offered the first museum correspondent position in Mexico to Sándor Paczka. The global network of trade museums provided Budapest with information about economic possibilities and promoted Hungarian goods abroad. The main museum in Budapest published Les Fabricants Exportateurs du Royaume de Hongrie, which listed 1,223 companies that exported Hungarian goods, in eight languages. Through its global system of museums, the Hungarian state circulated over ten thousand copies of the publication a year around the globe.25 With the information provided by Paczka and his trade museum colleagues across the globe, the Hungarian state outflanked the Foreign Ministry on the global stage.

Scholarly neglect of the Hungarian state’s role in Austria-Hungary’s global trading network has fostered a narrative of a backwards empire struggling to maintain great power status through competition in global commerce and feeble imperialist ventures.26 It is true that the Foreign Ministry envisioned a global competition over diminishing opportunities for economic expansion that required aggressive political and military maneuvering. The Hungarian state, however, forwent the battle over overseas territorial possessions and focused instead on maintaining an amicable global environment in which it could more easily direct freight and human traffic through Fiume. Much has been written about how this struggle played out within Austria-Hungary. The Hungarian state infiltrated the Foreign Ministry, fought in decennial budget debates, and vetoed colonial ventures.27 Few have questioned how the two halves of the monarchy interacted beyond the borders of the empire to form foreign policy. As Koziebrodzki’s enthusiasm shows, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry channeled imperialist aspirations through the empire’s global consular network. Koziebrodzki’s belief in the importance of the cabotage line along the Moroccan coast to his empire’s trade reveals the place of prestige and status in the Foreign Ministry’s global commercial strategy. The contrast between Paczka’s detailed statistical report and Koziebrodzki’s generalized account of import and export possibilities epitomizes the dialectic of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy formation taking place outside the Ballhausplatz, indeed outside the empire.

“Virgin Land”: Africa

On December 25, 1901, Graf von Crenneville, the empire’s main consular official in Tangier reported to Gołuchowski that the court of Moroccan Sultan Mulai Abd al-Aziz IV had divided the representatives of the great powers into two groups. The first group included Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and Germany, each of which was striving to assert some political influence. Great Britain, Russia, Belgium, and Austria-Hungary constituted the second group, which commanded greater respect because its members desired only economic cooperation and mutual progress. The sultan, Crenneville suggested, sought to extend economic relations with Austria-Hungary because he looked favorably on the empire’s supposedly apolitical motives.28 Crenneville likely failed to mention to members of the court that two years earlier Gołuchowski had condoned the Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society’s attempted negatiations for the acquisition of Río de Oro, the Spanish colony directly to the south of Morocco, and that the Hungarian state had stepped in to veto any attempted purchase.29 Similarly, it was the Hungarian state and Adria that had fought the Foreign Ministry over the course of four decades to prevent Austro-Hungarian imperialist ventures in Morocco.

On October 20, 1902, the imperial consular in Tangier reported that the recently “[lost markets] could be easily recovered with a prompt intervention. If, on the other hand, they are lost, it will later require twice the effort to regain the lost territory.”30 The connection between markets and territory was clear. Austria-Hungary’s trade with Morocco remained dismal between 1867 and 1914. In terms of exports and imports, Morocco was usually dead last in official reports published by the Cisleithanian and Hungarian states. Even when Adria maintained routes between Fiume and Moroccan ports, trade barely budged. But rather than view the absence of market exchange as a sign that the two economies had little to offer each other, many imperial officials attributed the weak trade flows to the absence of overseas territory and the laziness of the empire’s own subjects. Without a territorial presence and sufficient effort from the empire’s merchant marine, one official account lamented, the empire’s trade with northern Africa “will never take the place that belongs to us as a Mediterranean power.”31 As one of the few parcels of Africa that Europe had not yet colonized by the early years of the twentieth century, Morocco offered Austria-Hungary its sole chance for what Koziebrodzki referred to as “virgin land” that offered the “fertility” of nascent markets.32 To prevent other great powers from closing the territory off to the empire, imperial officers engaged in a cold war to ensure Austria-Hungary’s territorial claim.

Austro-Hungarian efforts to prevent the expansion of the other great powers into the region met with little success. In 1908, Koziebrodzki warned the Foreign Ministry that “the competition unfolding all over the world among Europe’s seafaring powers to secure ‘their place in the sun’ becomes [...] more and more apparent in northwestern Africa.” In 1902, Crenneville feared that “the German East Africa and Wörmann lines will soon be allowed to win ground in northern Africa as they have done in the south and the east.”33 Germany was not the only threat. Crenneville warned about growing competition from France, America, Spain, and the Netherlands. In one 1909 report, he argued that the empire had to establish a commercial presence quickly because beginning July 31, the ships of the Dutch society “Neederland” would stop at Tangier, Algiers, and Genoa during their trips to Batavia. Attached to the same report was a newspaper article about increasing maritime traffic and communication between Spain and northern Africa.34 It was clear to the empire’s consular officials that the looming threat of foreign shipping companies required that Austria-Hungary act to secure its claim to the territory.

But a claim to land was not sufficient to secure trade. El Dorado was not “Virgin Land.” Profit required labor. There was a sense that trade (enough trade to sustain a self-sufficient empire) lay dormant in the Mediterranean and in Africa. But, in the words of Koziebrodzki, the fruits of the region would only “open themselves to the can-do spirit.” Until the cold war which the imperial bureaucrats imagined they were fighting turned hot, the merchant marine rather than the navy was the empire’s frontline combatant. One writer argued that the great importance of the merchant marine in the lives of the people requires that the development of the merchant fleet be maintained at the same pace as the corresponding development of the naval fleet, “what the merchant marine accomplishes and conquers in the competition of peaceful work, the navy constantly receives through the respect that it instills.”35 As another writer put it, “the trident of Neptune is the scepter of the world.”36 This understanding of maritime commerce placed considerable pressure on national merchant fleets. Not all leaders of the empire’s shipping companies, however, could easily square the concept of “can-do spirit” with the traditional performance metric, profit.

In consular reports to the Foreign Ministry there was an underlying belief that dormant trade between northern Africa and the empire would awaken if Adria were only to put in the effort. It was not clear what that trade was precisely. Koziebrodzki argued that the extra cost incurred because of delays and extra damages when Adria unloaded in Gibraltar prevented Austro-Hungarian petroleum from competing with American petroleum.37 It is hard to believe that Adria was the reason Austro-Hungarian petroleum could not compete with American petroleum. Vienna never managed to increase the global competitiveness of Galician oil by reducing the cost of rail transportation from Galicia to Trieste.38 There is also no record that the Hungarian state attempted to capture a market beyond the empire for petroleum products refined in Fiume. Koziebrodzki mentions neither Vienna’s nor Budapest’s failure to promote the export of petroleum. In his eyes, the sole obstacle to Austria-Hungary’s global petroleum trade was Adria’s inadequate service. This was a recurring theme throughout the decades preceding World War I. The clash between imperial officials, who blamed Adria for dismal trade performance, and Adria’s leadership, which claimed that there was no market for Austro-Hungarian goods in Morocco or the Spanish Sahara, dominated debates about the empire’s economic interests in northern Africa.

There were Hungarians who supported the Foreign Ministry’s position on the empire’s global interests. In 1888, the Budapest Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Adria funded a research expedition in northern Africa led by János Jankó. Working with local Austria-Hungarian consuls in Port Said, Cairo, Alexandria, Benghazi, Tripoli, and Tunis, as well as their trade reports, Jankó’s task was to determine whether Hungary had economic interests in Africa.39 His conclusions, unsurprisingly, resembled those of the consular offices with which Adria would do battle over the coming decades. He argued that the establishment of national shipping lines to ports along the northern African were indispensable if Hungary sought to stimulate its inadequate trade in the region.40 A strong maritime presence coupled with naval authority would allow Hungary to claim the economic market that it was geographically predisposed to command.41 Jankó based his vision of Hungary’s needs on an understanding of Hungary’s position in the world as one of competition with the other great powers and world civilizations. Hungarian businesses could only operate, he argued, where “civilization” existed and where no other European power maintained a presence.42 Adria declined Jankó’s proposal. But the empire’s consuls continued to influence perceptions within Hungary of economic opportunities in Africa. In 1908, the Economic Bulletin, citing consul reports, argued that if Adria could not or would not sail along the Moroccan coast, the Hungarian state would have to find a Hungarian company to establish a cabatoge line from Oran to Mogador (Essaouira).43 The Foreign Ministry could not convince the Hungarian state that the empire required Adria’s presence in Morocco. But the ministry, through the consuls, could influence the information that the Hungarian public received.

Even the Hungarian state was not always opposed to the Foreign Ministry’s approach to African trade. In January 1900, the Hungarian Trade Ministry began to debate the creation of routes between Fiume and northern Africa.44 The Foreign Ministry announced proudly in November of the following year that Adria’s new contract required that, beginning January 1902, it maintain routes with “the most important Northern African ports” and establish routes to Casablanca, Mazagan, and Mogador.45 Count Gołuchowski, the head of the Foreign Ministry, was a dedicated supporter of Austria-Hungary’s naval branch, not least because it could carry the Austro-Hungarian flag across the world, and he believed that Austro-Hungarian control over Morocco could be a stepping stone to a greater naval presence in the South Atlantic.

Not everyone shared Gołuchowski’s vision. On September 12, 1902, Adria’s directors reported that trade experiments with ports on the western coast of Morocco did not have the intended results and that Adria’s captains had feared the western coast’s unpredictable weather.46 The following day, Adria, claiming that trade with the western ports would not materialize, announced that the route’s terminus would be Tangier.47 The Hungarian state probably supported Adria’s decision not to establish new routes because the arrangement at the time served Hungary’s global interests. Many within Hungary believed that the empire’s exports with Morocco originated in Cisleithania, ruling out the possibility of directing trade through Fiume.48 There were almost no Moroccan imports to Hungary. And almost all Hungarian exports to Morocco traveled through Fiume.49 The Foreign Ministry and consular officials in Morocco may have bemoaned what they believed to be the empire’s failure in northern Africa, but the Hungarian state’s global strategy was successful without regular lines to Morocco.

The Foreign Ministry appears to have misunderstood the specifics of the contractual language. The official arrangement between Adria and the Hungarian state provided Adria’s leadership considerable room to decide where, when, and how frequently their ships would stop in northern Africa. The establishment of routes to Casablanca, Mazagan, and Mogador, furthermore, was a right the state contract guaranteed to the company, not an obligation. Adria’s arrangement with Budapest stated concrete objectives. The agreement established the minimum number of yearly routes and their destinations. There was room to maneuver. Many requirements provided options, such as “at least six times a year,” without providing exact dates, and the contract listed various ports from which Adria’s leadership could choose. This proved a powerful tool for Adria’s leadership and the Hungarian state against pressure from Austro-Hungarian bureaucrats and business leaders who sought to extend Adria’s routes. When someone in 1905 complained to the Hungarian trade minister that Adria had reduced its routes to northern Africa, the minister’s office offered the following response: “Due to the fact that these scheduled services are maintained by the company on a contractual basis, I cannot comment on the notified change.”50 Adria’s contract and the support of Budapest helped the company defend itself against the empire’s diplomatic officials in Africa, who supported the creation of new routes to Morocco.

The debate did not end in 1902. Imperial bureaucrats refused to sacrifice what they considered the empire’s economic security because of a shipping company’s risk aversion. The Foreign Ministry coerced the Hungarian Trade Ministry to renegotiate Adria’s contract. In November 1902, the trade ministry notified Adria that it was debating requiring the company to reextend lines to Morocco based on consular reports. The underlying assumptions of the Foreign Ministry saturated the reports: despite the lack of any evidence, conditions were characterized as positive for an extension; a significant new market allegedly would generate exports; and a delay in expansion would transfer the empire’s rightful trade to foreign rivals.51 Adria’s official response to the trade ministry’s notice cited statistical data according to which, since 1892, trade had not been adequate to support the establishment of a direct line. Adria’s response stated unequivocally that the company’s leadership believed the establishment of direct (and profitable) lines between Fiume and Morocco was impossible.52

Imperial officials blamed Adria for the precarious sailing conditions and poor trade between the two monarchies. Crenneville argued in December 1902 that Adria’s rates were too high and that the company’s frequent accidents were consequences of its use of cheap and poor-quality ships. According to him, Adria’s “hired ships on rotating routes are junk, and the petty number of crew are poorly paid and overburdened.”53 He said that the empire’s sugar exports to the region had recently increased and that he hoped to increase other exports, such as candles. Success required only skillful merchants and able travelers, i.e. the “can-do spirit.”54 To provide these merchants and travelers with opportunities to trade, Adria would have to purchase new ships, reduce its freight rates, and, of course, establish regular lines to Morocco’s ports.

Crenneville failed to mention how the company would finance capital investments and increased production while cutting revenue from fares, which was often more than double the subsidy the company received from the state.55 The company’s leadership refused to lower fares and increase voyages without assurance that the increased cost would be made up in increased volume. Crenneville insisted that there would be a future payoff, but he failed to provide a time frame or offer specific details about that payoff. For the time being, he expected Adria to take a profit cut for the sake of the empire’s supposed interests. Adria’s refusal to decrease its rates, replace its supposedly old ships, and increase its services assured that there would be further conflict between the company and the Foreign Ministry.56

In the early twentieth century, Morocco was the only country which offered the Foreign Ministry the opportunity to realize its imperial ambitions. Adria focused on developing Hungary’s trade through Fiume to and from European countries and colonies. These unaligned priorities fueled debates over what the empire could export and what import markets existed in Morocco. In 1904, Crenneville complained that the empire’s lumber exports had decreased because Adria had refused to stop at Algiers and Oran more than once a month. The consular officer complained that most wood imported from Fiume and Trieste to these ports arrived via Italian ships, and he demanded that Adria be bound to deliver to ports in Algeria on account of the state subsidy the company received. He cited competition from America and Norway and argued that Adria’s freight rates should be reduced to a level below the rates for the German and Italian lines to generate trade. He then listed the ships that had transported lumber to Algiers since the beginning of the year (the past ten days) according to the flag under which the ship had sailed, making sure to note that only two of the more than thirty ships had sailed under the Austro-Hungarian flag.57 He never questioned whether Cisleithanian or Hungarian lumber arrived via foreign ships or whether there existed a market for the empire’s lumber at all. The empire’s lumber exports to Morocco continued to decline, but the decreasing price of Norwegian timber was most likely the reason for this, not the dearth of Cisleithanian and Hungarian ships.58

For some, Morocco’s supposedly dormant market offered greater fruits than the markets of Western Europe. In 1909, the new Chief of Mission Ludwig von Callenberg complained that local sugar importers on the western coast of Africa refused to continue to import Austro-Hungarian sugar because of the lack of a reliable shipping service.59 He offered a list of products that were being shipped to Western European countries which, in his mind, would find new markets in Morocco. He emphasized sugar. He went so far as to claim that Austria-Hungary required Morocco as a market because of the amount of sugar Moroccans could import. This was in the future, of course. When he wrote the report, the empire’s sugar exports to Morocco were almost non-existent.60 He also failed to explain why it was more economically beneficial to export sugar to Morocco instead of Western Europe. The United Kingdom was a significant market for Hungarian sugar. France was also a strong market. To many, the potential economic losses caused by a trade war over Moroccan markets far outweighed any possibility for gains. But when a new line opened between Morocco and Spain, the consul in Tangier stated: “It is well known that sugar makes up most of our exports to Morocco and our importers are very troubled over this competition.”61

In contrast, Adria’s report insisted it was a well-known fact that sugar exporters did not consider Morocco’s market adequate and stressed that it should be these exporters, not bureaucrats, who determine the empire’s sugar trade.62 The company also found the rates that the Cisleithanian state enforced for sugar transportation from Trieste to ports on the Western Moroccan coast too low to be made up by volume.63 Adria’s freight rates for the main trade goods which went through Fiume to Western Europe were lower than Trieste’s, but Adria made up the difference in volume.64 Because trade between Trieste and Morocco was so dismal and Vienna refused to raise the rate limit, Adria refused to divert its ships from profitable Western European trade routes.

Koziebrodzki claimed in 1908 that Adria’s ventures to Morocco in 1902 had been “untimely and too short.”65 Between 1902 and 1908, Foreign Ministry officials and consular representatives in Morocco agreed that Adria only had to expand its shipping network, decrease freight rates, and increase the number of trips made to make new profits. Adria’s leadership continually retorted that this reasoning was fallacious. In 1904, the company’s leadership reminded the Hungarian Royal Maritime Authority that Hungary’s trade with Morocco might have increased between 1902 and 1903, but in 1901 there had been no exports to Morocco.66 And between 1903 and 1904, Hungary’s trade with Morocco decreased, reportedly due to France’s and Belgium’s low prices.67 In response to complaints in 1907 about its service to Algeria, Adria’s leadership emphasized that trade with northwestern Africa was dismal, complaining that their twelve ships combined carried only 929 tons of exports to Tangier, and imports were almost nonexistent. Adria stated firmly that “the maintenance of the monthly route demands considerable material sacrifices,” which it refused to make.68 When Count Gołuchowski contacted Adria’s leadership directly about the possibility of extending lines to Morocco, Adria’s director Leó Lánczy responded: “Your desires could not in good faith be met; … in the future a remedy would only be possible if the esteemed government could elect to provide a special subsidy for the line.”69 Due to the politics of dualism, however, the Foreign Ministry could not subsidize a Hungarian national company.

Mexico

Similar tensions between the Hungarian state, the Foreign Ministry, Adria, and imperial enthusiasts influenced Austria-Hungary’s relationship with Mexico. In 1900, Habsburg-Mexican relations had had a troubled history. Between 1861 and 1867, Archduke and Prince Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria had ruled the Second Mexican Empire by invitation from Napoleon III. When the French withdrew their forces, Maximilian refused to abandon his imperialist supporters and remained in Mexico, only to be executed by the forces of republican leader Benito Juarez on 19 June 1867.70 In January 1868, Franz Josef dispatched Admiral Tegetthoff to recover Maximilian’s corpse on the frigate Novara, the same ship that had carried Maximilian to Mexico to become emperor.71 Beneto Juarez had hoped to use the release of Maximilian’s remains as a bargaining tool to achieve diplomatic recognition from Austria-Hungary. His gambit failed. Austria-Hungary and the Mexican Republic’s severance of relations curtailed the nascent connections between the two economies that Maximilian’s reign had fostered.72

Despite the diplomatic setback, many envisioned a positive future for Austro-Hungarian economic activity in Mexico. Jenő Bánó, who had lived in Mexico for eleven years, wrote to Budapesti Hírlap in 1898 to garner support for trade development between Hungary and Mexico. He said that he discussed the possibility of establishing economic relations between Hungary and Mexico with the Governor of Fiume, Count Lajos Batthyány and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs for Mexico, Ignacio Mariscal. He said that both men gave favorable responses, but that he had not discussed the matter with them in four years. He also said that he had talked to the director of Adria, who had been supportive of the idea. He argued that Mexico should replace the American market because McKinley’s tariffs closed the American market off to the world, and he recommended that Adria begin to serve Mexico instead of Argentina and Brazil, whose economies, he claimed, were in decline.73 He argued that Mexico would provide a “new and excellent market” for Hungarian flour, wine, plums, furniture, glassware, and porcelainware, as well as a source of tobacco, though he did not explain why the import of Mexican tobacco would be more cost-effective than the import of Turkish tobacco.

After Austria-Hungary and Mexico restored relations in 1901, Bánó began to write more frequently about Hungary’s supposed Mexican interests, calling on the Habsburg aristocracy to invest in Central America. This time, he argued that Adria should redirect its route from Argentina and Brazil, because Mexico was closer.74 In 1904, Bánó reasoned that the redirection of Hungarian emigrants from the United States to Mexico would produce a significant market for Hungarian industry because Mexico’s industrial sector was undeveloped and Hungarian immigrants in Mexico would choose to purchase Hungarian industrial and agricultural products. The desire to buy Hungarian, however, was unlikely to overcome competition from American and Western European companies in Mexico. It was well known that German industrial companies were trying to penetrate the Mexican market and that Hungarian companies could do little to make themselves competitive.75 Bánó was quite optimistic about the number of immigrants from Hungary in Mexico, and he was also optimistic about who would come to Mexico if Adria established a direct route to Mexico and the capacity of these immigrants to purchase Hungarian-produced products. But he acknowledged that the supposed demand among Hungarian immigrants would not be enough to entice Hungarian exports. To stimulate Hungarian-Mexican trade, Adria would again be expected to reduce its rates and sacrifice profit to establish a direct line from Fiume to Mexico.76

Bánó knew that the Hungarian state’s concerns lay in the development of Fiume. He emphasized that ships for a new line between Hungary and Mexico could be built in Fiume.77 He then turned to the argument that a subsidized shipping line would induce Hungarian exporters to ship through Fiume rather than northern European ports. He claimed that the statistics about Hungarian trade to Mexico only included Hungarian goods shipped from Fiume or Trieste and not goods transported to other European ports and then shipped to Mexico. He argued that these goods were recorded as exports from the country to which the ports belonged, not from Hungary. This form of record keeping, he claimed, underreported Hungarian exports to Mexico, which were five to six times higher than recorded, but were shipped from Hamburg, Antwerp, Southampton, Saint-Nazaire, and Barcelona. But the fact that he made such an argument underscores the Hungarian state’s prioritization of Fiume’s development.78

Bánó was not alone. In October 1901, another opinion piece in Budapesti Hírlap stated that “Hungarian interests seriously require direct trade” with Mexico. Here too, the author failed to identify what those interests were.79 In 1908, Lázár Pál, who believed that Hungary could “count only on a permanent and secure market where the stronger competitors still have not set foot,” argued that Adria had failed in its duty to secure a market like the market in Morocco, proclaiming, “as if the creation of secure new markets were something that occurs overnight!” The Minister of Commerce, Pál argued, should use the state’s approaching contract renewal with Adria to force the company to establish lines with Mexico, stating “we are not able to find a more suitable market for Hungary than Mexico, where they will receive us with open arms.” Pál based his argument on the fact that the privately funded Hungarian East Shipping Company already had a route that stopped at Mexico. Adria, of course, would need to maintain routes to Mexico for at least three years, despite financial losses, before signs of market development would emerge.80

Though Bánó never provided a source to support his claims that Hungarian exports traveled through non-Hungarian ports, he was correct. He erred, however, when he believed that the Hungarian state misunderstood the situation. The Hungarian state recorded export statistics, including exit points, every year, and it realized that the few Hungarian goods that made it to Mexico traveled via rail to non-Hungarian ports before crossing the Atlantic.81 But the Hungarian state also understood the precarious state of the Mexican economy and political system.82 Hungarians were advised to be extremely cautious in the Mexican credit market.83 In 1911, the Austro-Hungarian consul in London, in a report entitled “What do they want in Mexico?” said that the most sought-after goods were hand guns, rifles, and ammunition.84 Discussions of creating a secure market in Mexico during the Porfiriato era were delusional by many accounts. To establish subsidized lines between Fiume and Mexico in the years before World War I would have created a liability for the Hungarian state and would have risked drawing Austria-Hungary into Mexico’s troubled affairs.

The disinterest of both the company and the Hungarian state helped Hungary avoid possible misadventures in Mexico. After the settlement of trade negotiations between Austria-Hungary and Mexico, the Spanish shipping company La Compañía Transatlántica de Barcelona inquired whether it could provide service once a month between Trieste and Fiume and Mexico. The Foreign Ministry, of course, argued that Adria should launch a line between Fiume and Mexico.85 But the Hungarian Royal Maritime Authority in Fiume was skeptical that such an extension of shipping was even necessary. The Authority reported to Lajos Láng, an advisor to the Hungarian Minister of Commerce, that Adria had the first opportunity to establish such a line if it desired to do so. The Hungarian ministry was confident that Adria’ leadership possessed the judgment required to make the decision. No consular officers were involved in the discussion. If Adria chose to forego the opportunity to establish a new route, the Maritime Authority indicated that the Hungarian Ministry of Commerce would have no problem with La Compañía Transatlántica establishing a route.86 The Trade Ministry took the advice of the Maritime Authority and reported to the office of Prime Minister Kálmán Széll in August of 1902 that La Compañía Transatlántica should be allowed to establish a shipping route between Fiume and Mexico.87

In 1907, the Hungarian state again inquired as to whether Adria would be able and willing to establish a line between Fiume and Mexico. Adria responded that the Austro Americana society had already established a line between Trieste and Veracruz in 1905 and the combined subsidies between the Cisleithanian and Mexican governments were not enough to cover the company’s losses. Adria also pointed out the dangers to the ships and noted that it would need at least a one-million-crown yearly subsidy to operate twelve voyages yearly.88 Rather than establish its own route, Adria agreed to a state proposed transshipment arrangement with La Compañía Transatlántica to connect Fiume and Mexico.89 The introduction of the connection between Fiume and Mexico and the agreement with La Compañía Transatlántica were requested by the Hungarian state. Adria requested more information, but it questioned only the chain of exchange and the cost involved, not the use of another country’s shipping line.90 Neither the company nor the Hungarian state required that only Hungarian ships transport Hungarian goods or that Hungary maintain a presence in Central America.

Adria and the Global Economy

That the assumed reason for the empire’s supposedly inadequate trade with Africa and the Americas was Adria’s lackluster resolve is evident from the company’s complaint file held in the Austrian State Archives. Of course, all shipping companies received complaints; ships and weather were unreliable, as were the workers who loaded and unloaded cargo ships at each stop. One complaint from the main consular in Algiers noted that it would have the same grievances with all the Cisleithanian and Italian shipping companies.91 Most grievances directed towards Adria concerned the company’s service to northern Africa, especially to Morocco, and they revolved around disagreements concerning the importance of shipping destinations and means. It should be clear that the empire’s diplomatic corps and many of its subjects considered Adria unreliable. This was especially the case in northern Africa. Numerous reports detailing shipwrecks after storms support the claims of Adria’s captains that African’s coast was dangerous.92 But the company’s organizational structure amplified the effects of these storms on shipments between the empire and Morocco. Despite repeated demands from Cisleithanian companies and the Foreign Ministry, the Hungarian state never required Adria to maintain lines to Moroccan ports.93 When a ship could not complete a route agreed to in the contract, it was replaced with a ship from a non-contract line. Numerous reports detail storms that delayed ships along the northern African routes that Adria was contractually obligated to maintain.94 Because Larache, Casablanca, and Mazagan were contractually optional destinations, these ports received greater cancellations than those to the east of Tangiers.95

One case shows that Cisleithanian businessmen who wanted their products shipped at reduced rates knew how to speak to the consular officers. Koziebrodzki was referring to the complaint of a Cisleithanian oil company when he reported that the empire required a direct line to Morocco. The company cited the threat of American competition and highlighted the “ground” that Austro-Hungarian trade was losing due to Adria’s obstinacy. 96 The oil company was not alone. In a separate instance, a Cisleithanian automobile manufacturer claimed that it was unable to compete with French automobiles in northern Africa because Adria’s freight rates were too high.97 The company insisted that all else was equal and Cisleithanian automobiles were of equal or better quality than French automobiles. The problem, the company claimed, lay with Adria. The company used the threat of French trade overtaking Austro-Hungarian trade in northern Africa as a threat to urge the state to force Adria to reduce its shipping rates. Complaints against Adria were less a sign that the Hungarian company failed to achieve its goals and more an indication that deep conflicts existed within Austria-Hungary over what those goals should have been.

These complaints, however, should not form the basis of an analysis of how Austria-Hungary integrated into the global economy. By many measures, Adria fulfilled the Hungarian state’s goals. Thanks largely to Budapest’s redirection of the railway to Fiume and subsidization of shipping companies, Fiume became the tenth most trafficked port in Europe. Principle overseas imports consisted mostly of raw commodities such as rice, cotton, and tobacco. Overseas exports included refined sugar, flour, wood products, and paraffin. In 1867, imports totaled 423,721 quintals, and they rose to 9,299,592 quintals by 1913. Exports in 1867 reached 604,734 quintals and increased to 11,738,827 quintals by 1913. In 1913, the total value of imports was 213,410,000 crowns, while exports were valued at 264,594,000.98 In total, between 1867 and 1913, 40.4 percent of Fiume’s overseas trade traffic consisted of imports and 59.6 percent consisted of exports.99 Every year between 1893 and 1913, Adria accounted for the highest percentage of export shipments (over thirty percent yearly except for 1913).100

This success allowed the Hungarian state and Adria to remain steadfast in the face of pressure from the Foreign Ministry. Neither the complaints of Cisleithanian businesses nor imperial bureaucrats could force Adria to alter its routes. When Adria was asked to stop at a new port in Brazil to break into the rubber market, it refused out of fear that it would endanger coffee trade.101 Over the course of its history, the framework of Adria’s shipping network changed little.102 Adria would add and remove stops along its main routes. But unlike the Austrian Lloyd, the final destinations remained the same for the most part until the outbreak of World War I. But while Hungarian businesses forged trade and finance relations with India, South America, China, Japan, and Australia over the course of five decades, Africa, with no significant market for Hungarian commodities, never attracted much attention. Hungarian and Austrian colonial enthusiasts, which included a significant portion of the public, imperial bureaucrats, and Emperor Franz Josef, never outweighed the Hungarian state’s perception that Africa offered little economic opportunity and numerous risks.

 

* * *

 

Adria’s story serves as a warning against forming a narrative of Austria-Hungary’s global history based predominantly on the Foreign Ministry’s interpretation of an empire in decline.103 Historians often condemn the Hungarian state’s obstructionist approach to negotiations with the Cisleithanian state and the empire’s joint institutions.104 But this essay has shown that Budapest’s obstructionism played a significant role in Austria-Hungary’s relatively benign extra-European engagements. The inclusion of the Hungarian state complicates the notion of an Austro-Hungarian foreign policy because Budapest not only influenced the decisions of the joint Foreign Ministry but also engaged the world beyond Europe on its own terms. Rather than fear of or indifference to overseas activity, a strategy of internal development guided the Hungarian state’s approach to global trade. This strategy exacerbated internal tensions within the empire. Though officially united behind a common foreign policy, the Cisleithanian and Hungarian states and the empire’s joint institutions often had divergent, competing international interests. But the Hungarian state’s strategy was largely successful, and this success should be as prominent an element of understandings of Austria-Hungary’s global history, if not an even more prominent element, than the Foreign Ministry’s lament over its failure to maintain the empire’s great-power status.

 

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1 U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1496.

2 Leopold Graf Bolesta-Koziebrodzki, Chief of Mission to Sultan of Morocco in 1907–1909, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna [Ministerium des Äußern], May 21, 1908, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv [hereafter HHStA], Ministerium des Äußern [hereafter MdA], Administrative Registratur [hereafter AR], Fach 34, Schifffahrt Adria, Generalia (1901 – 1915), Beschwerden, 1908/4138 [hereafter F344138].

3 HHStA MdA AR Report in F344138, 43.

4 Sándor Paczka to Ferencz Kossuth, Hungarian Royal Trade Minister, January 15, 1908, Državni arhiv u Rijeci [hereafter DAR] – 46, JU 9 1908 XVIII/II – 456 [hereafter DAR 456].

5 For example, see Bilgeri, “Österreich-Ungarn im Konzert der Kolonialmächte;” Frank, “Continental and Maritime Empires;” the special issue of Austrian Studies edited by Hughes and Krobb: “Colonial Austria: Austria and the Overseas;” Loidl, “Safari und Menschenversuche;” Naranch, “Made in China;” Ritter-Basch, Die Weltumsegelung der Novara; Ruthner, “Central Europe Goes Post-Colonial;” Sauer, k. u. k. kolonial; Schilddorfer and Weiss, Novara: Österreichs Traum von der Weltmacht.

6 Frank, “The Children of the Desert,” 411, ft. 4.

7 Tooze, The Deluge.

8 Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History,” 818.

9 The American economy was a primary danger that imperialists attempted to fortify their empires against. See Beckert, “American Danger.”

10 For example, see Bornemisza, Kelet-Afrika kereskedelmi viszonyai; Weiss, Kereskedelmi hódítások; Havass, Magyar imperiálizmus.

11 Tápay-Szabó, Magyar Adria.

12 Lukacs, Budapest 1900, 186.

13 Ablonczy, Keletre, Magyar!; Köves, “The Semiotics of Empire-Building,” 95–104; Kövér, “Modes of Orientalism in Hungarian letters;” Rác, “East and West in Modern Hungarian Politics,” 208; idem, “Orientals among the People of the East,” 136. For a classic example, see Staud, Orientalizmus a magyar romantikában. For an exception, see Romsics, Múltról a mának, 121–58.

14 Eddie, “Economic Policy and Economic Development in Austria-Hungary,” 871.

15 Die Probleme der österreichischen Flottenpolitik, 58.

16 Sondhaus, The Naval Policy, 62. For a debate about the renegotiation of the agreement in 1898, see

“A képviselőház közgazdasági bizottságának jelentése,” 364–66.

17 Duckerts, Le port hongrois de Fiume, 6–7.

18 Miller, Europe and the Maritime World.

19 “Hivatalos Rész;” “Magyar Kereskedelmi Muzeum,” 1055.

20 “Magyar Királyi Kereskedelmi Muzeum,” Közgazdasági Értesítő 9, no. 9 (1914): advertisement, after page 528.

21 “A magyar királyi kereskedelmi muzeum üzletkezelősége,” Magyarország tiszti cím- és névtára (1900): 342.

22 “Magyar királyi kereskedelmi museum,” Magyarország tiszti cím- és névtára 21 (1902): 358.

23 “A magyar királyi kereskedelmi muzeum üzletkezelősége,” Magyarország tiszti cím- és névtára 22 (1903): 359; “Magyar királyi kereskedelmi museum,” Magyarország tiszti cím- és névtára 23 (1904): 189; “A magyar királyi kereskedelmi muzeum üzletkezelősége,” Magyarország tiszti cím- és névtára 24 (1905): 227; “Magyar királyi kereskedelmi museum,” Magyarország tiszti cím- és névtára 25 (1906): 240.

24 “Magyar királyi kereskedelmi muzeum,” Magyarország tiszti cím- és névtára 26 (1907): 244.

25 “Magyar kereskedelmi museum,” 54.

26 Canis, Die Bedrängte Großmacht; Kolm, Die Ambitionen Österreich-Ungarns; Lehner and Lehner, Österreich-Ungarn und der “Boxeraufstand;” Skrivan, “The Economic Interests of Austria-Hungary;” Rauscher, Die Fragile Großmacht; Winter, Österreichische Spuren in der Südsee.

27 Diószegi, Hungarians in the Ballhausplatz; Godsey, Aristocratic Redoubt; Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 191–202; Sondhaus, The Naval Policy, 147–48.

28 Komár, “Az Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia és Marokkó,” 55.

29 Sondhaus, The Naval Policy, 147–48.

30 Report from Tangier to Foreign Ministry, October 20, 1902, 778910, HHStA MdA AR Fach 68/2.

31 Report from Tunis to Foreign Ministry, July 7, 1905, 252534, HHStA MdA AR Fach 68/4.

32 HHStA MdA AR, Fach 34 F344138.

33 Viktor Graf Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet, Chief of Mission to Sultan of Morocco from 1901–1904, to Kereskedelemügyi Ministerium [hereafter KM], 20 October 1902, DAR – 46, JU 9 1908 XVIII/II – 282 [hereafter DAR 282].

34 “Le développement des communications maritimes entre l’Espagne et le Nord de l’Afrique” in F344138 Report (HHStA MdA AR, Fach 34).

35 Ricek, Moderne Schiffahrt, Second page of Foreword.

36 Geyling, Fünfundsiebzig Jahre Österreichischer Lloyd, 1.

37 HHStA MdA AR, Fach34, Report in F344138.

38 Frank, Oil Empire, 176–77.

39 Jankó, “Érdekeink Észak-Afrikában,” 107.

40 Idem, “Kereskedelmünk Észak-Afrikában,” 540.

41 Ibid., 540; Idem, “Érdekeink Észak-Afrikában,” 111.

42 Idem, “Kereskedelmünk Észak-Afrikában,” 541.

43 “Afrika, Marokkó,” Közgazdasági Értesítő, March 1908, 772.

44 KM to the Magyar Királyi Tengerészeti Hatóság [hereafter MKTH], January 18, 1900, DAR 282.

45 Foreign Ministry Report, November 30, 190, DAR 282, 4966/90.

46 Adria Magyar Királyi Tengerhajózási Részvénytársaság [hereafter Adria] to MKTH, September 12, 1902, DAR 282.

47 Adria to MKTH, September 13, 1902, DAR 282.

48 Hölek, “Magyarország és Északafrika,” 836.

49 This data was taken from A Magyar Korona országainak évi külkereskedelmi forgalma.

50 KM to Foreign Ministry, 28 October 1905, DAR 282, 578990.

51 KM to Adria, November 14, 1902, DAR 282.

52 Adria to MKTH, May (date not provided), DAR 282.

53 KM to MKTH, December 16, 1902, DAR 282.

54 HHStA MdA AR, Fach 34, F344138.

55 Adria, Üzleti jelentés.

56 KM to MKTH, 9 March 1903, DAR 282.

57 Algiers, January 10, 1899, Letter from V. Graf Crenneville, “Specialbericht aus Algier,” DAR 282.

58 Sándor Billitz, freight forwarder, to MKTH, October 4, 1904, DAR 282.

59 Ludwig von Callenberg, Chief of Mission to Sultan of Morocco between 1909 and 1913, “Klagen über den ,,Adria” – dienst. – Neuregelung des österreichisch – ungarischen Schiffahrtsdienstes nach Marokko, June 20, 1909, DAR 282.

60 Oesterreichiesches statistisches Handbuch, 232.

61 Tangier consul to Count Agenor Maria Adam Gołuchowski, Chairman of the Ministers’ Council for Common Affairs of Austria-Hungary, July 24, 1904, DAR 282.

62 Adria to MKTH, February 25, 1908, DAR 282.

63 Adria to MKTH, May 2, 1904, DAR 282.

64 MKTH to Károly Hieronymi, Interior Minister of Hungary, May 18, 1904, DAR 282.

65 HHStA MdA AR, Fach 34 F344138.

66 KM to MKTH, August 19, 1904 DAR 282.

67 Adria to MKTH, September 8, 1904, DAR 282.

68 Adria to MKTH, May 16, 1907, DAR 456.

69 Adria to Gołuchowski, February 24, 1906, 13521, HHStA MdA AR Fach 68/1.

70 Harding, Phantom Crown; O’Connor, The Cactus Throne.

71 Sondhaus, The Naval Policy, 16.

72 Pruonto, “Did the Second Mexican Empire,” 110.

73 “Összeköttetés Mexikóval,” Budapesti Hírlap, November 19, 1898.

74 “A mexikói magyar kereskedelmi,” Budapesti Hírlap, April 11, 1901.

75 “A Közép-tenger körül,” Budapesti Hírlap, January 7, 1903; “Német vas Mexikóban,” Budapesti Hírlap, February 16, 1902.

76 “Az OMGE ipari és kereskedelmi szakosztályának ülése,” Köztelek, March 16, 1904.

77 “Bánó Jenő fölolvasása,” Budapesti Hírlap, March 8, 1904.

78 Jenő Bánó, “Mexikó kereskedelmi fejlődése és a magyar gőzhajó járatok,” Magyarország, May 31, 1908.

79 “Magyar hajójárat Newyorkba és Mexikóba,” Budapesti Hírlap, October 27, 1901.

80 “Hajójárat Mexikóba,” Magyarország, May 8, 1908.

81 A Magyar Korona országainak évi külkereskedelmi forgalma 1903–1915.

82 “Mexicói cs. és kir. Konzulátus,” Közgazdasági Értesítő 3 (1908): 1070.

83 Ibid., 1075.

84 “Mit keresnek Mexikóban?,” Közgazdasági Értesítő 6, no. 1 (1911): 578.

85 Foreign Ministry Memo to Prime Minister Koloman von Széll, Vienna, November 5, 1902. 72588, HHStA MdA AR Fach 68/1.

86 Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [hereafter MNL OL] K 26 1908 – XXXVIII – 1289 – 394, July 10, 1902, 43982, MKTH to Lajos Láng.

87 MNL OL, K 26 1908 – XXXVIII – 1289 – 394, August 31, 1902, Note from the Trade Ministry to the Prime Minister, 4618.

88 Adria to MKTH, September 29, 1907, DAR– 46 – 439.

89 Adria to KM, August 29, 1908, DAR 456.

90 Adria to MKTH, June 23, 1908, DAR 456.

91 KM to MKTH, February 13, 1900, DAR 282.

92 Adria to MKTH, December 28, 1904, DAR 282.

93 KM to MKTH, March 8, 1904, DAR 282.

94 Adria to MKTH, December 28, 1904, DAR 282.

95 Adria to MKTH, January 20, 1904, DAR 282.

96 “An die hochverehrliche k.u.k. österreich-ung. Gesandtschaft in Tanger,” Complaint by Benchimol & Kell, Beilage zum Bericht No. 8. H. P. vom 20. Juni 1909.

97 “Einführung von Automobilen in Tunesien,” March 4, 1912, HHStA MdA AR Fach 95/1.

98 Pelles, “Az Adria Magyar Királyi Tengerhajózási Rt,” 197.

99 Ibid., 205.

100 Ibid., 206.

101 Adria to the Prime Minister, Budapest, April 26, 1906, 32710, HHStA MdA AR Fach 68/4: Schifffahrt-Lloyd, Generalia (1909 -).

102 For example, compare Adria’s shipping schedules for 1891 and 1913.

103 Deak and Gumz, “How to Break a State,” 1106; See also Wank, “Varieties of Cultural Despair;” Bridge, The Habsburg Monarchy; Hantsch, Leopold Graf Berchtold. A similar corrective has been made about the perspective of the military. See Deak, “The Great War and the Forgotten Realm,” 367.

104 Most recently in Wawro, A Mad Catastrophe, 13.

2018_2_Krizova

pdfVolume 7 Issue 2 CONTENTS

Between “Here” and “Over There”: Short-term and Circular Mobility from the Czech Lands to Latin America (1880s–1930s)*

Markéta Křížová
Center for Ibero-American Studies, Charles University, Prague
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The present text deals with the phenomenon of short-term mobility from the Czech Lands to Latin America from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s on the basis of sources such as memoirs, letters, and official reports, oral histories, and family histories. An examination of patterns in short-term labor mobility can offer interesting insights into the mechanisms of communication in the broader Atlantic region in the period in question and also further an understanding of cultural and economic interchange and the perceptions by the migrants themselves of their place in the world, their “home,” and their identities. By transmitting skills, experiences, and cultural knowledge, they assisted in the creation of “transnationalism from below” on both sides of the ocean.

Keywords: short-term mobility, labor mobility, Czech Lands, America, Argentina, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transnationalism from below

Introduction

In 1937, Matěj Poláček, a carpenter from southern Moravia, disembarked in the port of Buenos Aires. This fact in itself would be of little interest. In the previous half century, hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans, men and women, had made the same trip. However, Poláček walked down from the deck of Cap Arcona, a luxury transoceanic ship, after having spent several weeks vacationing in his native village. The company for which he was working, the German corporation Grün & Bilfinger, had given him compensation for the work he had performed in the form of tickets for the vessel which had brought him from Hamburg to Buenos Aires in less than two weeks.1 This seems to be at odds with the standard image of Central European migrant worker, but numerous historical sources prove that since the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of migrants had been crossing the Atlantic back and forth, maybe not in such a high-class fashion as Poláček, but playing their part in a complicated web of economic and social relations which transcended the borders of nation states and continents. They were not opting for permanent resettlement, but worked overseas for some time to acquire capital to use in their home countries or to supplement the family income.

The interest of scholars in the great transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries has resulted in a fair amount of monographs and shorter studies. There are many “bilateral histories of migration,” in the words of Tara Zahra, for instance histories of Poles in Chicago or Czechs in Argentina.2 Historians have paid attention in particular to the reasons for which migrants chose to leave their homelands, the mechanisms of integration into receiving societies, and/or the maintenance of earlier loyalties. Only recently has an interest emerged among scholars in the persisting strong and multilayered ties between the countries of origin and those of destination.3 There were in fact rather high rates of return. About 30 percent of the Europeans who entered through the North American ports between 1815 and 1914 returned to Europe, and the proportion was even higher for Latin America during this period, so the phenomenon of return and circular mobility is indeed worth consideration.4 The movement across the Atlantic certainly left profound marks on the intellectual and material culture of the countries from which the migrants set sail and the societies where they settled, whether permanently or temporarily.

In the discourse of the times and to a great extent also in the historiography, return migration was and is often equated with failure. Certainly, there were those who returned because they were unable to fulfill their visions. Still, the glum picture given by Charles Dickens in his American Notes of those “coming back, even poorer than they went” hardly captures the complexity of the phenomenon of overseas mobility.5 In fact, the preponderant majority of those who headed for America planned to return. In 1900, the Portuguese consul in Buenos Aires wrote, with respect to his fellow countrymen coming to Argentina: “The main aspiration of this people is to save some money to buy small plots of land in their homeland.”6 Furthermore, at the time, thanks to the improvements in maritime and overland travel, workers were able to cross the Atlantic repeatedly. Alongside the colonies of fellow countrymen who were trying to establish themselves in the New World arose communities of those “with their feet in both societies,”7 able to maintain (at least partially) their status in their home society, including kinship ties and political loyalties. After returning, by bringing information and money to their native communities and putting into practice knowledge gained abroad, they drew relations, friends, and countrymen who had remained at home into the Atlantic system of economic and cultural interchange. Thus, they contributed to the creation on both sides of the ocean of what Ewa Morawska has called “transnationalism from below,” in which everyday people participated as the principal agents within the borders of the choices allowed to them by the concrete socio-political circumstances.8 On the other hand, while becoming “transnational,” these men and women were able to define who they were and where they belonged, in spite of competing allegiances for different “homes.”9

The realization that the transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in fact, all migration has almost never been unidirectional has prompted many historians to use the term “mobility” instead of the concepts of “outmigration” and “immigration, ” which were originally coined to meet the administrative needs of nation states in the nineteenth century.10 I prefer it in this article, as it better captures the multidirectional and interwoven patterns of migration activities, with emphasis on the short term and the repeated and circular moves over the ocean and back. My goal is to demonstrate, via a very limited case study focused on the Czech Lands/Czechoslovakia,11 how this type of study can help us move beyond a narrowly nationalistic approach to the study of history. Also, as historians have shown a considerably stronger interest in migration to the United States than in migration to the southern parts of the American continents, I have focused on mobility to and from Latin America as the principal starting point of my analysis.

While there has been a steady influx of individuals and smaller groups from Central Europe to the southern parts of the American continent since the colonial period which grew stronger throughout the nineteenth century, the main impetus for increased interest in settling in Latin America was the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited opportunities for Czechs, together with other Central and Eastern Europeans, to enter the USA. Also, the adverse consequences of the global economic crisis in the 1930s in Central Europe and the local booms in various parts of Latin America sparked further interest in Latin America (even though, as I will explain, the global crisis caused drops in available workplaces in Latin American countries as well).12 While the permanent migration from the Czech Lands to Latin America has been studied intensively by Czechoslovak/Czech historians since the 1960s,13 the phenomenon of short-term, circular, and return mobility has not yet received similar attention.

Sources

There certainly is an explanation for the relative lack of interest among historians in short-term mobility, namely, the scarcity of sources. In a sense, these migrants fall into a “blind spot” in the archival documentation, as the official statistics usually only include people who sought the approval of the authorities to leave the country permanently. It is not possible to determine the volume of the back and forth movement between America and Europe with any precision. Short-term laborers often relied on the help of family members or friends, especially at the beginning of their ventures, but they were relatively mobile and they remained largely outside the more compact expatriate communities in America, mixing instead with other salaried laborers, either locals or immigrants from other countries. Thus, their names do not appear frequently in the source materials concerning national clubs and associations in the host societies.14 There is, furthermore, a general problem with statistics dealing with migrants from Austro-Hungary. Czechs were often automatically considered either “Austrians” or “Germans,” or they were mixed with other Slavs, like Poles; they sometimes even presented themselves as such when looking for work.15

There are scattered mentions of companies sending their employees overseas in the published and manuscript autobiographies of migrants, the documentation from official visits by Czech and Austro-Hungarian and later Czechoslovak officials touring Latin America for various purposes, and travelogues or newspaper articles, and in the archival fonds. Interviews were done with Czech settlers repatriated from Latin America after 1918, as well as (by mail) with their fellow countrymen who opted to stay abroad, by the employees of Československý ústav zahraniční [Czechoslovak Foreign Institute].16 Finally, there are the family histories, transmitted orally, together with postcards, photographs, and other memorabilia. Several decades ago, Julianna Puskás eloquently demonstrated the value of these types of documents for the study of (not only) Hungarian migrations.17 Many of the testimonies—some of them so far unknown to or little exploited by historians—are only indirect; often there are just scraps and pieces from peoples’ life histories.

Given the nature of these sources, one is compelled to adopt a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach. My interest lies primarily in the agency of migrants themselves, as individuals and members of family units and local communities, who were acting within concrete social, geographical, and temporal spaces. Overseas migration always involved individual decision making, and if we seek to arrive at a nuanced understanding of these historical processes, we must consider individual stories as well as the broader collective phenomena. Still, my ambition has been to arrive, on the basis of these individual stories, at some general conclusions with respect to the transatlantic entanglements, which constituted one of the crucial historical factors in the making of present-day Central Europe.18

The chronological delineation of this study connects two very distinctive political regimes, beginning with the period when the Czech Lands still constituted part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and ending two decades after they had been made part of the new, postwar state of Czechoslovakia. While major political events often make suitable milestones for historical study (and in certain respects the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918 constituted a turning point in the history of migrations, since tens of thousands of Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks returned from over the world to the lands of their birth),19 I still opt for structural approach. Therefore, I examine short-term and circular mobility from its commencement at the very end of the nineteenth century (due to the considerable reduction in the cost of transatlantic passage) up to the beginning of the World War II, when overseas transit in general was brought to an abrupt end.

Back and Forth

The concept of “short-term mobility” escapes precise definition.20 People had a wide array of reasons for leaving for the New World, and a similarly diverse array of experiences once they arrived. For the present analysis, and aware of the insufficiencies of my approach, I take as central the initial aim of returning instead of remaining and becoming permanent residents and, at times, a pattern of repeated visits. The social composition of the group under consideration is also important. I do not take into account the members of the managerial staff of the Austrian/Czech/Czechoslovak companies in the Latin American branches (i.e. what is referred to as “career migration”21), nor do I consider the journalists and travelers who earned their living along the way. Rather, I focus on individuals who came from the same social strata as the long-term and permanent migrants, specifically the lower and middle classes, urban and rural, and in the majority of cases people who did manual labor. For them, living overseas was a means to an end, a labor strategy,22 not the final objective of their endeavors. The intention of returning rules out the poorest, who often had to sell everything they possessed, arriving in the New World “with just the shirt they had on, without a penny in their pocket,” as stated one of the texts from the beginning of the twentieth century the author of which warned Czechs against emigration.23 Surely also those who planned to return sometimes had difficulties raising the necessary cash and were compelled to take out mortgages or ask for loans from their relatives, but were not forced to sell everything (and clearly, the mere act of taking out a mortgage or asking for a loan meant that the person intended to return).24 Also, the poorest migrants usually lacked the necessary qualifications that would enable them to find better-paid jobs and save money for a return ticket.

Of course, sometimes the decision to stay or return was not made by the migrants themselves, but rather was dictated by outside forces. Many of those who originally planned to stay permanently returned within a few years, because the promises made by the agents and the authorities of the host country had given them misleading impressions of the realities of everyday life in the New World. Sometimes people who wished to return were forced to stay when they realized that their savings would barely suffice to buy a return ticket. Judging from the memoirs and interviews, there were many such cases. “I came to Argentina, as many of us did, thinking that I will get rich quickly and easily and I will earn a lot of money and then immediately I will return home. This was my firm conviction when I left home,” stated František Lukešík, who came to Argentina around 1910. As he could not find salaried work, he ended up in the agricultural colony Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, founded in 1913 by several Czech families.25

There was never significant seasonal transatlantic mobility from the Czech Lands, i.e. nothing equivalent to the Spanish and Italian golondrinas (swallows), farmhands who took advantage of the alternating agricultural cycles between the hemispheres and spent the European winter harvesting fruit and wheat in Argentina and then returned to Europe in May.26 Even with the improved system of railroad traffic, the Czech Lands remained too distant from the Mediterranean and Atlantic ports to make such movements worthwhile. Most of the Czechs and Moravians who went to America for shorter stays were industrial rather than agricultural workers, and they came for periods of years instead of several months. Still, there was a correlation between overseas mobility and the existing patterns of seasonal work.

This, in fact, is true for the whole of Europe. While traditionally the various types of migration—transatlantic, continental, or regional—have been studied in virtual isolation, in recent decades various historians have proven their mutual interdependence, and the “push” and “pull” models have given way to more complex explanations.27 As for the Czech Lands, in some parts, such as southwestern Bohemia and southern Moravia, mostly poorer agricultural regions with high number of landless or petty farmers who could not support their families by working the land alone, there existed a long tradition of seasonal and short-term labor mobility within and outside the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Germany, Serbia, and Italy. Not just young and single, but also married men would spend up to eight months a year seeking skilled or semi-skilled employment as farmhands, bricklayers, brickmakers etc. Women worked as maids in Vienna, but also as construction assistants all over Germany and Austria.28 A special survey of seasonal labor mobility ordered by the Austrian government in 1913 as a supplement to the regular censuses shows clearly the extent of the short-time absences. At the local level, there were places where seasonal workers made up 20 percent or more of the total population, a figure comparable to the percentages in the best-known regions of seasonal out-migration in Europe, like the Italian Friuli.29 Of course, there were also regular or occasional movements from other regions—for example, miners from northern Bohemia drifted to the Ruhr area in times of labor shortage.30

Given the intensity of this mobility, overseas transfer does not appear as exceptional as traditional historical studies have tended to suggest. Rather, it seems to have been one of the alternatives workers could pursue. The fact that communities with existing traditions of seasonal and short-term mobility had already established social mechanisms for accommodating absences and returns is important. There existed what could be termed a “culture of mobility,” i.e. a collective strategy for coping with and taking advantage of the willingness of some of their members to travel by adjusting existing norms, values, and ideologies to their absences.31 Females took male occupations on the farms or hired day laborers to do them; families and the community at large were willing to accept some of the novelties brought about by the return of laborers. The laborers themselves were already used to making accommodations in the new environments in which they had lived, and, last but not least, while working in various European countries, they had opportunities to learn about the possibilities of transoceanic migration.32

It is possible that some of the seasonal workers originally did not plan to go to America, but decided to cross the Atlantic only after coming to the Italian port, for example, and encountering agents of shipping companies.33 Similarly, it is possible that they were approached with offers of work or attracted by rumors while working in Germany, as was the case of Poláček. Up to World War I, in particular Brazil and later Chile actively spread immigration propaganda in Germany, so the Czech seasonal workers who were coming to Germany also became the targets of agents. And even when they did not opt to move overseas themselves, these seasonal workers brought home information about such opportunities from Germany or Italy.34 America certainly was not an unreachable, strange world for Central European farmhands and workers. Of course, mobility, whether short-term or permanent, also depended on concrete economic conditions in a given region. And it should be noted that for the period under consideration overseas short-term mobility remained of secondary importance in comparison with the continuing seasonal labor movements within the Czech Lands or to neighboring countries. The possible paths for improving one’s economic and social status for the inhabitants of the Czech Lands at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries included a number of choices.

A Typology of Short-term Migrants

The countries of destination in Latin America for the short-term migrants were mostly the same as for the long-term and permanent migrants: first and foremost Argentina and Brazil, then to a lesser degree Chile (mostly due to its geographical position, which made short-term stays more difficult) and Mexico, and only exceptionally Central America or other Latin American countries. Argentina and Brazil in particular offered an acceptable climate and a relatively large array of work opportunities due to rapid modernization and urbanization, which had been underway since the second half of the nineteenth century, a factor even more important for short-term migrants than for those who mostly opted for privately owned land and an independent existence.

Regarding the typology of short-term mobility from the Czech Lands, there are two clearly distinguishable groups. The first of these consisted of unskilled or semi-skilled workers motivated by the vague notion of the “American dream,” as it was spread by the agents of the transportation companies and the colonizing societies or by the successes of their predecessors. In their effort to earn money quickly, they were willing to take any work, but they usually proved ill-prepared for the realities of life in the New World.35 From the point of view of cultural exchange, they did not have much to share with the host societies, and though their work as farm hands or factory workers provided them with new experiences, these insights were not of much use in their native communities. Many of such would-be short-term migrants were in the end forced to remain for a longer period of time than they had initially planned or even permanently, since it proved almost impossible to save money for the return journey. Sometimes, they were repatriated at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian or Czechoslovak embassies.36 Repeated warnings from the authorities and already established fellow-countrymen offer clear evidence of their considerable vulnerability to economic oscillations and social pressures; however, their numbers increased nonetheless, especially during the economic crisis of the 1930s, even though labor opportunities in Latin America decreased sharply precisely at that time.37

The second group consisted of skilled workers. Some of them came to America to find employment in their respective fields, either at random or drawing on the previous experiences of relatives or friends. Others were sent by the companies for which they were working in Europe. For both groups, Latin America offered better opportunities than the United States, where the labor marked had been saturated by immigrant and domestic specialists since the second half of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, factories in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile themselves sent agents to Europe to seek specialists in professions in which there was a high demand for the comparatively few skilled laborers;38 furthermore, these countries actively encouraged the establishment of foreign companies. As the Czech Lands had historically produced some specialized jobs, these workers adapted with relative ease not only to their new lives in various European countries, where their expertise was in demand, but also to conditions on the other side of the ocean. There was also the aforementioned traditional seasonal mobility of construction workers from southern Bohemia and southern Moravia. Matěj Poláček, to whose third arrival in Argentina in the span of ten years I alluded in the opening lines of this article, had been working as a migrant laborer since the 1890s, first in Hungary, then in various German cities, and then in the New World. There, he took part in such projects as the construction of the huge Cruz del Eje dam, the railroad bridge at San Lorenzo, and the “Tiro Federal,” that is, shooting grounds for the federal army in the Argentinian capital.39

There were Czech railroad builders, construction workers, and factory workers all over Argentina, as the precipitous expansion of railroads created a need for people with experience in these professions. For example, workers from the Czech factory in Kopřivnice, a famous producer of railroad carriages, were invited to the state-owned factory in Tafi Viejo in 1910. Because there was a scarcity of work in Kopřivnice at the time, the factory management supported their temporary absence and even organized Spanish courses for them. Of about forty workers, some stayed in Argentina, while others returned home before the war.40 For the dangerous work at the oil fields in southern Argentina, experienced miners were recruited by German agents in the Czech mining regions Ostrava/Ostrau and Kladno.41 At the beginning of the 1930s, the Škoda company of Plzeň delivered facilities for the newly built beet sugar refinery plants in the Argentine provinces of Mendoza and San Juan. Since the nineteenth century, the Bohemian Lands had been at the foreground of sugar production in Europe. After a very unsuccessful first season in the Argentinian enterprise, Škoda arranged to send over technicians and “boilers,” along with the machinery.42

The Bohemian Lands were also famous for beer production. Not only were Czech beer, malt, and hop important export articles, but since the end of the nineteenth century brewing machinery had been exported to furnish breweries all over Latin America. Again, specialized workers were sent to start production, some of them repeatedly when new branches of breweries were established or production was expanded. Vojtěch Vaníček, representative of the Economic Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, traveled in South America together with the aforementioned Zdeněk Fafl in 1910 on behalf of the Trade and Commercial Chamber. He found Czech specialists “in almost every brewery we passed through.”43 Similarly, after visiting Argentina and Brazil in 1910 and finding many Czechs in local breweries, Czech economist Leopold Perutz recommended that “our vocational and trade schools teach Spanish and Portuguese.”44 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jan Mikš first passed through various European breweries, concluding with Zagreb in 1910. He then moved to to South America; there was comparatively intense mobility, both permanent and short term, between Croatia and Latin America, especially Chile.45 For two years, Mikš worked in breweries in Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and other cities. In Santiago, he made the acquaintance of Count Kolowrat-Liechtenstein, the Austrian envoy to Chile, who later employed him as a tenant of his own brewery in the town of Rychnov in eastern Bohemia.46 And, finally, there were representatives of specific professions such as musicians who at the time were in great demand in Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires, where they provided not only the dance music and entertainment in restaurants, but also live accompaniment for silent films.47

The preponderant majority of the short-term migrants were male, in contrast to the more balanced mix in the case of long-term migrants. Still, there were also female specialists. Uruguayan and Argentinian upper-class families preferred maids and cooks from Europe over local labor as a sign of high social standing;48 and there has been a tradition of Czech and Moravian maids going to Vienna, so again the move overseas was more of a prolongation of existing mobility patterns than the establishment of entirely new ones. Also, the Argentinian elites employed governesses from Central Europe who were able to speak French for lower wages than “genuine” French gouvernantes.49 There were certain risks, as the mediating agencies sometimes delivered the young women to brothels.50 In response to numerous reports and complaints, as of 1930, women from Czechoslovakia under the age of twenty-five could only travel to Argentina or Brazil if they could presents an affidavit from a family member or employer who pledged to provide “financial support and moral supervision.”51

Experiences Overseas

Specialized workers often came to South America with a contract already in hand. They were thus spared the humiliating stay in the “Immigrants’ hotels” in Buenos Aires or São Paulo, where they could stay for free, but where conditions were crowded and discouraging,52 and the equally discouraging clamor for work, any work at all. Because they possessed skills that were rare in Latin America, they were able to negotiate their pay and sometimes even the luxury of an occasional trip home. They often felt superior and sometimes voiced a sense of superiority over local laborers, and sometimes even seem to have had a notion of themselves as representatives of a “civilizing mission” who were spreading European/Czech skills in undeveloped regions. The authorities in the home country were actually aware of this and commented on it negatively. While the Habsburg state did not intervene actively in the “export” of skilled workers, the Czechoslovak Ministry of Trade and Industry made efforts (although mostly in vain) to keep specialists in prominent export industries (such as beer-making, sugar-making, glass-making, the textile industry, etc.) within the state borders even in times of rising unemployment during the great crisis of the 1930s precisely because they feared that the transfer of technological knowledge abroad would create competition for domestic production.53

Still, even the position of a highly qualified worker was not at all secure, and America was far from a “new home.” Often, salaries were lower than had been promised.54 Many of the workplaces were far from inviting. For example, in the oil fields in southern Argentina, the workforce consisted mostly of foreigners, the atmosphere was highly cosmopolitan,55 and earnings were relatively high. But, according to the memoirs of some of the Czech workers, the housing conditions were dismal, consisting mostly of crude shacks made of boards and corrugated sheets; there was acute lack of drinking water, which was sold at high prices. Medical facilities were inadequate and there was no compensation for work-related accidents. As the region was isolated, the workers lacked protection and could hardly flee.56

The situation on railroads was similar. When in 1929 the Argentinian government started the construction of the railroad from Salta to Formosa, it negotiated the involvement of a Hungarian company which recruited skilled workers in various places, including the Czech Lands. But as soon became evident, high earnings notwithstanding, the working conditions were hard. Because of the lack of proper machinery, the laborers had to do backbreaking manual work, drinking water was scarce and housing inadequate. In response to reports on these conditions, the Hungarian government forbade further recruitment of workers for Argentina, but the Czechoslovak authorities only issued warnings through the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute.57 Of course, these experiences, if narrated back home, might have had discouraging effects. The dominant image of Latin America as a region in which work was reduced to manual labor is interesting. “In Argentina, intelligence will not find work, as there are enough educated people. Argentina needs only laborers in agriculture and in trade.”58

Those who had worked first in Western Europe, had been members of labor unions and had taken advantage of (or taken part in ensuring) social securities and labor legislature resented the lack of protections for workers in Latin America. The situation was particularly bad in Brazil. “There are no legal protections for workers. The laborers are blatantly oppressed. […] Every factory has its own warehouse with food for workers. Often the laborer does not get any money at all. If he needs medicine or other necessities, he must buy at a high price from the warehouse of the factory and sell at a loss for cash.”59 Of course, this was even more stressful for short-term migrants, who had hoped to accumulate meaningful savings as quickly as possible. For some of the migrants, the stay overseas seems to have been crucial as an experience which increased their awareness of social issues.60 Last but not least, migrants had to face anti-immigrant sentiments, which with the passage of time became more intense in many Latin American countries.

Migrants who aspired to remain in their new homes for longer period of time or even permanently mostly tried to settle down as quickly as possible on purchased or rented estates. The relative availability of land in Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it was becoming scarce in the USA, was one of the major attractions for Czechs (who, unlike other migrants from eastern and southern Europe, generally aspired to settle in the countryside instead of looking for work in urban areas). The temporary migrants, in contrast, often moved around, either because they were sent to new locations by the companies for which they were working or because, in their search for work, they had gotten to know various parts of the country and fellow workers of various nationalities. As they opted for a short, profitable stay in America, with as few expenses as possible, and as they often worked in multilingual and multinational environments, many of them considered it impractical to devote time and money to activities like learning Spanish or Portuguese, especially when they were working for French or German companies.

The dominance of German companies in Argentine industry eased the process of adaptation for Czechs and Moravians, most of whom had at least a superficial knowledge of German. When Karel Urban, one of the would-be sojourners who decided to stay in America, responded to the questionnaire of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, he commented: “I only remembered several words in Portuguese, but that bit of my German helped me everywhere.”61 The language barrier was another factor which prevented the short-term migrants from constructing the notion of a home (albeit temporary) in America. Of course, without the knowledge of the local language, they were also more vulnerable to being cheated by employers or members of the local population.

The American Trunk

While it was demonstrated above that intercontinental mobility in many respects was followed by long-established models of labor sojourns, this did not just mean a widening of the radius of travel for work. Stays overseas had some important repercussions for the migrants themselves, their families, and the local communities. Of utmost importance were the remittances that flowed into the villages and suburbs in the Czech Lands. The fact that “temporary immigrant comes to earn money and then leaves with wages, [which] is important for doing the work, but is not something [the host country] needs for its development” was noted by the contemporary Czech commentators62 and officials in Latin America. Many of the contemporary commentators noted the substantial difference in wages between Argentina, for example, and Europe, not forgetting, however, immediately to note also the high living costs, especially the prices of basic foodstuffs.63 As remittances came mostly through the mail or by personal delivery, it is difficult even to estimate the total sums involved. But they probably meant a boost to local economies through the purchase of land plots and houses64 and also due to the fact that the prolonged absences of numerous males made it necessary to employ hired hands.

The notion of “American wealth” even entered local folklore. One Moravian offered the following characterization of the advantages of migrant labor in the New World for people in the Old: “Good for women in the old country, who have their husbands in America. They work, they send money home.”65 And they also sent exotic goods. Poláček once dispatched a chest of oranges from Argentina shortly before Easter, and his daughters gave them away instead of painted eggs, which is the local custom on Easter Monday.66 This story could be seen merely as a curiosity, but it illustrates the fact that such gifts sent or brought home reinforced the exotic image of the New World in Central Europe and could be also regarded as a symbol of the progressive interlinking of local and regional economies to the transatlantic system.

The returning migrants also brought back information about the world on the far side of the ocean. In his monograph, Mark Wyman uses of the metaphor of the “America trunk” as an apt symbol for both emigration and remigration, of coming to America and returning to the homeland, of conserving the memories of the mother country and bringing home new wares, goods and ideas.67 Certainly, the letters from relatives and friends living in America represented an important source of information for their home communities and, later, for historians.68 But first-hand experiences transmitted by word-of-mouth, together with the presents and memorabilia taken out of the trunk, probably had an even stronger impact, though not one that would leave much trace in historical records. But perhaps these presents and memorabilia influenced the contents of the “American trunk” packed by the next generation of migrants. The seasoned “Mexican” or “American” in fancy clothes, able to deal with any situation and endeavoring to climb the social ladder, even entered the local folklore, including songs, jokes, and fairytales, as well as the popular literature all over the Czech Lands.69

In his memoirs, František Vyšata, a traveler and ardent proponent of the Czech national spirit among migrants, lamented that “the preparation of our fellow countrymen for such a vital step as leaving of motherland was minimal or nonexistent.” Migrants simply bought their tickets from “eloquent agents” and then “off they went to try their luck.”70 But, as was already noted, this was in fact not true. More often than not, prospective migrants had abundant and surprisingly precise information which helped them make carefully considered decisions when contemplating travel overseas. It certainly was not a coincidence that the Czech and Moravian regions in which we find highest number of seasonal migrants to European countries and, later, to America—southwestern Bohemia, southern Moravia—were also regions from which numerous individuals and families decided to move overseas permanently. In a study of contemporary transmigrants, Peggy Lewitt refers to this flow of information as “social remittances” in an effort to accentuate its importance for the increase in the material wellbeing of the home communities because it stimulated other forms of mobility.71 The two types of mobility certainly reinforced each other, as the return migrants spread knowledge, direct or indirect, of the opportunities overseas, while the permanent settlements of fellow countrymen made the shorter stays of those who did not want to remain for good easier. Also, within the framework of short-term mobility, the chain pattern acquired great importance. Memoirs and correspondence confirm that on returning for another stay in America, workers often took with them relatives—brothers, bothers-in-law, nephews etc. —to follow them to the Americas.72

Alongside the economic implications, there were important social and cultural consequences for community cohesion and the lives of the members of communities from which migrants departed for the New World. The overseas sojourns differed from previous patterns of seasonal mobility, if only due to the longer duration of labor stays. Short-term migrants did not dispose of their properties, and for the most part, if married, left their wives behind, thus maintaining also their social position in the community and preventing themselves from establishing closer social ties in the host societies. Though the wives took over the everyday tasks, their husbands managed their affairs from long-distance through correspondence and messages sent back and forth with traveling friends and relatives. Still, the outcomes of their prolonged absences could be damaging. Both contemporary commentators and recent studies have spoken of the “feminization” of society, as wives and other family members were forced to take over some of the work and, perhaps more importantly, the social responsibilities (and thus to some extent the social influence) of the departed men.73 Folklore captured the feelings of uneasiness and a sense of fragmentation, tension, and inconsolable emptiness: “Children are crying aloud when they bid farewell to their father over the wide sea.”74 The documentation of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute covers many cases of fathers gone overseas and mothers who died or were seriously ill, leaving the care of the offspring to relatives or the state.75 Therefore, since the 1930s, anyone applying for a passport and leaving minor children behind had to demonstrate that he or she had provided for their support.76

Conclusion

The impact of returnees on their home surroundings depended, of course, on many factors, including the length of their stay in the Americas and the extent and type of contacts they had had with American society. However, some general trends emerge. In her comments on the impacts of the return of migrant workers from the United States on the Hungarian countryside, Puskás notes the crucial impact of experiences with the democratic establishment, political freedoms, which made it more difficult for the returnees to tolerate the more restricted conditions in their home country.77 As the sources concerning Czech and Moravian migration to South America indicate, upon returning, the migrants lacked “freedom” in a different sense—lowered social restraints and pressures, less cramped living conditions, and a sense of greater responsibility for one’s own life.

One finds explicit allusions to the lack of “freedom” and the discomforts of living in densely populated areas in the correspondence of returned migrants sent via the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute and implicit references in the memoirs of Matěj Poláček. In this sense, the feeling of being at “home” unexpectedly shifted overseas, throwing into doubt the notions maintained during the sojourns in America. A letter sent in 1929 by the Moravian returnee to compatriots in Argentina documents not only the intense communication with people oversees, the interchange of letters, and the frequent visits of relatives, but also the fact that even returning home and buying land was not necessarily a definite step. “How was the harvest? I am homesick for America, I liked it there, except for the flies. […] Here we are among strange people. […] When we tire from working for others, we will sell [what we have] here again and go over to you. […] The country is nice here, fields all flat, but more work than with the cotton over there.”78 The anonymous author of the letter still drew a distinction between “here” and “over there,” but her loyalties were not at all clear-cut. Poláček bought a “ranch” in Argentina, while also investing in real estate in his native village, manifesting fervent affection for his homeland. That he was prevented in 1946 from embarking again for South America and was subsequently deprived of part of his properties as a consequence of the rise to power of the communist regime is a different story.79 What is important in this context is the evident multiplicity of “homes” Poláček (along with hundreds or thousands of other Czechs and Moravians) was able to come to regard as “his,” a sentiment he was at least partially able to transmit to his surroundings, drawing the peripheral regions of Central Europe into the transatlantic economic and cultural interchange.

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1* This article was written as part of the the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734) and Charles University PROGRES Q 09 program: History – The key to understanding the globalized world. The first version of the article was presented at the Fifth European Congress on World and Global History in Budapest (2017). I am thankful to the participants of the panel “Emigration from the Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to America, 1848–1918,” as well as to the reviewers of the submitted manuscript, for their inspiring remarks.

In the 1970s, when he was nearing ninety, Poláček wrote down his life story, which was then preserved by his descendants. It was published with the title Za velkou louži: Vzpomínky moravského dělníka Matěje Poláčka na Afriku a Jižní Ameriku; translation into German currently underway.

2 Zahra, The Great Departure, 16.

3 Other texts which merit mention include, from the field of the study of migration to Latin America, Da Orden, Una familia y un océano; or the collective volume Sæther, Expectations Unfulfilled. Of course, there is also the important study by Mark Wyman, quoted in this text and dedicated to the phenomenon of return migration from the United States: Wyman, Round-Trip to America.

4 Julianna Puskás went so far as to state that “from the point of view of the emigrants’ original plans, it is not those who returned who needed to be explained, but rather those who settled permanently in America” (Puskás, “Hungarian Overseas Migration,” 227). Also Devoto, Historia de la inmigración, 73, stated that “European migration to the Americas constituted a circular process, not a linear one.” With respect to mobility between the Czech Lands to America, the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute in October 1930 reported that “yearly roughly same number of people return [from South America] as leaves for [South America]” (Documentation in the National Archive of the Czech Republic (hereafter quoted as NA), fonds ČÚZ, box 33.

5 On the relative lack of interest among historians and the lack of evidence (a consequence of the fact that the people who returned, in an effort to hide their “failure,” did not draw attention to their stays in or returns from America), see Moltmenn, “American-German Return Migration.” See also Dickens, American Notes, originally published in 1842, then in many reeditions.

6 Borges, Chains of Gold, 9. The case studies of Norwegians in the aforementioned volume Expectations Unfulfilled show similar patterns.

7 The phrase used by Chaney, “The World Economy,” 204, with reference to present-day transmigrants.

8 Morawska, “Disciplinary Agendas,” 611.

9 The phrase “multiplicity of homes” is used in the volume of Al-Ali and Koser, New Approaches to Migration?, dealing, however, with recent migrations.

10 Steidl et al., “Relations among Internal,” 63.

11 The Czech Lands or the Lands of the Bohemian Crown are the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, historically ruled by the kings of Bohemia and since 1526 incorporated into the Habsburg Monarchy. In 1918, they became, together with Slovakia and Ruthenia, parts of the new Czechoslovak Republic. See Pánek, Tůma et al., A History of the Czech Lands. While the phrase “Czech Lands” was not used after 1918, I am sticking to this denomination, instead of “Czechoslovakia,” as the present article does not take into account migrants from Slovakia either before or after 1918. At the same time, I will refer in the article to “Czechs”, indicating their provenance from the Czech Lands, rather than “Czechs, Moravians and Silesians”, referring to the three separate regions of which the Czech Lands are composed.

12 On both of these consequences in local milieus, positive as well as negative, in the 1920s and 1930s there is ample documentation in NA, fonds ČÚZ, boxes 30, 33 and 39.

13 The interest among Czechoslovak historians in migration studies was provoked by the limitations on the use and study of archival sources abroad after 1948. The study of materials on European and world history in the national archives was a sort of alternative or solution to this limitation. (See Křížová, “Iberoamerikanische Studien”. On the history of outmigration from the Czech Lands to Latin America, see the volumes from a series of conferences organized by the Centre of Ibero-American Studies: Opatrný, Emigración centroeuropea a América Latina I–IV. There are other valuable collective volumes and monographs, such as Prutsch, Das Geschäft mit der Hoffnung.

14 This was not in any way exceptional. For instance, several studies included in the collective monograph concerning the Norwegian migrants to Latin America indicate patterns of social and economic behavior similar to those prevailing among the labor migrants from the Czech Lands in the same area: Saether, Expectations Unfulfilled.

15 Zdeněk Fafl, an employee of the Trade and Commercial Chamber in Prague who in 1910 took an inspection journey through Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile stated that “many Czechs in Brazil pass as Germans and many as Poles” (Perutka, “Jižní Amerika,” 1069).

16 The institute was established in 1928 as a state-supported but independent organization the aim of which was to maintain contacts with expatriate communities and individuals of Czechoslovak origin living abroad. The documentation, which often reaches back to the pre-1918 period, at present is held in the National Archive of the Czech Republic. See Brouček, Krajané a domov.

17 Puskás, “Hungarian Overseas Migration,” passim, and also Yans-McLaughlin, “Metaphors of Self in History.” The value of the family photographs as a source for the study of overseas mobility and the fabrication/maintenance of individual, family and group identities was discussed in an excellent article by Da Orden, “Fotografía e identidad familiar.”

18 I took inspiration from the highly regarded monograph by Fernando Devoto, who also sought to combine analytical and narrative, micro- and macrohistorical approaches (Devoto, Historia de la inmigración, 12).

19 Brouček and Grulich, Domácí postoje k zahraničním Čechům, 10.

20 The problematic distinction between permanent and temporary migrants was dealt with by Bovenkerk, The Sociology of Return Migration, 10–13. And, as shown by Fernando Devoto, even arriving at a simple definition of the “migrant” is problematic, much as it is problematic to distinguish this type of newcomer from “foreigners,” “travelers,” and “passengers” (Devoto, Historia de la inmigración, 20–42).

21 See the migration typology of Bade, Emigration in European History, x–xi.

22 Migration to America as “labor strategy” is analyzed by Borges, Chains of Gold.

23 Jetmar, “Hrst úvah o Argentině a české inmigraci,” 9–10.

24 On mortgages and loans, sometimes excessive and burdensome, taken out by those opting for sojourns in America see the report of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, October 1, 1930 (NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33).

25 Lukešík was later interviewed by mail by the members of the Czech Foreign Institute, (NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33. Lamentably, the documentation is neither properly catalogued nor paginated.) Josef Grygar, a miner from Ostrava, went to Argentina in 1906, apparently under the influence of Ferdinand Missler, the dominant agent for the traffic to Argentina from the Czech Lands. Later, he denounced Missler’s characterization of the opportunities that awaited him as deceptive propaganda. “Missler […] lures so many people to work, and there is no work for these thousands. And the ships are bringing more and more. […] Some people have been here for a long time and would like to go home to their families.” Grygar himself never saved enough to return home to his wife and son. (His letters were edited by his grandson: Grygar, “Osudy rozdělené oceánem,” 334. On Missler, see Opatrný, “Propaganda y contrapropaganda.”)

26 On these “birds of passage,” see Vázquez-Presedo, “The Role of Italian Migration.”

27 In his groundbreaking 1960 essay, Frank Thistlethweite argued for the interdependence of transatlantic and other migrational activities and the need to consider them as a complete whole (Thistlethweite, “Migration from Europe Overseas”). For later elaborations, see Steidl et al, European Mobility; for a complex depiction of migrations within Europe, see Moch, Moving Europeans.

28 Blau, Böhmerwälder Hausindustrie und Volkskunst, 193, mentions these “bricklayer-maids” (Maurermädchen). On Czechs in Vienna, see Steidl, Auf nach Wien! Similar patterns existed in other parts of Europe. See Borges, Chains of Gold and Holmes, Cultural Disenchantments.

29 The results of the survey were published in Mitteilungen des Statistischen Landesamtes. Hermann Zeitlhofer compared seasonal mobility from the Czech Lands and Friuli, “Zwei Zentren temporärer kontinentaler Arbeitsmigration;” on the whole phenomenon of seasonal migration from the Czech Lands see Zeitlhofer, “Bohemian Migrants.” The outpouring of inhabitants from these regions was noted by contemporaries: Korčák, Vylidňování jižních Čech.

30 Kořalka and Hoffmann, Tschechen im Rheinland und in Westfalen.

31 Again, I made use of a term used for the analyses of present-day migrations, in this case by Elrick, “The Influence of Migration,” 504–05.

32 The importance of the stage model of migration opening the way overseas is noted by Baines, “European Labor Markets,” 46–47.

33 One such case is mentioned by Dubovický, “Krajanská kolonie Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña,” 149.

34 Ibid., 142.

35 In the fonds of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute in the National Archives two notebooks are preserved with the title “Deník. Cesta do Jižní Ameriky, 1930” [Journey to South America, 1930]. Under the entry on March 18, 1930, the anonymous author resumed the interviews with fellow passengers. “Two Moravians. Both have families. Don’t plan to stay in Argentina, they want to earn money and return. One of them has built a house and another has bought one. So, they need money. How and where they don’t know and don’t care much. ‘We will see.’”

36 The bricklayer Vincenc Mlček offers the following recollection: “All of us wanted to earn some money to found a family and come back in two or three years. But the reality was different.” Mlček himself spent 25 years in Argentina, returning to the mother country only in 1946. His memoirs, written after his return to Czechoslovakia in 1945, were edited by his son: Mlček, Vzpomínky na Argentinu, 139.

37 For a detailed discussion of the problem of unqualified migrants, see Hyža, Zpráva o cestě do Jižní Ameriky, 1927, NA, fonds ČÚZ, box. 33, f. 48. Hyža was sent by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Social Welfare to gather information about the potentials of successful emigration and also to propagate Czechoslovak exports. In his report, he conveyed the warnings of fellow countrymen in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil against coming as a dayworker given the “competition from Italians, Spaniards, and Southern Slavs.” He argued instead for the transfer of specialists in fields such as smiths, lathe operators, locksmiths, and foundrymen (f. 48), all professions in great demand in the rapidly expanding states of South America. A similar statement is found in Kresta, Stát São Paulo, 86. Again, the author names the sought-after professions: “locksmiths, electronic technicians, smiths, carpenters, bricklayers,” etc.

38 For example, Brazilian printers and newspaper publishers sought lithographers and were willing to pay for their transport, see the article “Čeští litografové v São Paulo,” 7.

39 Křížová, Za velkou louži, passim.

40 Hyža, Zpráva o cestě, NA, fonds ČÚZ, box. 33, f. 57.

41 Čech-Vyšata, Patnáct let v Jižní Americe, 56. There were oil fields in Austrian Galicia, where many of these miners got their first experiences in this industry (see Frank, Oil Empire). The standing of the Czech and Moravian laborers in the Argentinian oil fields was similar to that of the Norwegians described by Bjerg, “Male Narratives from the Margins of the Country”: fatigue, long working days, anxiety, frugality, social isolation, scarcity, and untidiness.

42 Letter of Václav Čermák, September 25, 1932, sent to the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, NA, fond ČÚZ, box 33.

43 Vaníček, Republiky řeky La Platy, 138. On the export of machinery for beer brewing from the Czech Lands see Novotný and Šouša, “La malta de Bohemia en América Latina.”

44 Perutz, “O hospodářském významu Argentiny,” 691.

45 On migration from Croatia to Chile, see de Kuzmicic, Inmigrantes croatas a través del siglo XX; Pajovic, “La emigración yugoslava a América Latina.”

46 The life story of Mikš has become part of local historical memory. See the interview with Mikš’s grandson Jan Mikš on the webpage of the brewery in Rychnov.

47 Information of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, May 1, 1930, NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33.

48 However, in his report Hyža warned young women interested in such occupations that work conditions were burdensome, with no protections whatsoever against the caprices of employers and immediate dismissals from service and no form of social insurance. (Zpráva o cestě, NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33; the same stated the information concerning the employment of Czechoslovak maids, sent by the ambassador in Buenos Aires to the Czechoslovak Foreign institute, August 28, 1937, NA, fond ČÚZ, box 33).

49 Memoirs of one of the governesses: Čvančarová, Na tvrdém úhoru. There were similar trends among other ethnic groups: see, for example, Frid de Silberstein, “Immigrants and Female Work in Argentina,” 195–217.

50 Kodýtková, 21 let v Argentině, 11. In 1887, the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Exterior warned unaccompanied young women not to travel to South America ( Agstner, Von Kaisern, Konsuln und Kaufleuten, 112).

51 Report from the Czechoslovak Embassy in Buenos Aires to the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, March 10, 1930, NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33; see also Vyhnanovský, Cestovní pasy a vystěhovalectví, 230.

52 According to Čech-Vyšata, who spent only one night in the “Hotel de Inmigrantes” in the port of Buenos Aires, the food was disgusting; also, about eighty men were lodged in one room, and “instead of sleeping, until the break of day we were busy hunting various kinds of vermin” (Čech-Vyšata, Patnáct let v Jižní Americe, vol. 1, 22).

53 Brouček and Grulich, Domácí postoje k zahraničním Čechům, 17.

54 Jetmar, “Hrst úvah,” 11.

55 Solberg, Oil and Nationalism in Argentina, 39, stated that of a total of 1,700 workers and supervisors in Comodoro Rivadavia in 1919, only 3 percent were Argentinian citizens; many of the foreigners did not speak Spanish. (There is a table stating the percentages of various nationalities; however, the Czechs disappear in the mass of “Austrians.”) On the general context, see Kaplan, “La primera fase de la política petrolera,” 775–810.

56 Bielik, “Zo života Slovákov a Čechov v Patagonii, ” 150.

57 Report by the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, November 1, 1929, NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33.

58 Jetmar, “Hrst úvah,” 55. Three decades after Jetmar’s note, a report of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute of March 15, 1931 warned that “intellectuals have no prospects whatsoever in Argentina” (NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33).

59 Hamáček, “Brazílie,” 58. More than twenty years later, the report by Hyža mentioned the absence of any reciprocal treaty between Czechoslovakia and Argentina that would enable the paying out of insurance for a worker who was gravely injured at work to his relatives in Czechoslovakia (Zpráva o cestě, NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33, f. 123). The Czechoslovak Foreign Institute also warned repeatedly that “there is no organized social service in Brazil, nor are there labor unions which would strive for the improvement of workers’ organizations” (NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 35).

60 This was the case of Antonín Neugebauer, who left for Brazil in 1886 and then moved to Montevideo. Between 1887 and 1889, he lived and worked in Buenos Aires, where he helped organize the German-speaking workers with the intention of founding of one of the first laborers’ associations in the country, Vorwärts (Forward). He returned home in 1889. See Klíma, “Antonio Neugebauer.”

61 Urban to the Czehoslovak Foreign Institute, January 25, 1934, in NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33. A report of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute of May 1, 1930 noted that there is only a slight minority of Czechoslovak migrants to South America who have “at least some command of Spanish. Language skills are limited to German for Czechs and Hungarian for Slovaks” (NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33). In 1905, Jan Jetmar recommended to those traveling to Argentina to learn Spanish beforehand, but stated that it was possible to find one’s way around using German (Jetmar, “Hrst úvah,” 55).

62 Ibid., 14–15, commenting specifically on the case of Argentina.

63 Jan Jetmar, quoted above, at the beginning of the twentieth century stated on Argentina: “The wages are good, or measured against ours excellent, […] but it is necessary to consider also the increase in the price of all life necessities” (Ibid., 15).

64 Matěj Poláček bought a house for his daughter and partly financed the purchase of a house for his grandson, while rebuilding his own, “all by honest and dutiful work.” (The commentary on Poláček’s financial situation, written by his daughter at the end of his memoir after his death, was not included in the edition at the request of the family members. Thus it remains only in the manuscript version.) Also, the letters that were to be delivered via the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute to South America (and apparently never were, as the originals remained in the archive) include mentions of land purchases with the “American” money (NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33).

65 Smutná and Smutný, Keď som sa já z mojho kraja do Ameriky zberal, 15. This edition of approximately twenty folk songs from southern Moravia dealing specifically with short-term work mobility was edited recently, but composed mostly at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and collected around the 1950s by local amateur ethnographers who lamentably did not include much information concerning the sources of the published texts. Puskás noted in the case of Hungary that “there is hardly a story, hardly a local legend of America that’s does not make reference to the dollars sent home” (Puskás, “Hungarian Overseas Migration,” 396).

66 Author’s interview with descendants of Matěj Poláček, recorded on April 20, 2017.

67 Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 189.

68 A case study from Slovakia by Bielik, “Slovak Images of the New World,” proves the impact of letters from America on the expectations of prospective migrants. Analyses of correspondence have contributed in an important way to our understanding of motivations and the initial images the migrants had of the New World, as well as their later changes of opinion: among others, Da Orden, Una familia y un océano; Eduardo Ciafardo, “Cadenas migratorias e inmigración italiana.”

69 For example, Župan, Pepánek nezdara, vol. 1, 126–28. For an overview of these folkloric traditions, see Pavlicová and Uhlíková, “Vystěhovalectví do Ameriky.”

70 Čech-Vyšata, Patnáct let v Jižní Americe, 5–8.

71 Lewitt, The Transnational Villagers.

72 On the importance of chain networks in the emergence of permanent and temporary expatriate communities in the New World see Krebber, “Creed, Class, and Skills.”

73 On the similar situation in Hungary, see Puskás, “Consequences of Overseas,” 394.

74 Smutná and Smutný, Keď som sa já z mojho kraja, 21.

75 Public lecture of Rostislav Kocourek, employee of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, “Rodiny vystěhovalectvím rozdělené,” for the “Workers’ Radio,” February 3, 1931, transcript in NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 33.

76 Vyhnanovský, Cestovní pasy a vystěhovalectví, 305.

77 Puskás, “Consequences of Overseas Migration,” 398–400.

78 Letter of December 23, 1929, written by a woman, but only identified by the postal address “Cyril B., Březce u Olomouce,” NA, fonds ČÚZ, box 30.

79 Poláček, Za velkou louži, 123–27, on the purchase (and subsequent sale) of the property in Argentina; passim for the frequent praise of “our dear, beautiful Czech land.”

2018_2_Hirschhausen

pdfVolume 7 Issue 2 CONTENTS

International Architecture as a Tool of National Emancipation: Nguyen Cao Luyen in French Colonial Hanoi, 1920–1940*

Ulrike von Hirschhausen
University of Rostock
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* This paper is the revised form of a lecture given at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest on April 5, 2017, as part of its lecture series “Current Approaches to Global History.” Many thanks go to Dr. Judit Klement and Dr. Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics, who stimulated thoughts about globalizing cities and also made my stay in Budapest at the time of the demonstrations in support of the Central European University a wonderful experience of collegial friendship. I am also deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewer from the Hungarian Historical Review for his or her critical reading and very helpful ideas.

This paper takes the city of Hanoi as an example in order to explore the potential of global history with regard to the urban context. It argues that the specific conditions of French urban planning made international architecture, not indigenous traditions, a tool of national emancipation in the 1930s and 1940s. The colonial administration of France in Indochina became increasingly concerned with integrating vernacular elements in its colonial architecture in order to visualize a policy of assimilation. This “Indochinese Style” was clearly seen as part of an imperial repertoire of power to which Vietnamese architects were opposed. Most of them, as the professional biography of Nguyen Cao Luyen illustrates, therefore considered contemporary architecture, as the International Style, to be an appropriate tool to reengineer a colonized society in the direction of national emancipation. When the French assigned a large area in southern Hanoi exclusively to the Vietnamese, this “New Indigenous Quarter” turned into a laboratory of international architecture that the emerging Vietnamese middle-class regarded as a means of practicing global modernity. Only the interconnectivity of the local, the imperial and the global realm helps us to better understand why at the local level internationalism appeared in Hanoi to be the appropriate tool for designing a national future.

Keywords: colonialism; Hanoi; architecture; international style; urban planning; empire.

Introduction

French colonialism in Hanoi was particularly concerned with urban planning. In 1900, the city, located in the north of Vietnam, became the capital of France’s newly conquered territories in Southeast Asia, termed French Indochina and roughly including the present-day areas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. A French presence needed to be created visually in order to assert political domination over the territory against indigenous revolts as much as to demonstrate reformist attitudes towards the Vietnamese in a field considered a less overtly disciplinary form of colonial rule. The bulk of current research on Hanoi’s built environment has followed well-known assumptions of colonial rule as an effective power, which reconstructed the inner city as a French capital, neglected traditional housing of the Vietnamese and enforced ethnic separation between the Vietnamese and the European—primarily French—population.1 This, however, seems to partially reflect long-standing and unquestioned ideas of empire-building as a process planned in Western metropoles, forcefully implemented by colonial élites and resulting in a rather static geography of power between the colonizers and the colonized. The critical New Imperial History that is currently emerging questions this notion by focusing on the ambivalent and changing mutual relationship between the colonizers and the colonized in order to open a new understanding of both their diverse agencies in “making and unmaking” empire. This way, the historic entanglement of peripheries and centers, which historiography has often treated in isolation, also becomes visible. Attributing greater weight also to indigenous actors who were bridging these spaces sharpens our sensitivity to the outcome of the colonial encounter as an interactive phenomenon without neglecting the unequal distribution of power upon which it is based.2

Cities have not constituted a major field in which historians have tested such premises, whereas social scientists are particularly concerned with the emergence and governance of global cities today.3 This article takes the built environment of the colonial capital of Hanoi as an exemplary field in which imperial, colonial and national actors used architecture as a strategy to initiate and enforce their frequently contradicting and sometimes overlapping visions of political power, economic hierarchy and cultural identity.4 The Vietnamese Nguyen Cao Luyen (1907–1987) exemplifies a group of indigenous architects. By tracing his imperial biography in the 1930s and 1940s, the activities of these men who were eager to realize their visions of Hanoi’s urban design and city planning in the face of colonial hierarchy and ethnic segregation will be explored. I argue that the specific condition of French urban planning made international architecture, not vernacular traditions, a tool of national emancipation. This thesis builds on two points. First, France’s colonial administration became increasingly concerned with integrating regional and local traditions and elements in its colonial architecture in order to visualize a policy of assimilation. An “Indochinese style” emerging from these efforts was clearly marked as part of an imperial repertoire of power that indigenous architects opposed. Second, some of these architects, including Nguyen Cao Luyen, therefore considered the International Style that had reached its heyday in Paris, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago and Tokyo during the late 1920s and 1930s to be the appropriate tool to reengineer a colonized society. Rather than a reinvention of indigenous traditions, adapting to and reinterpreting global modernity would strengthen their program of national emancipation and future autonomy. Practicing global modernity as a prerequisite for these aims for them meant selecting and converting principles of contemporary avant-garde architecture and adapting them to the local context of Hanoi. A sufficient explanation for these policies, which they considered to be anti-colonial, needs to take three dimensions into account: the colonial environment of Hanoi as well as the metropolitan influences of Paris that Nguyen Cao Luyen had experienced as an intern with Le Corbusier as much as the global trends of the International Style that in the mid-1930s were practiced selectively on a worldwide scale. The interconnectivity of these realms—the local, imperial and global—helps us to better understand why at the local level of Hanoi, internationalism appeared to be the appropriate tool for designing a national future.

An “Indochinese Style” as a Repertoire of Power

City planning and urban architecture became an object of change after World War I. Various factors were responsible for shifting attitudes of both the French colonial administrators and Vietnamese élites in Indochina. In Paris, debates over colonialism had taken on a new tone in the French parliament. Politicians demanded visible attention to the needs of the colonized and started to replace the former leitmotif of “assimilation” with the term “association” as a means of managing ethnic diversity in the colony. Concealing the hard fact that the unequal distribution of political power and military force had remained intact, they advocated a softer policy of taking ethnic identity, indigenous traditions and geographic factors into account in order win greater support from the indigenous population.5 This seemed even more necessary in the face of ongoing revolts against French colonial rule after World War I, in which more than 100,000 Vietnamese had served without gaining more participation at home.

These new politics of “association” were increasingly intertwined with urban design in Hanoi. An influential colonial actor eager to translate the political strategy into local architecture was Ernest Hébrard (1875–1933), who arrived in Hanoi in 1921 to head the new Town Planning and Architecture Service.6 Hébrard had worked in Thessalonica and Athens, where he had realized plans to protect the historic districts and developed futurist “world city” projects. Although a well-trained Beaux-Arts architect by education, Hébrard took a keen interest in developing new forms of regional architecture that the colonial government was in turn eager to use for political purposes. During his years in Hanoi, Hébrard implemented civic buildings combining indigenous traditions with modern techniques of construction and material that were at the same time adapted to the climatic conditions of Hanoi. The “Indochinese style” became particularly evident in his Colonial Ministry of Finance built in 1927, which today serves at the home of the Foreign Ministry of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Comparable to colonial approaches in Cambodia, Tunisia or Morocco, this regional architecture, often an eclectic mix of diverse cultures within and beyond the colonial borders, remained a product of the French. Only French architectural theorists seemed to Hébrard capable of discerning and building upon the true character of Vietnamese culture and, correspondingly, only French architects were commissioned to implement their vision of the Vietnamese vernacular in the center of Hanoi.

 

 

 

Fig. 1. Ministry of Finance (1927), designed by Ernest Hébrard7

 

Integrating indigenous traditions in this colonial architecture went hand in hand with segregating the urban population according to race. Hébrard, as most city planners of his time, advocated racial segregation as a necessary constituent of colonial urbanism. The reasons for such segregation, which almost all colonial city planners endorsed, were related to hygiene, security, surveillance and racism.8 In an article “L’urbanism en Indochine,” published in 1928, Hébrard argued in favor of an ethnic topography of the city while realizing that mutual interest often eroded this colonial zeal:

 

La ville est divisé en: quartier de commerce genre européen et indigène; quartier d’habitations, européen et indigène; quartier des garages, quartier des chantiers, ateliers, petites industries et usines. Il est souvent de quartiers européens et de quartier indigènes, et certains pourraient croire à une spécialisation absolue et penser que des zones devraient être rigoureusement traces pour éviter tout contact pouvant devenir dangereux. En Indochine, les groupements sont distincts, mais si très rarement les Européens habitant les centres indigènes, par contre des Indigènes aisés vivent souvent dans les centres européens.9

 

Constantly comparing the French methods of controlling colonial societies with those of the British and the Dutch, Hébrard advocated the expansion of land-use zoning in order to enforce strict racial and environmental controls, which, however, were never officially implemented in Hanoi.

In 1926, Hébrard founded a new Architectural Section at the École Beaux Arts d’Indochine at which he hoped to further develop a modern regional architecture as a stabilizing factor underpinning the French régime. The more practical purpose of the colonial administration behind Hébrard was to recruit the much-needed draftsmen, subordinates and technical assistants for the French governmental architectural service. The five-year curriculum of the Architectural Section combined study of Vietnamese traditions with that of Western architectural theories and practices. It became supplemented through surveying and sketching civic buildings of the French, both those in the Beaux-Arts tradition and those in the new “Indochinese style,” such as Hébrard’s Ministry of Finance as well as Vietnamese temples, pagodas and ordinary houses.

Unintended by Hébrard—and even less by the colonial government—the new school spread ideas rather contrary to its original task. The concepts of European and American avant-garde architects increasingly swept into classrooms and lectures and created new models that extended far beyond the Beaux-Arts tradition, Art Deco or French ideas of an “Indochinese style.” The key reason for this unintended outcome was that the interwar-war period, during which around 50 Vietnamese students graduated from the new school, was one of the most stimulating moments in the history of twentieth-century architecture and urban-planning theory. In Dessau, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe developed ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of arts”) unifying art, crafts and technology at the German Bauhaus. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright created buildings emphasizing simplicity and an organic adaption of the environment in contrast to the ornate architecture prevailing in Europe.10 Most influential for the Vietnamese students at Hanoi’s Section was probably Le Corbusier’s activity as a theorist and architect in Paris. Le Corbusier proclaimed a new aesthetic devoid of any traditional references, oriented toward function and driven by technological development. Although Le Corbusier’s manifesto Vers une architecture, published in 1923, was not part of the curricula, the likelihood that the young French teachers whom Hébrard hired from France circulated and discussed this manifesto with their Vietnamese students is very high.11 Moreover, the publications of the Congrès International d’Architecture (CIAM) radiated worldwide and found repercussions in the colonies.12 In 1932, a year before one of the school’s graduates, Ngyuen Cao Luyen, left for Paris to work as an intern with Le Corbusier, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition of “modern architecture.” The show was accompanied by a book entitled The International Style with which Nguyen and his fellow students, as later articles regarding him verify, were fully familiar.

 

Fig. 2. Lecturers and students, among them Nguyen Cao Luyen, from the École des Beaux Arts, Hanoi, in the 1930s13

 

These global trends of how to express modernity in urban architecture increasingly became a topic in the classrooms of Hanoi’s Architectural Section. Here they overlapped and mixed with Vietnamese interpretations of modernity fostered by the activities of teachers like Victor Tardieu. Tardieu was a progressive architect from Paris who had been a key promoter of an Architectural Section at the École Beaux Arts d’Indochine since the early 1920s. When the school finally opened, he taught students who studied there to strive in their work for the same standard as in the metropole (“égaler la qualité métropolitaine”), thereby undermining Hébrard’s demarcation of cultural difference between center and periphery as well as the administration’s interest in maintaining a social hierarchy within Indochina’s colonial society.14

Taken together, the French colonial government founded the Architectural Section at Hanoi’s École Beaux Arts with the primary purpose of creating and promoting a new modern “Indochinese Style” that would serve as a tool of imperial rule and produce subordinates and technical assistants for governmental service. Deviating from these expectations, the school turned into an institution at which both French and Vietnamese discussed radical concepts of modern architecture and their capability to reengineer human societies. This was to have unintended consequences for Hanoi’s colonial society and urban built environment in the 1930s.

Nguyen Cao Luyen between Hanoi and Paris in the 1920s–1940s

Nguyen Cao Luyen, one of the 50 Vietnamese graduates of the Architectural Section at the École Beaux Arts d’Indochine, participated actively in all these discussions.15 Coming from an educated middle-class background, Luyen had early on engaged himself in informal Vietnamese associations that promoted ideas of affordable housing production and fostered an endogenous architectural work beyond mere transfer. Immediately following his graduation in 1933, the 26-year-old Luyen departed for Paris to work as an intern with August Perret and Le Corbusier. This stay in the imperial capital had a formative influence on his biography, both as an architect and as a political activist.

In Paris, Luyen was able to approach two leading representatives of modern architecture, one conservative and one radically progressive. Luyen spent the majority of his internship working at the office of August Perret (1874–1954). In the 1930s, Perret was one of the most acclaimed and booked architects of both the French bourgeoisie and the government and was responsible for the design of many civic buildings. Perret argued that contemporary architecture must represent metaphysical principles of construction, thereby legitimizing a return to classical forms while using modern materials, above all reinforced concrete.16 The success of Perret’s neoclassical architecture certainly had an influence on Luyen as some of his later Art Deco designs suggest. Luyen’s own work in Hanoi, however, points rather to the lasting influence of Le Corbusier (1878–1965) who, in stark contrast to Perret, used sociological arguments as the emergence of a new mass culture and urbanization to legitimize his architecture and its potential to standardize. The English, French and German sources used for this article do not indicate how long Nguyen Cao Luyen worked as an intern at Le Corbusier’s atelier, but new research on the latter’s co-workers sheds light on Le Corbusier’s recruitment pattern.17 In the early 1930s, despite his increasing global reputation, Le Corbusier was constantly in depth, had no state commissions at all, quarreled constantly with his clients and paid almost no salary to his interns and fellow architects. Nonetheless his pioneering role in the new “international” architecture attracted a wealth of young, ambitious architects from Europe, Latin America, Japan and India, mostly of middle-class background, who were eager to work in his atelier at the Rue de Sèvres even without salary. Ngyuen Cao Luyen’s background from a Vietnamese middle-class family certainly contributed to making an unpaid internship with Le Corbusier possible.

The key aspects of Le Corbusier’s programmatic architecture, which engaged Luyen and many other young architects at the time, were emphasis on the geometric line as a regulating principle, a complete independence from historical context, the necessary combination of technology and architecture, the primacy of function and the use of new material such as steel, glass or concrete, among others.18 The “International Style,” a synthesis of design concepts from many primarily French, German and American architects, shared many of these claims and became a global export good that was particularly visible through the joint work of these architects within the International Congress of Architecture (CIAM). It was further promoted by Le Corbusier’s extensive publications of his own oeuvre, which he marketed on a worldwide scale. The time Nguygen Cao Luyen spent at Le Corbusier’s office on Rue de Sèvres, which was full of young architects from all over the world, had similar repercussions. The few texts we have from Luyen after he left Paris in 1933 indicate his preference to contribute actively to the “International Style” that he had studied in Hanoi on a theoretical basis and with which he became acquainted on a practical basis in Paris. In an article for the journal La Patrie annamite in 1937, co-authored with others, Luyen reflected on their formative experiences and the future tasks of the Architectural Section at the École Beaux Arts d’Indochine, arguing that “certain étudiant architectes affirment que le point de vue primordial de l’École est des former des artistes indochinois. Mais les étudiants ont plus d’ambition, ont-ils ajouté, c’est de posséder l’esprit d’artiste . . . c’est de pouvoir se comparer aux artistes étrangers.”19

The French capital in these very years was a laboratory for modern architecture that provided Nguyen Cao Luyen with a wealth of professional stimulation regarding how to translate “international modernism” into his own work as an architect working in Hanoi. At the same time, the imperial metropolis attracted migrants and exiles from various colonies of the French empire and beyond, many of whom became politicized during their stay in the imperial center.20 It is this second, social and political dimension of Paris as a “hotbed of anti-imperialism” that helps to further explain the later activity of Ngyuen Cao Luyen in Hanoi both as an architect and as a political activist.

When Luyen arrived in Paris in early 1933, he came to a metropole that was bursting with “men without a country.”21 The huge number of colonial subjects recruited by the French army to fight in World War I was a key reason for their unintended presence in Europe following the war. Moreover, labor demands in the metropole attracted growing numbers of North Africans and West Africans over the subsequent years. The permissive political climate of Paris differed starkly from the colonial situation back home with its strict censorship, violent restriction of public opposition and discriminatory practices in places such as Algeria, West Africa and Indochina. This added to the attraction of the metropole particularly for educated and politicized colonial subjects who were often deported to the center by the colonial governments.22

The anti-colonialist outlook, which in many cases had already been a reason for the frequently forced departure of the migrants from the colonies, intensified through mutual exchange and communication. A letter written by a Vietnamese student in 1927 documents the importance of mutual contacts and learning for the formation of an anti-imperial perspective among Vietnamese: “Since my departure from home, I have come to think much about the situation of my country. [. . .] There is now in France a small number of Vietnamese who constitute a part of the country and who, benefiting from the situation here, have undertaken its defense. I believe it is my duty to take part in that defense.”23

The idea that learning from the West in political, cultural and economic terms and applying these ideas and concepts to the modernization and political independence of their own nations was a recurrent theme in all anti-colonial discourses worldwide. However, the close mutual contacts within the narrow space of the Quartier Latin, where most of the Vietnamese students lived, intensified these perspectives because each migrant was now able to compare his individual experience of colonialism with that of other colonized men. This experience, which Nguyen Cao Luyen also had in Paris, contributed to understanding his situation less as a singular “colonial” fate than as a part of an “imperial” system. Some of the Parisian migrants, such as Ho Chi Minh in the 1920s, drew the conclusion that inter-ethnic solidarity—such as that experienced at the local level in Paris—needed to be translated into a global solidarity of anti-imperialists. Others, such as Nguyen Cao Luyen ten years later, felt encouraged to apply “modernism” as a tool of national emancipation to their professional work at home. The idea of modern architecture being instrumental for social progress was an overarching theme for all protagonists of the International Style and the Bauhaus movement alike. Upon his return to Hanoi, Luyen translated the social agenda of European architects into a national cause seemingly more applicable to the colonial context. Two years after returning to Hanoi from Paris, he co-founded the association Ánh Sáng (“Lumière”) with the aim of coordinating practical measures of intellectuals in Hanoi’s social sector. The society soon embraced a broad spectrum of engineers, journalists, writers, artists, architects and doctors, which numbered around 3,000 members by 1940, who used their respective professional expertise as a means of national emancipation from French rule.24

The Parisian experience, altogether, marked a central moment in Nguyen Cao Luyen’s imperial biography. In professional terms, he acquainted himself with the architectural movement of “International Modernism,” learned how to implement it into reality and started to reinterpret its agenda for the built environment at home. In political terms, the exposure to a city brimming with immigrants from other colonies stimulated new ways of seeing the imperial order and its possible demise. Colonial Hanoi in the 1930s and 1940s became the theater for putting these global inspirations into local practice.

International Architecture in Hanoi’s Indigenous Quarter

Immediately following his return from Paris, Nguyen Cao Luyen, together with a partner, Hoàng Nhu Tiêp, founded Hanoi’s first architectural office that was run completely by Vietnamese. The chances of implementing modern concepts of urban architecture in Hanoi’s center seemed to be dim. The French colonial government invested heavily in public infrastructure and civic buildings, but did not commission indigenous architects with public works. However, the consequences of colonial urbanism, including racial segregation, created an unexpected niche in the residential market that indigenous architects like Luyen used to their own benefit. The development of the “New Indigenous Quarter” in southern Hanoi shows how concepts of international architecture permeated a zone assigned only to the indigenous population.

Since 1900, Hanoi’s French administration had set aside a large area in the southern part of the city to serve as a Vietnamese residential district. Since the inception of the project in 1902, the area was called the “New Indigenous Quarter.”25 Land acquisition implemented in order to privatize and subdivide the land met with ongoing resistance among the poor and migrant population that lived on the periphery of the colonial capital. Therefore, in 1928, only one-third of the entire area accommodated solid houses, while two-thirds of the area served as the site of so-called Paillotes and huts made of light material. The municipal council stopped tolerating this situation the same year, evacuating the poor and offering land to the growing number of wealthier and educated Vietnamese who were interested in leaving the overcrowded merchant city in the center. In accordance with the colonial hierarchy, actual ownership of the new plots would remain with the French, while the Vietnamese could gain access to them only under a lease agreement with the municipality. By the 1930s, the French administration realized that it had to abandon the idea of controlling and delimiting actual ownership in the private real-estate market after realizing that only full private ownership would have the desired effect of populating the Indigenous Quarter with middle-class Vietnamese families. To qualify for purchase, potential future owners had to satisfy considerable financial conditions and needed to be reliable taxpayers and legitimately married. The above conditions restricted the plots of land to members of the emerging Vietnamese middle-class who in turn preferred to commission Vietnamese architects, in particular the graduates of the Hanoi Architectural Section. For a variety of reasons, the consequences of racial segregation as a constituent of colonial rule helped international architecture become a dominant feature of Hanoi’s Indigenous Quarter.

First, the new owners—educated Vietnamese, young traders or second-tier civil servants who often maintained a staunchly national perspective—wanted to have their status and outlook adequately reflected in a modern, contemporary architecture. They clearly associated the “Indochinese Style” that characterized many civic buildings in the center with colonial architecture. Moreover, the outdated eclecticism of this architecture failed to symbolize the social progress they were making, while its association with the French empire was in no way attractive for this bourgeoning, nationally orientated group. Therefore, the “Indochinese Style” was largely rejected by the very Vietnamese whom it was designed to represent.26 Nguyen Cao Luyen characterized the remoteness that he, his fellow-architects and clients alike felt toward any construction of an imagined Vietnamese vernacular: “Il faut assouplir son esprit et allier son art au gout du public. [. . .] Il faut être très libéral, il faut être élastique en art. [. . .] Il faut dégager le caractère primordial de chaque style. L’architecture, ce n’est pas de la théologie.”27

Second, members of the new Vietnamese middle-class who could afford their own house in the Indigenous Quarter instead preferred a style devoid of any imperial association that was shared by urban élites worldwide. This was a key reason for which they embraced contemporary architectural trends such as Art Deco or the brand new International Style, neither of which carried any imperial connotations or conveyed an overly French character. Particularly the International Style that renowned offices such as that of Luyen and Tiép offered their clients was associated with global modernism. To participate in this global movement was also a sign of social progress as a prerequisite of national autonomy. Internationalism as a means of nationalism was a strategy that Nguyen Cao Luyen observed as a growing pattern: “La plupart de nos élèves, une fois sortis de l’École, croient faire oeuvre d’indépendance […] les architectes, bien entendu, avec le moindre effort, construisent des édifices semblables à ceux que l’on construit en Amérique ou en Scandinavie.”28

Third, being relegated to the margins of the colonial capital unexpectedly resulted in a flourishing new market for Vietnamese architects, developers and builders who became largely independent from the city’s colonial administration. The prolific output of Nguyen Cao Luyen’s office shows how indigenous architects used this very situation to their own benefit. Between 1934 and approximately 1945, Luyen, Tiép, Dúc built around 200 villas primarily in the Indigenous Quarter as well as several churches and temples and a variety of shops. They also collaborated closely with the French administration on a number of social housing projects. Their office offered a broad spectrum of styles corresponding to the tastes of their customers, specializing in Art Deco and the International Style. This exemplary villa (see fig. 3), built for a Vietnamese doctor in the late 1930s, used the Art Deco style with barely any reference to indigenous traditions.

Fig. 3. Villa designed by the office of Luyen, Tiép and Dúc, late 1930s29

Fig. 4. “Compartiment,” Luyen Tiép, Dúc, late 1930s, Hanoi30

 

Luyen worked above all on his own interpretation of the International Style, particularly through the “Compartiment,” a new type of townhouse that he built for customers. The key vocabulary of international modernism with its focus on the regulating power of geometric lines, cubic forms and a flat roof, constituting a break with the historical context, is clearly recognizable in this example (see fig. 4), built in Hanoi in the 1930s. Fine horizontal lines as a décor underlined the importance of geometry, inside corridors provided for the functional segregation of rooms and small pillars created shady outdoor places adapting to the local climate while at the same time using one of Le Corbusier’s favorite elements.

Nguyen Cao Luyen developed a reputation through his buildings that soon transcended the racial segregation that existed in architecture and urban planning. In 1940, the French general governor commissioned him to design the new interior architecture of the governors’ palace. In 1945, Luyen joined Ho Chi Minh’s first communist cabinet as a vice minister in the newly created ministry of architecture.

Conclusion

Colonial Hanoi thus became a location at which both French and Vietnamese protagonists used architecture and urban planning as a strategy to enforce their political, economic and cultural agendas. The colonial administration promoted an “Indochinese Style” that attempted to translate indigenous traditions into the colonial architecture as part of the new French politics of “association.” The Architectural Section that the French founded in 1926 at the École Beaux Arts d’Indochine should implement this goal by training indigenous clerks and assistants. Unintentionally, the school turned into an institution at which students discussed global concepts of contemporary architecture that peaked worldwide in the late 1920s and 1930s. Nguyen Cao Luyen, one of the school’s graduates, personally experienced these concepts while working as an intern with Le Corbusier in Paris. The French capital at the same time functioned as a “hotbed of anti-imperialism” fostered through mutual contacts and networks of students, workers and migrants from various French colonies. Colonial Hanoi became the theater for putting these ideas into practice when the colonial policy of racial segregation set aside a vast area in southern Hanoi to meet the residential needs of the Vietnamese middle-class. Instead of adopting the “Indochinese Style,” which Vietnamese owners, developers and architects alike associated with colonial rule, they favored the International Style associated with global modernism and shared by urban élites worldwide. In turn, the “New indigenous Quarter” at the margins of the colonial capital developed into a laboratory of international architecture that the Vietnamese middle-class also saw as a means of national emancipation from the colonial régime.

 

Bibliography

Bain, Alison. Urbanization in a Global Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Ballantyne, Tony. “The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and its Historiography.” The Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 429–52.

Benton, Timothy. Le Corbusiers Pariser Villen aus den Jahren 1920–1930. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1984.

Collins, Peter. Concrete: The Visions of a New Architecture: A Study of August Perret and His Precursors. London: Faber & Faber, 1959.

Cooper, Fred. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Cooper, Nicola. “Urban Planning and Architecture in Colonial Indochina.” French Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2000): 75–99.

Freigang, Christian. Auguste Perret: Die Architekturdebatte und die “Konservative Revolution” in Frankreich 1900–1930. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003.

Goebel, Michael. “‘The Capital of Men without a Country’: Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris.” American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1444–67.

Goebel, Michael. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Hébrard, Ernest. “L’Urbanisme en Indochine.” In L’Urbanisme aux colonies et dans les pays tropicaux, vol. 1, edited by Jean Royer, 278–98. La Charité-sur-Loire: Delayance, 1932.

Herbelin, Caroline. “Des HBM au Viet Nam: La question du logement social en situation colonial.” Mousson 13–14 (2009): 123–46.

Herbelin, Caroline. Architectures du Vietnam colonial: Repenser le métissage. Paris: CTHS-INHA, 2016.

Hirschhausen, Ulrike von. “A New Imperial History? Programm, Potenzial, Perspektiven.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 41, no. 4 (2015): 718–57.

Howe, Stephen. “Introduction: New Imperial Histories.” In The New Imperial Histories Reader, edited by Stephen Howe, 1–20. London: Routledge, 2010.

Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard. Vers une architecture. Paris: Crès, 1923.

Kym, Nguyen Van. “The French Model.” In Hanoi: City of the Rising Dragon, edited by Georges Boudarel and Nguyen Van Ky, 47–73. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Labbé, Daniel, Caroline Herberlin, and Quang-Vinh Dao. “Domesticating the Suburbs: Architectural Production and Exchanges in Hanoi during the Late French Colonial Era.” In Harbin to Hanoi. The Colonial Built Environment in Asia 1840–1940, edited by Laura Victoire and Victor Zatsepine, 251–71. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.

Logan, William S. Hanoi: Biography of a City. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000.

Mazur, Linda. “Nguyen Cao Luyen (1907–1987).” Tap Chí Kîen Trúc [Architecture Magazine of Vietnam Association of Architects] 6 (2015) c.

Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960. London: MIT Press, 2002.

Muscheler, Ursula. Gruppenbild mit Meister – Le Corbusier und seine Mitarbeiter. Berlin: Berenberg, 2014.

Nightingale, Carl H. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Passanti, Francesco. “The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier.“ In Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, edited by Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, 141–56. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Riehl, M. Vers une architecture: Das moderne Bauprogramm des Le Corbusier. Munich: Scaneg, 1992.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York–London–Tokyo. Princeton University Press, 1991.

Vann, Michael G. “Building Colonial Whiteness on the Red River: Race, Power and Urbanism in Paul Doumers’s Hanoi, 1897–1902.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 2 (2007): 277–304.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. Europe and Beyond. Edited by Anthony Alofsin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. Schriften und Bauten. Berlin: Mann, 1997.

Wright, Gwendolyn. “Indochina: The Folly of Grandeur.” In The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, 161–233. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

1 See Wright, “Indochina: The Folly of Grandeur”; Logan, Hanoi; Kym, “The French Model”; Cooper, “Urban Planning and Architecture in Colonial Indochina”; Vann, “Building Colonial Whiteness on the Red River”, 290, ft. 40.

2 See, e.g., Cooper, Colonialism in Question; Howe, “Introduction: New Imperial Histories;” Ballantyne, “The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and its Historiography;” Hirschhausen, “A New Imperial History?“

3 See Sassen, The Global City; Bain, Urbanization in a Global Context.

4 For a prime example of the new approaches moving away from the mutual exclusivity of colonizers and colonized, see Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial. In a similar vein, see the following short article: Labbé, Herberlin and Dao, “Domesticating the Suburbs”.

5 See Logan, Hanoi, 97f.

6 See Herbelin, Architectures, Chapter 2, “Ernest Hébrard et la recherche d´un rationalisme indochinois,” 68–84; Logan, Hanoi, 99–109.

7 For photo, see Logan, Hanoi, 100

8 See also Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities.

9 Hébrard, “L’Urbanism en Indochine,” 284, 285.

10 See Wright, Schriften und Bauten; Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright.

11 See Jeanneret, Vers une architecture; Riehl, Vers une architecture.

12 For information regarding the congress, see Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960.

13 Photo by the Hanoi architect Nguyen Van Ninh printed in Mazur, “Nguyen Cao Luyen, (1907–1987).”

14 See Herbeline, Architectures, 85–98.

15 For Ngyuen Cao Luyen, see Mazur, “Nguyen Cao Luyen, (1907–1987);” Labbé et al., “Domesticating the Suburbs,” 254 ff.; Herbelin, “Des HBM au Viet Nam;” Herbelin, Architectures, Chapter 3.

16 See Collins, Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture; Freigang, August Perret.

17 See Muscheler, Gruppenbild mit Meister.

18 See, for example, Benton, Le Corbusiers Pariser Villen aus den Jahren 1920–1930; Passanti, “The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier.”

19 Quoted in Herbelin, Architectures, 122–23.

20 See this argument in Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis; for the following quote see ibid, 5.

21 Baldwin, “The Capital of the Men without a Country,” 460; quoted in Goebel, “‘The Capital of Men without a Country’”.

22 For the ethnic composition of Paris, see Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis, 23f. In the early 1930s, approximately 13,000 North Africans and West Africans, 7,000 Vietnamese, including 700 students, and 4,000 Chinese lived in the Greater Paris area.

23 Letter by Truong Quan Thuy, February 1927, quoted in Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis, 139f.

24 See Heberlin, Architectures, 124–29.

25 See above all Labbé et al., “Domesticating the Suburbs.”

26 See Herbelin, Architectures, 110: “A côté des colonisé, ce style coûteux,, utilisant des références élaborées, empruntées à la tradition savant, ne connut pas de véritable succès . . . cette architecture incarnait en effet difficilement les aspirations de la classe moyenne et de la bourgeoisie vietnamienne. Celle-ci préfère se tourner vers la moderne plus cosmopolite des oeuvres des architectes vietnamiens de l’EBAI conçues à partir des années 1930.”

27 Dào Quang Vy, “Enquête sur la jeuneusse annamite,” La Patrie annamite 60 (1936); quoted in Herbelin, Architectures, 122.

28 See the footnote above.

29 For photo, see Heberlin, Architectures, 117.

30 For photo, see ibid.

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2018_2_Lemmen

pdf Volume 7 Issue 2 CONTENTS

The Formation of Global Tourism from an East-Central European Perspective

Sarah Lemmen
Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This article traces the formation of tourism to non-European regions from the late nineteenth century to the end of the interwar period with a focus on its East-Central European and specifically its Czech perspective. Tourism to Africa and Asia—considered here to be the culmination of “global tourism” in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century—has been generally regarded as part and parcel of the imperial endeavor: empire shaped both the infrastructure and the practice of overseas tourism. By focusing on Czechs as “non-imperial” tourists to non-European regions, this article traces their travel experience as defined by different coordinates: no imperial identity would determine their behavior abroad, and no reasoning of economic nationalism would favor the visit to certain world regions over others.

Following an overview of the globalization of tourism and its interconnectedness with the imperial project, this article focuses on the specifics of Czech tourism to non-European regions. Some specifics have very practical implications, such as the language skills that generally catered rather to a Central European than a global environment, or the average travel budget that was lower than that of travelers from Germany, Great Britain or the United States. Others suggest a Czech identity that was drafted in contrast to the imperial “other” and outside the colonial dichotomy of “rulers” and “ruled.” While Czech travelers profited from a strongly imperial tourist infrastructure, they often professed a general skepticism toward imperial rule.

Keywords: travel; tourism; globalization; East-Central Europe; Czechoslovakia; empire; Africa; Asia

The “Golden Age of Travel” in East-Central Europe

In 1932, Vladimír Hýl, a young teacher and cultural critic from the Czechoslovak city of Ostrava, displayed an unwavering belief in modernization when he formulated a history of advancing means of transportation that would enhance tourism around the globe:

In modern times, the world is shrinking and [thus] enables everyone to get to know her. Distances are soon to be meaningless. While sailing ships still required up to three months to reach America, [and] the first steamship needed fourteen days, [today] the fastest steamship manages the distance in five days and the airplane in eighty hours!1

From today’s perspective, even the stated flight time seems incredibly high and thus lets us continue this narrative of increasing speed and global density up to the present. Yet, this quote highlights the rapid change of overseas travels starting with the first passenger ocean liner launched in 1838, continuing with the faster and more regular ocean liners from the 1870s onward, and passing on to the first transatlantic passenger flight from southern Germany to New Jersey in 1928—only a short couple of years before Vladimír Hýl described the shrinking of the world in such enthusiastic terms.2

The rapid development of the means of transportation, both in travel time and mode as well as in the regions covered, led to a globalization of tourism that by the late nineteenth century had reached all continents and was soon to be criticized for producing a global “mass tourism” to destinations such as Cairo or Aswan.3 Although in his statement Vladimír Hýl was overly optimistic in his assessment that just about “everyone” could go and see the world, he did catch the zeitgeist of the interwar period as a time when even long-distance travels were slowly opening for a growing middle class. Trips to see the pyramids of Egypt, the exotic bazaars of Tunis and Algiers, the famous Buddha of Kamakura or the Taj Mahal in Agra had come into reach for growing social strata not only in London and Paris, but also in Vienna, Budapest and Prague.

This article traces the formation of tourism to non-European regions from the late nineteenth century to the end of the interwar period with a focus on its East-Central European and specifically its Czech perspectives. There are good reasons for the concentration on this region. The globalization of tourism, as the inherent claim suggests, affected virtually all world regions. But it did not affect all of them in the same way. And while around 1900 it was more likely for a European to embark on a leisure trip to India than for an Indian to explore Europe, it was also more likely for a member of British society to travel overseas than it was for a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy or, during the interwar period, of one of its successor states. Local customs, economic capital and political power played a role in choosing travel destinations, in finding travel accommodations and not least in interpreting and understanding travel experiences. This article will focus on the local appropriation of global processes—or “glocalization”4—when examining Czech tourism to non-European regions in this “golden age of travel” from the late nineteenth century and throughout the interwar period.5 By doing so, it will challenge some general assumptions on the relation between tourism and imperialism.

Tourism to Africa and Asia—as will be considered here the culmination of “global tourism” for the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century—has been generally regarded as part and parcel of the imperial endeavor. Research on the entanglement of tourism and empire has strongly argued the case that overseas tourism evolved in the wake of imperial outreach, while at the same time reinforcing imperial power.6 The building of infrastructure—railroads, shipping lines—in regions of imperial influence helped create efficient and safe tourism in locations that had been difficult to reach, while tourist infrastructure and its main protagonists —Thomas Cook & Son and others—became central financial and political players overseas, reinforcing imperial interests.7

At the same time, the entanglement of tourism and empire was also reflected in the practice of tourism. Focusing on tourists mainly from Great Britain—not only as the country with the largest overseas empire at the time, but also as the “inventor of tourism”—and from other empires, numerous studies show that these “imperial tourists” were coined by the imperial experience while at the same time they were given a vital role in (direct and indirect) empire building.8 For one, “empire tourism”—e.g. visiting destinations inside the empire—was the common way of traveling, both because imperial tourists may have had stronger ties to these places, but also because imperial tourism was strongly promoted for both economic reasons and in support of imperial identity. Touring the Empire therefore was denoted for British travelers as “buy British, see British, travel British, parade British,” and was part of enforcing imperial power and maintaining the existing world order.9 Travel destinations, choices of travel mode, and behavior on location were affected by an imperial identity and controlled by an imperial network. Looking at it from a reverse angle, travel experience was also tainted by the imperial: while imperial tourism offered a glimpse of the exotic, it was also embedded in a familiar context, as British currency and foods, customs and social routines were “available to British tourists across the Empire, especially in port cities and colonial capitals.”10

To be sure, “imperial tourism” was not the only option for British travelers, although certainly the most frequent one.11 Research has suggested, however, that imperial identity was generally not shed outside the empires, and that the choices and actions of the travelers were indeed imperially informed: independent of their travel destination or motive, it has been suggested, British travelers shared a British imperial mindset, which with “its triumphant rhetoric, [. . .] and colonialist vision [. . .] contributed to ways of seeing the world.”12 Imperial identity, then, coined travel experience and world views both inside and outside the empire.

This concept of “empire tourism” and imperial identity, as historian Gordon Pirie points out, was surely not a purely British phenomenon, but (however in lesser scope and degree) also valid in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.13 In contrast, Czech tourists—as well as those from Hungary, Poland and Austria among others—could not rely on imperial networks and infrastructure overseas or seek the familiar in the exotic.14 This is not to say that Czech—and other non-imperial—travelers were neutral bystanders: they took advantage of the imperial infrastructure and thus, inadvertently, also took part in the European imperial project. They, as much as any other tourist, were part of this form of “un-invited visiting,” of “creating inequality between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests.’”15 For the local populations, therefore, there might not have been a great difference between a Czech and a British traveler, as European travelers generally and inadvertently supported the existing imperial order.16

At the same time, however, the experience of non-imperial tourists was embedded in and defined by different coordinates: no imperial identity would coin their behavior abroad and no reasoning of economic nationalism would favor the visit of certain world regions over others. This would influence both decisions on where and how to travel and the experiences made on location. As the literary scholar Wendy Bracewell has argued, in contrast to British and French imperialist travel writing, “accounts of travel from Europe’s eastern peripheries suggest different relations of knowledge, representation and power, rather less monolithic or polarized.”17 Eastern European travelers, as Bracewell further argues, did not travel in a contextual void, but neither did they adopt all perceptions of the places they visited from Western discourse, as they “may find themselves working with a pre-existing vocabulary of images and stereotypes, but they are far from voiceless.”18 Although certainly not immune to notions of European superiority, East European tourism to non-European destinations certainly did not encounter a familiar environment: The “non-imperial tourist” was dealing with a different set of issues than imperial tourists, some of which were highly practical.

By telling a story of the emergence, development and experience of Czech tourism mainly to African and Asian destinations from the late nineteenth century to the end of the interwar period, I am asking how a world that had been built around imperial interests was appropriated by tourists without any stakes in the empire at hand. While looking specifically at Czech tourists, the underlying question is if (and how) a non-imperial tourism was different from an imperial tourism. In that sense, the arguments and the underlying concept may be valid for other “non-imperial tourists” from Poland, Hungary or interwar Austria.

This article is based to a large part on Czech travelogues published from 1890 to 1938 as well as on articles that were published in contemporary journals and magazines as part of a public discourse on tourism and its importance for the Bohemian lands as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as later for Czechoslovakia. Without access to quantifiable data on Czech tourism abroad, the steady increase in the publication of travelogues as well as the heightened public debates on tourism and the growing number of commercialized package tours to popular tourist destinations give not only an estimate of trends—of tourist destinations, of travel incentives, etc.—but also an evaluation of how tourism was experienced.

The Globalization of Tourism

Travel connections between continents have always existed, in the form of trade relations, expeditions or diplomatic missions. The specific form of long-distance tourism spanning several continents, however, in its understanding as a leisure activity and relying on the predictability of financial and temporal investment as well as a certain comfort, evolved from the European core of tourism during the nineteenth century.19

The eventual globalization of tourism—its outreach beyond the European continent—was strongly connected to the imperial project.20 Tourism—in contrast to the more adventurous and individualistic (as well as more expensive) earlier forms of long-distance travel—relied on favorable political stability and heavy infrastructure: tourism expanded in the wake of what came to be called “railway imperialism.”21 The speed with which the growing railway network soon connected all continents is remarkable, and it changed international and intercontinental relations as well as the means and speed of transportation and forms of control. In terms of tourism, railways not only considerably enhanced the number of travelers, but they also redefined travel destinations, as travelers would follow the train tracks and therefore were less inclined to venture “off the beaten track.”22 In short, railways enabled tourism to non-European regions on a large scale, while at the same time streamlining tourism to certain destinations and certain forms of travel.

Tourism as an Imperial Project

Only some regions outside of Europe or North America had been established as regularly frequented tourist destinations by the middle of the nineteenth century. One of the earliest and most important certainly was Egypt. The vital train connection between the Egyptian port of Alexandria and further inland to Cairo opened for instance already in 1854, reducing the travel time between these two cities from four days to a mere four hours, thereby connecting the Egyptian metropole to a global transport network and enhancing its history as one of the most popular tourist destinations outside Europe.23 This early date also serves as a reminder that British imperialist outreach did not necessarily predate the financial involvement in infrastructure and the advent of tourism, but rode along with its expansion. Muhammad Ali Pasha, governor of Egypt, was quite a driving force himself in the modernization of Cairo and the accommodation of European tourists.24

Other regions central to European interests and eventually to European tourism obtained railroads during the second half of the nineteenth century, intensifying in the last three decades. The railroad system in Africa was concentrated at first mainly in the north, expanding rapidly from Egypt to Algeria and Tunisia. By the turn of the century, the African continent had 20,000 kilometers of railroads, connecting vast regions by regular schedule.25 A similar timeframe can be established for India, which in 1860 only had 1,350 kilometers of railway tracks, while in 1900, this number had increased 25-fold, with the central train connection between Bombay and Calcutta opening in 1870.26 In South America, similar to Australia, railroads were first introduced in the 1850s, although railway construction accelerated only in the 1880s.27 Only few world regions, such as the vast Chinese empire, remained with virtually no railroad network until the turn of the century, a fact that both hints at the limited influence of European imperial powers in China and accounts for the relatively small number of European tourists during the nineteenth century.28

While the advancement of tourism largely followed European imperial outreach, it went eventually from imperial byproduct to establishing its own driving force. Two of the most famous passenger train services exemplify this trend of an increase in catering to a luxurious form of tourism and to well-paying customers: the famous Orient Express connected Paris—and Vienna—with Constantinople beginning in 1883. The Trans-Siberian Railway, built in the years 1891–1914, finally connected Moscow and eventually all of Europe overland with Vladivostok at the Pacific Ocean.29

The railroad network was complemented by the simultaneous establishment of regular travel routes by seaway. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 facilitated the direct connection by sea from Europe to Asia. Direct and regular ferry connections on steamships were introduced from Trieste to Port Said in 1869, Bombay in 1870, Singapore in 1880, Hong Kong in 1880, Shanghai in 1881 and Yokohama in 1892, enhancing the global transportation network considerably.

By geographical convenience, it was quite common to hail from East Central Europe. Not only did the trains to Constantinople or to Russia and then on to East Asia stop in Vienna, in Budapest or in Warsaw; but after the opening of the Suez Canal, the Austro-Hungarian port city of Trieste had become a central hub for transportation to the Southern Hemisphere. In its wake, Austrian Lloyd became the leading shipping company on this route for passenger travel.30

In the span of a couple of decades, European tourism to places such as Cairo, Algiers and Bombay had become both considerably faster and safer, more projectable in terms of time and finances, and last but not least, significantly more comfortable if not outright luxurious. By the late nineteenth century, the “golden age of travel” had been heralded for the European tourist.31

An Empire Equipped for Tourists

This apparent accessibility of the world was celebrated and promoted by the tourist industry. In 1890 a brochure by the travel agency Thomas Cook & Son dubbed Cairo “no more than a winter suburb of London.”32 Less possessive, but implying a similar direction, the Czech travel journal Do světa commented retrospectively in 1932 on the immense pace with which tourism had taken over the world and Czech society in particular:

 

While less than a quarter century ago, a trip to Venice was considered a large expedition that only those could accomplish who were not only blessed with wealth but also with great courage, today even the members of less affluent social strata are returning from Aswan in Upper Egypt or from [the Algerian] Biskra as if from a short excursion.33

This perception, of course, was not only due to the easy accessibility of foreign shores and to the calculability both of time and financial means, but to the emergence of a wide range of tourist infrastructure of European provenance and—again—in close relation to the imperial project. In colonial and tourist centers, an array of luxury hotels was built, such as the well-known Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo or the Mena-House right at the foot of the Egyptian pyramids.34 Restaurants and cafés with European fare provided for the culinary well-being of the travelers.35 The first office of the British travel agency Thomas Cook & Son in Cairo (opened in 1872) signaled another feat in the history of global tourism, offering package deals to its clients with measured exotic exposure and a heightened degree of security.36 Soon even trips around the world could be booked as a package tour.37 By the turn of the century, as the historian Robert F. Hunter argues, “there were two empires on the Nile—Britain’s military occupation, and Cook’s Egyptian travel,”38 and both profited from one another: tourism had conquered the world.

Another layer of tourist infrastructure soon followed suit: the exploration of long-distance and global tourism to Africa and Asia was soon taken up by prominent travel guides such as the German Baedeker Guides or the British “red books” by John Murray when they took non-European travel destinations into their repertory, with John Murray offering a first decisive list of “must-sees” of Egypt already in 1847, of Syria and Palestine in 1858 and of India in 1859. Karl Baedeker concentrated on non-European regions somewhat later, focusing on Syria and Palestine in 1875 and on Egypt in 1877, but omitted India altogether until as late as 1914—a hint at the different status of India in the British and the German context as well as the role imperial interests played in the choice of travel destinations.39 Another popular series of travel handbooks, the German Meyers Reisebücher, adhered in 1907 to the globalization of tourism with the publication of a “travel-around-the-world guide.”40 Czech tourists, however, had to make due with foreign-language guides for quite a long time: the first Czech-language travel guide to the Near East and North Africa was published only in 1936.41

The impact of this rapid globalization of tourism was immense—on the regions affected by it, on the travelers and on the local population, as well as on the power dynamics between them. A tourist in a fancy hotel or a European café in Algeria or Morocco during the interwar period could only marvel at the fact that less than a lifetime before, until the 1880s, certain North African regions could only be visited “disguised as a Muslim or a Jew,” as a tourist duly noted in 1928.42 In fact, some of the famous expeditions to explore and conquer the “Dark Continent” had taken place only a couple of years before the advent of the tourist: the 1880s still saw the second Africa expedition by Moravian explorer Emil Holub or the Emin Pasha Expedition by Henry Morton Stanley. Shortly thereafter, the adventurous and troublesome expeditions were exchanged for hotels and railroads, the constant uncertainty of exploration replaced by an exact itinerary and precise timetable. The era of the explorer was mostly over—now focusing mainly on the polar regions—and the tourist came to stay.

The Specificity of Czech Tourism

It is self-evident—if under-researched—that long-distance tourism to destinations in Africa or Asia even in its early phase was not limited to British, French or other “imperial tourists,” but was also enjoyed by a growing number of citizens of the Habsburg Empire and its successor states.

Czech tourists were part of global tourism from the very beginning—quite literally, as various travelers confirmed who took trips along railroad lines that had been built only shortly before.43 This experience, however, was limited in access to certain social classes. While extensive data on the quantity and social class of travelers from the Czech lands is not available, a look at the authors of travelogues suggests that until World War I, long-distance travelers from the Bohemian lands generally had an upper middle-class background. The well-known educator and writer Josef Kořenský, also acclaimed to be the first Czech to travel around the world (in 1893–1894), or the lawyer and journalist Jan Josef Svátek are representative travelers of this time both in social and professional background.44 Researchers and pilgrims were among the travelers, but—specific to the Czech case—there were neither members of the nobility nor public servants. The interwar years offered a democratization in tourism. The opening of travel destinations for ever more tourists, the lowering of the prices through competition and the increased catering not only to the higher society, but also to an ever more mobile middle and even lower middle-class enabled larger segments of society to travel abroad and even beyond the borders of Europe.

The expansion of tourism also led to an infrastructure around travel needs in the Bohemian lands and especially in interwar Czechoslovakia. Travel agencies opened in urban centers, such as the travel agency Čedok (founded in 1920), offering package tours abroad,45 while the Brno-based travel agency Do světa advertised three organized trips to Northern Africa and the Near East in 1927 alone.46 Other institutions followed suit to meet the growing demand.47 At the same time, journals and magazines sprang up that catered to the growing interest in travel to foreign countries.48 The tourist infrastructure met growing demand: the travel magazine Do světa discussed in its first edition in 1926 the “significance of [Czech] travel abroad“ and stated confidently: “Our travel activities are increasing.”49

Thus, Czech tourism developed in line with a general European trend to “get to know [the world],” as Vladimír Hýl is quoted at the beginning of this article. For a number of reasons, however, traveling turned out to be different for, say, a Czech teacher than for a British colonial officer, and these differences, I argue, were reflected both in the travel experience abroad and in the discourse surrounding long-distance tourism. The choice of travel destinations and travel mode, the language skills and financial abilities coined the travel experiences. A different mode of traveling than that of “imperial travelers” was noted by the tourists themselves and interpreted from a Czech perspective.

Travel Destinations and Financial Means

British tourists, as has been stated, were encouraged to travel the British Empire. Similarly, for French citizens, “[c]olonial tourism was represented as a duty.”50 While this was not an exclusive model of traveling, it certainly was a recurrent one.51 For Czech tourists, however, there was no “self-evident” travel destination in non-European regions. If we take the corpus of published travelogues as an indicator of popular travel destinations, we can determine, out of a sample of almost 100 Czech travelogues on non-European regions published between 1890 and 1938, the preferred destinations for global tourism.

In many ways, Czech tourists followed the travel routes set by imperial infrastructure, and not least by the recommendations of the widely consulted travel guides by Baedeker or Murray. However, they did not follow any imperial pattern. Egypt was and remained the most often and most regularly visited country throughout the entire “golden age of travel,” relying on the extended tourist infrastructure and fairly easy accessibility as much as on the fame of its ancient tourist sites. A trip to Egypt—which included a longer stay in Cairo and a ride to the pyramids, and often entailed an excursion down the Nile to the sites of Upper Egypt—was sometimes combined with a trip to either Algeria and Tunisia, or to Palestine. In the interwar period, various Asian countries such as Japan, India, China and Ceylon had become popular travel destinations at least for more affluent tourists.

Czech tourists, therefore, traveled to the same destinations as “imperial tourists,” if without the focus on one empire or another. However, they generally had distinct access to them. On average, Czech tourists had markedly less financial means than their British or German counterparts, a fact that clearly influenced their travel experience. The—admittedly fragmentary—data suggests that especially in the interwar period, Czech tourists were strongly recruited from professions such as teachers, university professors, journalists, as well as university students or artists. Not only did these professions come with a rather moderate income—although, almost equally important to long-distance traveling, with above-average vacation time—but, in international comparison, Czech spending capacity was limited. Although the national income of Czechoslovakia was higher than that of neighboring Eastern European countries or of Italy, it was somewhat below that of Austria and Germany and clearly below that of Western European countries or the USA.52 A comparison of incomes of some of the relevant professions in Prague, Berlin and New York for the second half of the 1920s show a distinct difference: while teachers in Prague earned about 1,500 Kčs, those in Berlin earned about twice as much and in New York triple that amount. This ratio applies to the income of university professors as well.53 These numbers suggest that in internationally frequented tourist centers that catered to the needs and means of the “imperial tourists,” the average spending power of Czech travelers was considerably lower than that of tourists from Western Europe or the United States.

Accordingly, a trip to Cairo, and even more so to India or Japan, was still an expensive undertaking for the average Czech tourist. The Brno-based travel agency of Jaroslav Karásek advertised a four-week roundtrip tour to Alexandria, Cairo, Aswan, Luxor and Jerusalem for 17,900 Kčs,54 while a four-week trip to Tunisia and Algeria was offered for 6,750 Kčs.55 Even the less expensive tour was four and a half times the amount of the monthly salary of a teacher in Prague. Especially during the interwar period, Czech tourists often opted for a more cost-effective solution by choosing to travel second class. This travel mode was a common topic in the travelogues. The luxurious grand hotels were generally traded for small boarding houses, the comfort of a first-class passage was rejected for the somewhat simpler second-class transit. The distinction of travelers according to social class and financial means was discussed by Czech tourists, who realized that the luxurious hotels were “adapted to the needs of the upper ten thousand,”56 and catered, as was made explicit, to the budgets of tourists from Great Britain or the United States.57 The Czechs, however, were “the only tourists traveling second class,” as the pioneer in Czechoslovak-Moroccan relations, Jan Kořínek, claimed in 1928.58 The travelogues offer a view of a European two-class society following an East-West divide, with the imperial tourists living the high life in the colonial metropolises, while Czech tourists shared the simple boarding houses with other Central and East European travelers, or as one of the travelers noted in 1935, with “Russians, Jews, [and] Poles.”59

Language Skills and Language Problems

Central to travel preparations was the gathering of information. While travelers from imperial nations could generally rely on published information in their mother tongue and thereby partake in a national discourse on those travel destinations, Czech travelers—and with them many others from “small nations”—had to make due mainly with literature in a foreign language, a situation that changed only slowly in the interwar period.

The main Czech encyclopedia of the time, Ottův slovník naučný (1888–1909), comparable in scope, depth and relevance to the Encyclopædia Britannica,60 gives ample evidence of the language distribution of the available literature at the time. The dictionary entries for “Africa,” “Asia,” and “America,” published in the first two volumes in the years 1888–89, refer to only seven literature references in Czech out of 116 mentioned altogether, adding up to six percent of the cited literature.61 The supplement edition of the encyclopedia from the interwar period consulted literature in Czech to a greater extent. The same dictionary entries now referred in 12 percent of all citations to Czech language publications. The majority of references, however, was still made to literature in German, followed by English and French.62 All in all, the increase of Czech-language literature was embedded in a general increase of specialist publications. While the article on “Asia” in the first edition of 1889 still noted that there were “only very little publications on all of A[sia],” the second edition, published roughly 40 years later, came to the conclusion that “[t]he literature on A[sia] has been increasing lately to such an extent that one can only mention the most important works that either reflect on the entire continent or on large regions.”63

The limited amount of literature on non-European regions available in Czech had practical as well as discursive implications. For one, it was not until the interwar years that a national discourse on those regions could flourish with a regular exchange between experts on these subjects. The travelogues under scrutiny here exemplify this change in their mentioning of preparatory literature. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, literary references were mostly made to publications in German or English. Josef Kořenský, for example, referred mainly to travelogues and academic treatises in English and German in preparation for his trip around the world in 1893/94, referring only to the Czech writings of the Indologist Otakar Feistmantel.64 In 1901, the explorer Enrique Stanko Vráz again mentioned for his preparations of a trip to Siam works by European, American and even Siamese authors, but not a single book in Czech was part of his preparatory reading.65

It was only in the interwar period that the corpus of literature in Czech on non-European regions—both academic studies and travel descriptions—had reached a critical mass that could serve as a starting point for discussion and cross-references, and the amount of coverage varied strongly from region to region. The sculptor František Foit, who in 1932 traveled by car from Cairo to Cape Town together with the botanist Jiří Baum, stated that he had read “everything” that was related to Africa, and listed books by the Moravian explorer Emil Holub along with publications by the US-American film maker Martin Johnson and the French writer André Gide about his travels to the Congo and Chad.66

Only in 1934 could the physician Jaroslav Přikryl in his travelogue about Ceylon and South India refer—in addition to novels by Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling and others—to literature mainly by his fellow countrymen and regional specialists Jiří Daneš (geographer), Karel Domin (botanist), Otakar Nejedlý and Jaroslav Hněvkovský (painters who lived in India for several years and wrote extensively about the country and their experiences there), Otakar Pertold (Indologist), and the explorer and widely published traveler Enrique Stanko Vráz.67

The limited amount of literature in Czech also had very practical implications, as the knowledge of foreign languages determined the accessibility of knowledge about those regions. The Czech school system, however, was focused entirely on Central European needs and traditions: in the Bohemian lands, language education concentrated mainly on German as well as on French in higher education. This focus continued throughout the interwar period. Proficiency in English, on the other hand, was limited to a small minority. In fact, English was not a mandatory school subject throughout the interwar period. The consequences of this educational decision in a global perspective were implied by Bohumil Pospíšil, a frequent traveler to Asia, when he warned in 1935 about the lack of interest in the English language at home and an ignorance toward its growing importance in a globalized world: “English was, is and will be the Alpha and Omega of all success east of Suez and west of Gibraltar. No declaration in French by our academics—[only] half savants in all practical matters—will be able to replace that.”68

Czech Choices in the Face of an Imperial World

In describing and debating their role as tourists in international contexts, Czech travelers reflected on their cultural and national identity and argued for an understanding quite different from that of an “imperial traveler.” It was in this discourse—led both in travelogues and in contributions to journals and magazines—that the Czech identity was drafted in contrast to the imperial (rather than the non-European) “Other,” both in social and in political terms.

A first vector in the discussion of national identity related to considerations on social status. Paired with a moral claim, the prototypical Czech tourist tended to stress his middle-class identity in open contrast to wealth and lavishness, but also to the political power of the imperial traveler. This was strongly linked to the more modest mode of traveling chosen by most middle-class tourists. The decision to stay in unassuming boarding houses rather than in grand hotels, to travel second class rather than first, as discussed above, may have been a financial necessity, but in the travelogues, it was presented as a moral choice. This is most evident in those passages in which Czech tourists write specifically about their choice of the small, yet comfortable boarding house over the luxurious hotels,69 or when a tourist opted for the cheaper mode of transportation, as did the engineer Josef Zdeněk Raušar on his way from Djelfa in Algeria to an oasis lying to the south in 1930. Choosing between two buses with different equipment, he stated that for Czech tourists, “the smaller one, the normal [bus] will do.”70 Other travelers stressed that they chose consciously and “with pride” second- or even third-class tickets for both train and boat passages.71 The specificity and singularity of this way of traveling was emphasized when as early as 1892 another traveler described how he tried to obtain a second-class ticket for the boat passage from Asyut in Middle Egypt up the Nile River—in vain, as it turned out: the captain persuaded him to go first class instead, as “for a European,” anything but traveling first class was inappropriate.72 Other travelers—if only a few—forewent European amenities altogether, as the writer Bohumil Pospíšil, who during his trip to China in 1935 stayed at local hostels, and explicitly called out this breach of expected behavior for European travelers when he stated that he “reduced the reputation of the white race” by living “like a native.”73 The refusal to accept certain norms as laid down for the imperial traveler, and therefore ignoring the maintenance of power as expected of metropolitan tourists, was frequently emphasized by various Czech tourists.74

This general insistence on traveling second class allowed a second interpretation that usually connected this form of traveling with a widespread topos in Czech national self-perception during the interwar period, namely its democratic identity, strongly linked with the topos of a “small nation.”75 In the travelogues, the Czech “democratic principle” (demokratičnost)76 was argued as a world view that held all people as equal. More than once did this idea come up in a debate over a ride in a rickshaw; arguing that a “democratic” Czech should not be pulled by another human being, as Karel Cvrk noted in 1923 on his trip through Ceylon: “A Czech, who is used to equality-liberty-fraternity, is usurped by a strange feeling when here in Colombo he is supposed to be pulled by a man.”77 In the same year, but this time in Japan, the journalist František Václav Krejčí commented similarly about a rickshaw runner that “it is contrary to our Czech democratic principle to see a man doing the work of a horse for us.”78 In these quotes, an understanding of democracy and equality that encompassed all men across the globe was highlighted as an inherent feature of Czech nationality.

Finally, colonial life—the social etiquette of the European upper classes in imperial centers—was distinctly criticized. Czech tourists noted not only the strict dress codes for Europeans that seemed inadequate for the local climate, but also the restrictive social rules that prohibited even superficial contact between men and women in public, or the tediousness of colonial life.79 The sculptor František Foit noted in 1930 with some annoyance on his trip from Cairo to Cape town via the British-dominated city of Omdurman in Sudan that “nothing is allowed, everything is guarded and there is a fake morale everywhere.”80

This general skepticism toward local practices of European behavior in China, in Egypt, or in Algeria—though not necessarily shared by all travelers—was quite a common feature in Czech travelogues and is traceable beginning in the late nineteenth century until the end of the interwar period. This did not, however, imply a fundamental criticism toward imperial outreach or colonialism as such. Rather, the legitimacy of European involvement abroad was only rarely discussed and even less criticized; the political status quo was rarely questioned. This might be somewhat surprising as, since the late nineteenth century, the Czech national movement had been strongly based on an anti-Habsburg sentiment that declared the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to be a “prison of nations” and therefore phrased itself often as oppressed. Only to a limited extent would this interpretation influence the perspective of European imperial involvement abroad.

Generally, most tourists acknowledged the benefits of modernization for the purpose of travel in vast regions of Africa and Asia, and connected these to the influence of the European imperial powers: railroads, tourist infrastructure and technology were clearly marked as a European influence on otherwise “medieval”81 or backward regions of “silence, sadness and hunger.”82

In the end, it was an in-between position that was taken by most travelers, who neither went “native” nor identified wholly with the imperial powers. As the zoologist Jiří Baum confessed in 1933:

 

The Czech nation can probably only sympathize with the natives, who were deprived of independence and the right to self-determination by the colonial governments, but on the other hand it is hard to dismiss that it is more comfortable to travel in all those world regions where the higher positions are held by Europeans.83

Conclusion

The “golden age of travel” saw the expansion of European tourism to most continents. The spread of the railroad network and tourist infrastructure in many ways streamlined travel as it created transportation hubs and tourist centers in certain parts of the world while others were—for the time being—left aside. Imperial endeavor was the motor of this homogenizing development, and in many cases it coined destinations, transport and lodging as well as food, rule and etiquette. Tourist infrastructure in colonial or imperial settings largely catered to “imperial travelers,” offering the familiar in the exotic while avoiding the “uncomfortable immersion in non-European cultures.”84

Non-imperial travelers, however, could not access all the infrastructure and especially the identity politics connected to “imperial tourism.” As generalized as some of the arguments had to be—not all British travelers were supporting imperial interests, not all Czech tourists were opposed to a higher level of comfort—the argument could be made that a different relationship to imperial power influenced the practices and experience of traveling in an imperial context, and therefore offered a different appropriation of these global processes. Economic means, language skills and access to knowledge influenced the choice of travel destinations as well as the travel mode: Czech tourists often shunned the luxury hotels and the elegant social events and rather opted for the less costly pension or boarding house and chose a second-class ticket instead of first class for their voyage. However, these choices were not based purely on economic considerations. Rather, the travelogues suggest a cultural argument, as they were debating the suitability of behavior abroad in the light of national identity. The self-understanding as a democratic and largely middle-class nation seemed for instance to demand the choice of simple, second-class travel. This also entailed a certain skepticism toward imperial rule, although its benefits for tourism were readily acknowledged, as modernization in the form of railroad tracks and imperialism were viewed as intrinsically linked. This discrepancy was not resolved during the travels. Instead, Czech tourists generally opted to stay outside colonial society and rather associated with fellow compatriots or Central European emigrants who frequented the same hostels or restaurants.

In hindsight, the interwar period turned out to be the most suitable for getting to know the world, as Vladimír Hýl suggested in the quote appearing at the beginning of this article. By the time the “golden age of travel” came to an end just before World War II, the coordinates of travel had shifted, changing from leisure to flight. Some of the most popular tourist destinations on the African, Asian and American continents now became safe havens for those lucky enough to escape Central Europe. The postwar era saw new milestones in the history of public transportation, but it did not, however, see an upsurge in intercontinental tourism. By the time Mr. Hýl had turned 50 years of age in 1948, flying had become a frequent mode of traveling across the Atlantic, with its duration reduced to a mere 15 hours. At the same time, however, he might have had a hard time getting a travel permit: in the face of increasing political tensions, travel across the descending “Iron Curtain” became highly curtailed and strongly controlled. Freedom of movement was regained only in 1989, though is now again restricted mainly by economic means.

 

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Abu-Lughod, Janet. “The Origins of Modern Cairo.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 4 (1965): 429–57.

Anderson, Martin. “The Development of British Tourism in Egypt, 1815 to 1850.” Journal of Tourism History 4, no. 3 (2012): 259–79.

Baranowski, Shelley, Christopher Endy, Waleed Hazbun, Stephanie Malia Hon, Gordon Pirie, Trevor Simmons, and Eric G.E. Zuelow. “Tourism and Empire.” Journal of Tourism History 7, no. 1–2 (2015): 100–30.

Berghoff, Hartmut, Christopher Harvie, Barbara Korte, and Ralf Schneider, eds. The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002.

Borovička, Michael. Cestovatelství [Travel]. Prague and Litomyšl, Paseka, 2010.

Bracewell, Wendy, and Alex Drace-Francis, eds. Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, 1550–2000 (East Looks West 2). Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008.

Bracewell, Wendy. “East Looks West: East European Travel Writing on Europe, 1600–2000.” In Călători români în Occident: Secolele 17–20 [Romanian travels in the West: 17th–20th centuries], edited by Nicolae Bocşan and Ioan Bolovan, 11–23. Cluj-Napoca: Centrul de Studii Transilvane, 2004.

Brailey, Nigel. “The Railway-Oceanic Era, the India-China and India-Singapore Railway Schemes, and Siam.” In Railways and International Politics: Paths of Empire, 1848–1945, edited by T.G. Otte and Keith Neilson, 94–111. London–New York: Routledge, 2006.

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Canton, James. From Cairo to Baghdad: British Travellers in Arabia. London–New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011.

Clifford, Nicholas. “A Truthful Impression of the Country:” British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Davis, Kenneth E. Wilburn, and Ronald E. Robinson, eds. Railway Imperialism. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Dupée, Jeffrey. British Travel Writers in China: Writing Home to a British Public, 1890–1914. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2004.

Furlough, Ellen. “Une leçon des choses: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France.” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 441–73.

Goodwin, Gráinne, and Gordon Johnston. “Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century: John Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers.” Studies in Travel Writing 17, no. 1 (2013): 43–61.

Gregory, Alexis. The Golden Age of Travel, 1880–1930. London: Cassell, 1998.

Haid, Oliver. “‘Eternally Will Austria Stand’: Imperial Tourism in Austria between Timeless Predisposition and Political Statement.” In Royal Tourism: Excursions around Monarchy, edited by Philip Long and Nicola J. Palmer, 107–27. Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2008.

Hauenstein, Werner. Wegweiser durch Meyers Reisebücher: 1862–1936, Bibliographie. Stadtoldendorf: U. Hinrichsen, 1993.

Hinrichsen, Alex W. Baedekers Reisehandbücher 1832–1990, Bibliographie 1832–1944, Verzeichnis 1948–1990. Verlagsgeschichte. Bevern: Hinrichsen, 1991.

Hunter, Robert F. “Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868–1914.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 5 (2004): 28–54.

Jančík, Drahomír. “Vnitřní obchod [Domestic trade].” In Mýtus a realita hospodářské vyspělosti Československa mezi světovými válkami [Myth and reality of the economic level of advancement of Czechoslovakia between the World Wars], edited by Eduard Kubů and Jaroslav Pátek, 187–200. Prague: Karolinum, 2000.

Judson, Pieter. “‘Every German Visitor Has a Völkisch Obligation He Must Fulfill’: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880–1918.” In Histories of Leisure, edited by Rudy Koshar, 147–68. Oxford: Berg, 2002.

Keller, Tait. Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Kunský, Josef. Čeští cestovatelé: Díl druhý [Czech travelers: Part two]. Prague: Orbis, 1961.

Lacina, Vlastislav. Zlatá léta československého hospodařství 1918–1929 [The golden years of the Czechoslovak economy 1918–1929]. Prague: Historický ústav AV ČR, 2000.

Lemmen, Sarah. Tschechen auf Reisen: Repräsentationen der außereuropäischen Welt und nationale Identität in Ostmitteleuropa 1890–1938. Cologne–Vienna: Böhlau, 2018.

Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Macková, Adéla Jůnová. “Turistické kluby [Tourist clubs].” In “Krásný, báječní, nešťastný Egypt!” Čeští cestovatelé konce 19. a první poloviny 20. století [“Beautiful, marvelous, unlucky Egypt!” Czech travelers from the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century], edited by Adéla Jůnová Macková, et al., 361–85. Prague: Libri, 2009.

Martin, Gregory. “German and French Perceptions of the French North and West African Contingents, 1910–1918.” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 56 (1997): 31–68.

Mücke, Pavel. Šťastnou cestu . . . ?! Proměny politik cestování a cestovního ruchu v Československu za časů studené války (1945–1989) [Have a nice trip . . . ?! Changes in the policie of travel and of tourism in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War (1945–1989)]. Pelhřimov: Nová tiskárna Pelhřimov, 2017.

Nash, Geoffrey P. From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926. London–New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005.

Otte, T.G. “‘The Baghdad Railway of the Far East’: The Tientsin-Yangtze Railway and Anglo-German Relations, 1898–1911.” In Railways and International Politics, edited by Thomas G. Otte and Keith Neilson, 112–36. London: Routledge, 2006.

Perkins, Kenneth J. “So Near and Yet So Far: British Tourism in Algiers, 1860-1914.” In The British Abroad since the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, Travellers and Tourists, edited by Martin Farr and Xavier Guégan, 217–35. Houndmills–Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Peter Bugge, “Czech Democracy 1918–1938: Paragon or Parody?” Bohemia 47 (2006–2007): 3–28.

Robertson, Roland. “Glokalisierung – Homogenität und Heterogenität in Raum und Zeit.” In Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft, edited by Ulrich Beck, 192–220. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998.

Rossberg, Ralf Roman. Geschichte der Eisenbahn. Künzelsau: Sigloch Ed., 1984.

Rychlík, Jan. Cestování do ciziny v habsburské monarchii a v Československu: Pasová, vízová a vystěhovalecké politika 1848–1989 [Traveling abroad in the Habsburg monarchy and in Czechoslovakia: Passport, visa and emigration policies 1848-1989]. Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2007.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage Books, 1994.

Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Skwiot, Christine M. “Itineraries of Empire: The Uses of U.S. Tourism in Cuba and Hawai’i, 1898–1959”. Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2002.

Slapnicka, Helmut. “Die böhmischen Länder und die Slowakei 1919–1945.” In Handbuch der Geschichte der böhmischen Länder, Bd. 4: Der Tschechoslowakische Staat im Zeitalter der modernen Massendemokratie und Diktatur, edited by Karl Bosl, 2–150. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1970.

Spence, Jonathan. In Search of Modern China. New York: W W Norton & Company, 1990.

Štemberk, Jan. Fenomén cestovního ruchu: Možnosti a limity cestovního ruchu v meziválečném Československu [The phenomenon of tourism: Possibilities and limits of tourism in interwar Czechoslovakia]. Prague: Nová tiskárna, 2009.

Stolberg, Eva-Maria. “Auf zum Pazifik: Die Bedeutung der Transsibirischen Eisenbahn für die Vernetzung des eurasischen Raumes 1891–1914.” In Die Internationalität der Eisenbahn: 1850–1970, edited by Monika Burri, Kilian T. Elsasser, and David Gugerli, 293–308. Interferenzen: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik 7. Zürich: Chronos-Verlag, 2003.

Tchoukarine, Igor. “‘The Sea Connects; It Does Not Divide:’ Czech Tourism on the Interwar Adriatic.” Journal of Tourism History 6, no. 2–3 (2014): 139–57.

Urbansky, Sören. Kolonialer Wettstreit: Russland, China, Japan und die Ostchinesische Eisenbahn. Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag, 2008.

Walton, John K. “British Tourism Between Industrialization and Globalization: An Overview.” In The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Christopher Harvie, Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider, 109–32. Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2002.

Winkler, Dieter, and Georg Pawlik, Der Österreichische Lloyd 1836 bis heute. Graz: Weishaupt, 1989.

Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915. New York: W. Morrow, 1997.

Youngs, Tim. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester–New York: Manchester University Press, 1994.

1 All translations by the author. Hýl, Ze tří dílů světa, 150.

2 This article is based on research for the following book: Lemmen, Tschechen auf Reisen.

3 The following travelogues were among those in which contemporaries commented on the growing number of tourists to non-European locations: Matiegková, V objetí sfingy, 58–59; Nordan, “V zemi pyramid,” 585. The history of European tourism beyond Europe is reflected in Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, especially Chapters 8–10.

4 Robertson, “Glokalisierung.”

5 Gregory, The Golden Age of Travel.

6 As an example of general agreement on the entanglement of “tourism and empire,” see the round table discussion among leading historians published in the Journal of Tourism History. Baranowski et al., “Tourism and Empire,” 1–2, 100–30. For further literature cf. footnote 8.

7 Cf. Hunter, “Tourism and Empire.”

8 From a growing literature, see as examples Berghoff, Harvie, Korte, and Schneider, The Making of Modern Tourism; Canton, From Cairo to Baghdad; Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country;” Dupée, British Travel Writers in China; Lowe, Critical Terrains; Nash, From Empire to Orient; Youngs, Travellers in Africa; Furlough, “Une leçon des choses;” Martin, “German and French Perceptions.”

9 See Gordon Pirie’s contribution in Baranowski et al. “Tourism and Empire,” 106.

10 Ibid.

11 James Canton suggests that travel and travel writing were so intricately linked that even the number of published travelogues on certain regions were in correlation to the outreach of the British empire. Canton, From Cairo to Baghdad, 2.

12 Barkan, preface in Dupée, British Travel Writers, here viii. Research on British travel has generally concentrated on the long nineteenth century, mostly setting aside the question of how long-distance tourism changed during the interwar period, when the social composition of long-distance tourists was slowly changing to a broader range of middle- and upper-class representatives. Conceptual research on travel abroad during the interwar period, however, seems to suggest that imperial outreach was still a vital driving force. Foregoing the British empire in favor of other world regions, cf. for example, Skwiot, “Itineraries of Empire”; Furlough, “Une leçon des choses,” 443.

13 Pirie’s contribution in Baranowski et al. “Tourism and Empire,” 106. For the French case, cf. also Furlough, “Une leçon des choses,” 443.

14 Travel and tourism in the Czech lands and the First Czechoslovak Republic is a growing research field, although tourism outside Europe (and many European tourist destinations) have not been sufficiently researched yet. Michael Borovička, Cestovatelství; Rychlík, Cestování do ciziny v habsburské monarchii; Štemberk, Fenomén cestovního ruchu. Post-1945 tourism is contemplated in Mücke, Šťastnou cestu . . . ?!. As an example of a popular tourist destination abroad, see Tchoukarine, “‘The Sea Connects,” 139–57. Other Central European histories of tourism include Keller, Apostles of the Alps; Haid, “‘Eternally Will Austria Stand’.” Judson, “‘Every German Visitor’.”

15 Shelley Baranowski’s contribution in Baranowski et al. “Tourism and Empire,” 117.

16 It is not surprising, then, that—as has often been noted—for locals the nationality of the foreigner was quite irrelevant, and therefore, as Edward W. Said stated, “the non-European [. . .] saw the European only as imperial.” Italics in the original. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 196.

17 Bracewell, “The Limits of Europe,” 65.

18 Idem, “East Looks West,” 15.

19 The difference between a “traveler” and a “tourist” has already been stated by contemporaries throughout the nineteenth century, using “tourist” pejoratively as inferior to “traveler” both in status and in class terms, as John K. Walton summarizes: tourists were seen as “following guidebooks to experience prescribed sensations in shallow ways which were inferior to the deeper insights of the independent and better-educated traveler.” Walton, “British Tourism Between Industrialization and Globalization,” 113. In contrast, tourism here is understood as a cultural rather than a moral category, referring to kinds of leisure travel that rely on organization, predictability and affordability for a broader social stratum and adhere to a certain performance and social behavior in the realm of the given infrastructure of hotels, railways and travel guides. For an overview of the establishment of tourism throughout the world, see Withey, Grand Tours.

20 See the discussion on this special relationship by Baranowski et al. “Tourism and Empire.”

21 A term and phenomenon that is discussed in detail in Davis, Wilburn, and Robinson, Railway Imperialism.

22 Buzard, The Beaten Track.

23 Abu-Lughod, “The Origins of Modern Cairo,” 433.

24 An overview of the early history of tourism in Cairo—and the role of Muhammad Ali in its onset—appears in Anderson, “The development of British.”

25 Rossberg, Geschichte der Eisenbahn, 135.

26 Brailey, “The Railway-Oceanic Era.” Cf. also Sethia, “Railways, Raj and the Indian States.”

27 Rossberg, Geschichte der Eisenbahn, 168–86.

28 China had only about 650 kilometers of railroads by the turn of the century. By 1910, this number had increased more than tenfold, though it was still small in relation to the size of the empire. Rossberg, Geschichte der Eisenbahn, 117; Spence, In Search of Modern China, 310–12. Specifically concentrated on the impact of imperial ambitions of European powers for Chinese railroad planning is Otte, “‘The Baghdad Railway’;” Davis, “Railway Imperialism.” Worth reading is Urbansky, Kolonialer Wettstreit.

29 Stolberg, “Auf zum Pazifik.”

30 For a first (and colorful) overview of the history of the Austrian Lloyd company, see Winkler and Pawlik, Der Österreichische Lloyd.

31 Gregory, The Golden Age of Travel.

32 Quoted from Withey, Grand Tours, 262.

33 [o.A.], “Význam cestování v cizině,” 1.

34 Mayer, Egypt, 116.

35 British influence on restaurant cuisine was especially noticeable throughout the world (and beyond the borders of the empire), though not to everybody’s delight. In the interwar period, a Czech traveler to Japan noted: “English cuisine is so similar anywhere in the world that the menus in Africa, India and Japan are almost identical.” Krejčí, Jaro v Japonsku, 41.

36 Hunter, “Tourism and Empire,” 35–36.

37 Thomas Cook offered trips around the world once a year beginning in 1872. By the 1890s, these trips included Australia and New Zealand. Withey, Grand Tours, 284 and 292.

38 Hunter, “Tourism and Empire,” 44.

39 Goodwin and Johnston, “Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century;” Hauenstein, Wegweiser durch Meyers Reisebücher; Hinrichsen, Baedekers Reisehandbücher, 163–66.

40 Wislicenus and Floeßel, Weltreise; Hauenstein, Wegweiser durch Meyers Reisebücher, 148–53.

41 Businský and Štrunc, Balkán, Palestina, Egypt.

42 Jan Kořínek writes how the Czech nature researcher Enrique Stanko Vráz in the years 1880–1883 could only travel in the clothes of a Moroccan Jewish man through Morocco. Kořínek, Maroko, 9.

43 The author František Klement went by train from Jaffa to Jerusalem only one year after this railroad line had opened in 1894. During the same year, Jiří Guth boarded a train in Algeria on a connection from Constantine to Algiers that had been introduced only shortly before. Klement, Z Jaffy do Jerusalema, 60–61; Guth, Na pokraji Sahary, 35.

44 As examples of travelogues in which the authors also describe their modes of travel, see Kořenský, Cesta kolem světa 1893–1894; Svátek, V zemi Sv. Kříže. For information about Josef Kořenský, see Kunský, Česti cestovatelé, 125–29.

45 Štemberk, Fenomén cestovního ruchu.

46 Cf. the advertisement in the journal Do světa 2 (1927).

47 For an introduction to tourist infrastructure catering to non-European regions, see Macková, “Turistické kluby.”

48 The magazines Do světa (1926–1927), Širým světem (1924–44) and Letem světem (1926–35) catered to the growing interest in worldwide tourist destinations. Literary periodicals included travel reports on a regular basis, such as Světozor (1904–43) or Zlatá Praha (1884–1929).

49 [N.a.], “Význam cestování v cizině,” 1.

50 Furlough, “Une leçon des choses,” 443.

51 Most literature on travel during this period is, in fact, on imperial travel. An exception is Perkins, “So Near and Yet So Far.”

52 Slapnicka, “Die böhmischen Länder,” 49, and Lacina, Zlatá léta československého hospodařství, 233.

53 Drahomír Jančík gives the following numbers: while a university professor in Prague earned 3,250 to 5,500 Kčs, his colleague in Berlin earned the equivalent of 9,600 Kčs and in New York even 11,200 to 16,800 Kčs. Similar relations are to be found for the teaching profession, with an income of about 1,500 Kčs in Prague, 3,040 Kčs in Berlin and 4,960 Kčs in New York. Jančík, “Vnitřní obchod,” 193.

54 As advertised in 1927: “Naše výpravy. Čtvrtá výprava do Egypta a Palestyny,” Do světa 1/4 (1927): 25–26.

55 “Výlet na Saharu,” Do světa 1/4 (1927): 26–28. Similar prices are given for trips with the Prague-based Klub přátel Orientu [Club of the Friends of the Orient], which in the 1930s offered package tours to the Near East for 6,950 Kčs. Letter to the regional authorities dated July 9, 1935. Archiv hlavního města Prahy [Prague City Archives], Fonds Klub Přátel Orientu 1930–1939.

56 Krejčí, Jaro v Japonsku, 40.

57 Ibid., 26; Domin, Dvacet tisíc mil po souši a po moři, 3, 23; Foit, Autem napříč Afrikou, 74; Mayer, Egypt, 78; Raušar, K palmovému háji, 33.

58 Kořínek, Maroko, 12.

59 Pospíšil, Čínou za revolučního varu, 118.

60 Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia, 96.

61 [N.a.], “Afrika (výzkumy)”; [N.a.], “Amerika (dějiny)”; [N.a.], “Asie (dějiny objevení),” 875.

62 [N.a.], “Afrika”; [-le], “Amerika,”; [-le.], “Asie,” 294. A more detailed analysis appears in Lemmen, Tschechen auf Reisen, 127–33.

63 [p.], “Asie (dějiny objevení),” 875; [-le.], “Asie,” 294.

64 Kořenský, Cesta kolem světa 1, 421, 472, 474.

65 Vráz, Cesty světem, 190.

66 Foit, Autem napřič Afrikou 1, III.

67 Přikryl, Putování po Cejlonu, 7–8.

68 Pospíšil, Čínou, 164.

69 Doubek, Dvě cesty Spexoru do Afriky a Asie, 31; Foit, Autem napříč Afrikou 1, 17.

70 Raušar, K palmovému háji, 27.

71 Jiřík, K pyramidám, 13.

72 Fait, “Na vlnách nilských,” 9.

73 Pospíšil, Čínou, 4.

74 Shelley Baranowski’s contribution in Baranowski et al. “Tourism and Empire,” 117.

75 The topos of democracy has been strongly linked to Czech national identity, as Peter Bugge has shown. Bugge, “Czech Democracy 1918–1938.”

76 As used by Krejčí, Jaro v Japonsku, 5.

77 Cvrk, Cestování po světě, 126.

78 Krejčí, Jaro v Japonsku, 5.

79 Especially critical is Foit, Autem napříč Afrikou 1, 140.

80 Ibid.

81 Novák, Indické povidky, 7.

82 The state to which these regions would revert if European influence were to recede, according to one of the travelers, the diplomat Zdeněk Němeček. Němeček, Dopisy ze Senegambie, 125.

83 Baum, Africkou divočinou, 43.

84 Comments by Shelley Baranowski in Baranowski et al. “Tourism and Empire,” 116.

2018_2_Kaps

pdfVolume 7 Issue 2 CONTENTS

Cores and Peripheries Reconsidered:
Economic Development, Trade and Cultural Images
in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy

Klemens Kaps
University of Linz
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This article explores the relationship between economic development and the trans-regional division of labor in the eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy. Using world-systemic models and postcolonial approaches, I offer a critical revision of traditional narratives on the economic history of the Habsburg dominions as a point of departure for a reconsideration of regional disparities in the Habsburg dominions. I examine the relationship between the geopolitical power position of the Monarchy and the socioeconomic transformations towards proto-industries and commercial agriculture in the course of the eighteenth century, with a focus on trade as a major factor which affected the way in which domestic market formation and economic interregional entanglement influenced the emergence of a split between cores and peripheries in the Habsburg dominions. In the last part of the article, I examine the discourses and cultural images which shaped the political-institutional framework regulating these exchange relations. I observe that orientalist metaphors about the Eastern peripheries were a symptom of the way in which some policy instruments were designed in favor of the core areas over the peripheral regions.

Keywords: economic history, Habsburg Monarchy, trade, cameralism, cultural images

Introduction: Theoretical Considerations

The term internal periphery is usually associated with concepts such as uneven regional development, spatial disparities, social inequalities, and development policies. In contrast with neoclassical approaches to regional disparities, the internal peripheries approach assumes a causal link between economic conditions in developed core areas and underdeveloped peripheral regions. The emergence of a trans-regional division of labor according to which peripheries provide the raw materials which are turned into consumable finished commodities in the core areas leads to increasing levels of income, wealth, and productivity, rendering peripheries dependent on the cores. Starting from this basic assumption of world-system analysis and by adopting its key notions and concepts (such as ceaseless capital accumulation, unequal division of labor, and the commodification of social spheres), the internal peripheries’ approach has been characterized by a greater flexibility to include political, social, and cultural factors.1

Classical world-system analysis conceives the political predominantly in relation to the structural rhythms of the whole system, and it seems that the economic sphere in particular dominates political decisions. The internal peripheries approach, for its part, as it was developed by the followers of Hans-Heinrich Nolte,2 takes into account the political sphere as an autonomous though not completely independent variable. While the systemic character of economic development within the center-periphery framework is maintained, the state is an actor which can pursue modernization policies and learn from the core regions. Thus, transfers of ideas, knowledge, and technology from core areas to peripheral zones can, to a certain extent, balance out the unequal flows of capital, commodities, and labor that generally characterize this relationship. Competence accumulation (one of the four elements of Nolte’s world-system, alongside hierarchy, expansion, and competition) is a key variable for the change in the developmental conditions of interconnected political spheres.3

Alongside the political, the cultural sphere is also defined in an innovative way by the internal peripheries approach. A particularly interesting phenomenon is that of stereotypes and images of the other, understood as a condensed form of identity perception between different regions, states, and world regions. While one can read and interpret these cultural artefacts from a spatial perspective and decode the different hierarchies between cores and peripheries inherent in them, there is also potential for a social reading of such constellations. Referring to postcolonial categories of dominants and subalterns, Dipesh Chakrabarty stresses the relevance that these images have for the researcher interested in social differences between various societies.4

Edward Said’s orientalist paradigm is a prime example of how the spatial and the social approach can go hand in hand in an attempt to decode a “Western style of domination restructuring and having authority over the Orient” from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first.5 Said clearly underlined that stereotypes and pejorative images of the other acted not only as representations of core-periphery dichotomies, but could shape this chasm between different world regions and states. It is important to point out that orientalist or differently coined pejorative descriptions and ascriptions can also be found within empires and states or between different regions, as Larry Wolff’s classic work Inventing Eastern Europe has amply demonstrated, where the categories of East and West are used to put forth a discourse about the alleged backwardness of Eastern Europe.6 Based on these considerations, this article explores the connections between economic regional disparities and the trans-regional division of labor, with a focus mainly on trade relations and their political regulations, which were influenced by cultural images and stereotypes in eighteenth-century Habsburg Central Europe.

The Position of the Habsburg Monarchy in the World-System in the Eighteenth Century: A Critical Revision

The economy of the Habsburg Monarchy in the early eighteenth century was defined by Immanuel Wallerstein as a rising semi-periphery, albeit his definition rested on geopolitical rather than economic factors. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Vienna-based Habsburg Emperor Charles VI acquired all the Spanish European dominions except for the Iberian Peninsula, including the Austrian Netherlands, Naples, Sardinia (which in 1720 was replaced by Sicily), and the Duchy of Milan in Northern Italy (which was attached to the Duchy of Mantua, acquired in 1707, and together formed Austrian Lombardy). This notable territorial expansion in northwestern and southern Europe, i.e. in both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, was endorsed by the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714 and was understood as compensation for the withdrawal of the Habsburg claims to the Spanish throne. The geopolitical gains made by the Habsburg Monarchy are even more remarkable if set against the context of their successful wars against the Ottoman Empire, waged in coalition with other European states between 1682 and 1699 and again between 1716 and 1718. The peace treaties of Karlowitz/Sremski Karlovci (1699) and Passarowitz/Požarevac (1718) brought yet more territories to the Habsburgs, with the incorporation of central Hungary, Transylvania, the Banat of Temesvar/Timişoara, Little Wallachia, and Northern Serbia as far as Belgrade.7

While Wallerstein’s narrative avoids considering the economic development of the Habsburg regions, he interprets its geopolitical expansion as precarious and short-lived. Lost wars with Spain and France and then with the Ottoman Empire and Prussia between 1733 and 1763 brought about major territorial losses and hampered the rise of the Habsburg Monarchy to the status of a great world power. Using classical arguments, Wallerstein sees the loss to Prussia of most of Silesia, the wealthiest province in the Habsburg Monarchy (first in 1742 and then confirmed by peace treaties in 1748 and 1763), as the reason why the Habsburg Monarchy lost the struggle for hegemony between the two semi-peripheral states and remained a second-rate regional power until its disintegration at the end of World War I.8

One could raise several questions concerning this narrative. While it is an undeniable fact that, in terms of territorial growth, the Habsburg Monarchy had peaked in 1718, the shrinking size of the Habsburg dominions was neither linear nor irreversible, as the acquisitions of Galicia (1772), Bukovina (1775), and Venice (including Dalmatia, 1797/1815) eloquently show. Even the loss of Silesia was not the end of Habsburg power aspirations in Central Europe. Silesia had a diversified proto-industrial economy, especially engaged in the production of iron and linen, and it was perfectly connected with world markets as remote as the British and Spanish Atlantic dominions, where slaves were dressed in Silesian linen cloths.9 The political impact of the cession of Silesia to Prussia was immediate, as the substantial (and growing) Silesian tax revenues were now redirected to Berlin.10 But apart from this kind of fiscal shift, the economic consequences of the loss of Silesia were quite limited. Trade relations, including the transit trade that created access to world markets through Hamburg, and the interregional division of labor continued largely unabated throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. 11

Furthermore, the loss of Silesia posed no obstacle to the economic development or administrative and economic reform of the Habsburg dominions. On the contrary, this event triggered political and economic reforms in the Habsburg Monarchy, which was gradually turned into an integrated internal market, for which the custom reform of 1775 was an important step. This reform abolished all internal custom tariffs between Austrian and Bohemia, with the exception only of those areas heavily involved in international transit trade, such as Tyrol and the Austrian Littoral around Trieste.12 In conclusion, Wallerstein’s interpretation of the Habsburg Monarchy as a declining or, at best, stagnating semi-periphery after 1748 has to be challenged on various grounds, both geopolitical and economic. The analysis must take a closer look at economic development in the Habsburg dominions, paying particular attention to how the status of the Habsburg Monarchy as a rising semi-periphery coexisted with persisting and reinforced regional differences within its dominions.

The Emergence of an Internal Economic Core: The Expansion of Proto-industry in the West

The status of the Habsburg Monarchy as a rising semi-periphery can be even more clearly detected in economic than in geopolitical terms. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the quantitative growth and qualitative expansion13 of proto-industrial enterprises turned Bohemia and substantial regions of Austria into producers of semi-finished and manufactured commodities. This created the foundation for the mechanized industrialization of these regions in the nineteenth century, the first wave of which set in after 1825.14 Proto-industry, often labeled “industrialization before industrialization,”15 is defined as the production of manufactured goods for trans-regional markets in a production process that is characterized by a comparatively high degree of division of labor. Conversely, these industries did not use steam-powered machinery, and they relied heavily on the part-time, in particular seasonal labor of the rural population.16

The two models which largely shaped proto-industrial economies were manufactories and domestic industries, organized either as putting-out systems (Verlag) or as small commodity production (Kaufsystem), juxtaposing a central production site including clear organizational hierarchies and differentiated salaries with decentralized workshops, chiefly located in peasant households. Both forms could operate separately but often were combined for the organization of the production process of one commodity. Raw materials provided by middlemen to peasant-workers were turned into semi-finished products in household-based workshops before they were further transformed into consumable commodities in manufactories. This pattern meant that a substantial part of the production process shifted from urban centers to rural areas due to the abundant rural workforce, lower wages, and the lack of guild regulations.17 However, it has been argued that a general uniform pattern of proto-industrialization cannot be detected, and that differences existed in the roles of markets and corporate institutions such as guilds and manors (Grundherrschaft).18

To be sure, the establishment of proto-industries in the Habsburg dominions did not begin in the eighteenth century, but far earlier. Clear examples of this include the production of linen textiles in Vorarlberg, Bohemia, and Upper Austria, iron production in Bohemia, Carinthia, Upper Styria, and Southern Upper Austria (including the production of pig iron in the region between Vordernberg and Innerberg in Northern Styria and the production of scythes, knives, and sickles in Upper Austria), glass manufacturing in Bohemia, and the weaving of woolen cloth in Bohemia and Silesia.19 The second half of the seventeenth century bore witness to the foundation of new enterprises, such as the silk spinning mill at Count Sinzendorf’s Walpersdorf manor (1666), the highly successful and long-lived wool manufactory in Linz (1672), the tobacco manufacture in Enns (1676), and the mirror manufactory in Neuhaus (1701). Some of these factories, however, did not survive long.20

In the eighteenth century, proto-industry expanded dynamically and structurally, leading to the growth of production but also to a diversification of industrial activities in the Habsburg dominions. As early as the 1720s, an economic boom led to the foundation of a range of new textile manufactories in Lower Austria. The Second Oriental Company, using its monopolistic privileges, established cotton manufactories in Gross-Siegharts in 1720 and in Schwechat, near Vienna, in 1724.21 In Bohemia, the foundation of new enterprises had started even earlier, for instance with the establishment of a wool manufactory at the manor of Ossek in 1697, the foundation of a cloth manufactory in Plánice in 1710, and the starting of a linen weaving firm by the English merchant Robert Allason in Rumburk in 1713. The Rumburk plant was also equipped with bleaching facilities, and by 1724 it had produced 157,124 pieces of linen measuring 84–110 ells each.22 In 1715, Johann Joseph Count Waldstein founded a wool mill on his estate of Dux-Oberleutensdorf/Duchcov-Horní Litvínov.23 The establishment of new textile enterprises resulted in a rise in the the overall production. Output of woolen cloth manufactured in Bohemia grew from 6,715 to 39,000 pieces (valued at 700,000 florins) between 1717 and 1731, more than a five-fold increase.24 At the same time, this period of growth also involved the qualitative upgrade of the Bohemian economy. Regional raw materials were being turned into consumable commodities in-house, as prescribed by the prevailing mercantilist doctrines, which tried to avoid the outflow of money towards foreign producers.25

Textile production, which would become the leading industrial sector in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, grew in terms of gross production and variety. Linen and woolen cloth manufacturing, which had a long tradition in the Habsburg dominions, were joined by new activities such as cotton processing in the first half of the eighteenth century and, later, by silk production. Other traditional industries grew as well. In 1730, the Habsburg Alpine provinces produced as much iron as Great Britain.26 The proto-industrial growth of Bohemia, Upper and Lower Austria, and Styria relied chiefly on the mobilization of aristocratic capital, while capital imports by foreign merchants and investments by the state, including the imperial family, played an additional role.27

While wars such as the War of the Polish Succession (1733–36), the Austro-Ottoman War (1736–39), and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) not only led to geopolitical setbacks for the Monarchy, but also affected its economic development in a negative way, these were only brief interruptions in an overall tendency towards growth initiated in the 1720s and early 1730s. This is clearly underlined by the foundation of new firms after these wars came to an end. For example, the wool mill in Kladubry in Bohemia was set up in 1749 with the financial support of Emperor Francis Stephen and Queen Maria Theresia. In 1755, a linen manufactory was set up in Potštejn in Bohemia, again with the support of the imperial-royal couple.28 In the 1750s and 1760s, new manufactories for woolen cloth, linen, and silk were founded in Carinthia. While the woolen factory in Linz had to be financially supported by the state in 1754, the growth in textile production was further boosted when the state started cancelling the concession of industrial privileges between 1761 and 1764.29

Early statistics on industrial activity can be used to estimate the industrial development of the Habsburg dominions in the late eighteenth century. Cotton production, which was liberalized in 1763, grew with the foundation of a number of factories in Lower Austria. While the production value of cotton had amounted to 1.2 million florins for the entire Monarchy in 1766, by 1781 this value had soared to 3.5 million florins in Lower Austria alone.30 While the cotton manufactory in Schwechat had processed 30 tons of cotton in 1730 and 50 tons in the 1750s, in 1781 the cotton manufactories in Lower Austria processed an aggregate total of 420 tons of cotton. Employment rose five-fold between the middle of the century, when the Schwechat manufactory employed 20,000 spinners and weavers in a putting-out system, and 1781, when the workforce employed in cotton production amounted to 100,000 workers in all of Lower Austria. While cotton import restrictions imposed in 1784 hindered the growth of the sector, expansion surged again after 1797, and production remained high until the deep recession in the Habsburg economy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the lifting of the continental blockade.31

Growth can be detected in other industrial sectors. Wool production in Bohemian rose dramatically in the second half of the eighteenth century, as the increasing employment figures demonstrate. Between 1731 and 1775, the number of workers employed in Bohemia’s wool industry doubled, while between 1775 and 1788 this labor force increased by a further 80 percent. After that date, employment numbers shrank slightly due to technological improvements that reduced the number of workers needed per loom. In Bohemia and Moravia, the workforce employed by the wool sector more than doubled between 1775 and 1788 (increasing from 80,000 to 152,000, spinners excluded), while the overall demographic growth amounted to barely 20 percent. This expansion of the workforce went hand in hand with the rising number of manufactories that organized putting-out systems. In the Brno district, for instance, in 1775 there was one cloth factory, while in 1789 the number had risen to four, all which were located in the Moravian capital city of Brno itself. The growth in output was significant. In 1797, the overall production of woolen goods in Bohemia amounted to 5.5 million florins, which represented 20 percent of manufacture production value in the province. These figures represent a nearly eight-fold increase in current terms compared to 1731 figures and roughly four-fold in real terms.32 The production of woolen goods, mainly cloth, also grew in other provinces, such as Carinthia and Upper Austria, where only one manufactory (in Linz) was allowed to operate. In terms of workforce, this factory peaked in 1790 with 2,289 factory employees and 47,947 putting-out workers.33

Linen production also underwent considerable growth in the second half of the eighteenth century in traditional regions such as Bohemia, the Mühlviertel (in the north of Upper Austria), the Waldviertel (in the north of Lower Austria), and Vorarlberg, all of which benefitted from the disappearance of Silesian competition after 1742. Only with the growing production in cotton textiles and shrinking production costs per fabricated unit caused by mechanization in the early nineteenth century did the expansion of linen production come under pressure.34 Overall textile production in Bohemia grew by an annual average of 3.7 percent in the late eighteenth century.35 Glass production expanded as well, and as many as 52 glassworks existed in Bohemia in 1752.36 Iron production also grew in the second half of the eighteenth century. Towards the end of the century, production was expanding at an average growth rate of 2 percent per year, and growth accelerated further between 1796 and 1803, when the rate hiked to 4.5 percent, not far from that of Great Britain (6.9 percent annual growth between 1796 and 1806).37 Despite this, the Habsburg iron industry lost its leading position on European markets. While in 1767 Styria turned out as much pig iron as the whole of England, by 1780 all the Habsburg Alpine provinces, where 80 percent of all iron production under the Habsburgs was located, were only producing as much as one-third of the British iron output. First and foremost, however, this reflects the dramatic growth of the British economy due to rapid industrialization since the 1760s.38

In sum, over the course of the eighteenth century, most of the western provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy bore witness to steady and dynamic growth in the proto-industrial sector, which crystallized in both the increasing output of existing industries and the emergence of new industrial sectors. Although the leading export products, namely glass, linen, and iron, had lost ground on the Western European markets by the end of the Napoleonic Wars,39 the Habsburg economy was able to increase the share of manufactured goods among its exports between 1800 and 1807 (from 44 percent to 61 percent), which indicates the international competitiveness of Habsburg proto-industry.40

The examples of enterprises and scattered quantitative evidence thus demonstrates that proto-industry gained a stronghold in the western regions of the Habsburg Monarchy over the course of the eighteenth century. However, this does not mean that there were no hierarchies or disparities between the Austrian and Bohemian lands. By 1790, of 280 manufactories in the western Hereditary Lands, half were located in Lower Austria alone and a further 30 percent were found in Bohemia. This clearly indicates that growth and economic transformation also led to spatial stratification within the core areas of the Monarchy.41 To be sure, the hierarchies between western core areas were smoother than those separating cores and peripheries, as we shall see below. Also, agricultural activities were far from absent in the regions undergoing proto-industrialization: The workforce employed in agriculture amounted to 78 percent in Bohemia in 1756 and 75 percent in the Austrian provinces in 1790.42

Apart from the availability of capital, the factors that determined the success of the process of proto-industrialization and the emergence of core areas was the presence of ecological resources, such as wood and water, and a plentiful rural workforce. While skilled workers were often recruited abroad from the Austrian Netherlands, France, and England, strategies to lower wages included employing women and children and a bound work force of beggars, orphans, and prisoners, who were sent by the government to work in sweathouses beginning in the late seventeenth century.43 Economic policies were also of crucial importance. The legal division between local crafts (Polizeigewerbe) and the production of manufactured goods for the trans-regional trade (Kommerzialgewerbe), defined in 1754, created ways around guild restrictions and thus facilitated the establishment of manufactories in urban areas.44 After the international economic crisis of the early 1770s, the abolition of internal custom duties in 1775 lowered transaction costs in the western provinces, triggering a new boom the effects of which were finally consolidated with the protectionist trade policy implemented in 1784 and 1788. This led to a sweeping expansion of proto-industrial production during the 1780s and 1790s.45 Finally, the limitation of serfdom in 1781/82 enhanced the mobility of the rural workforce, which had a particularly deep impact in Bohemia, where demesne lordship (Gutswirtschaft) was especially significant.46

The Emergence of a Core-periphery Dynamic between the West and the East in the Habsburg Monarchy: Trans-regional Division of Labor Embodied by Trade Relations

In contrast with the western core regions, the eastern territories of the Monarchy did not participate to an equal degree in the process of dynamic proto-industrialization over the course of the eighteenth century. This is clearly visible in the dominant position of agricultural activities in these territories. On average, in Hungary, Transylvania, the Banat, Galicia, and Bukovina, around 90 percent of the population worked in agriculture as late as 1790.47 In the aforementioned statistics no manufactories feature in Hungary or Galicia in 1790. However, administrative sources reveal the existence of some factories in both territorial complexes. 34 such factories, dedicated to the production of textiles, glass, and porcelain, existed in Galicia in 1773 and 11 in 1808.48 In addition to this, an extensive linen-processing sector, based mostly on the putting-out system, existed in the barren Carpathian Mountains in the south of Galicia. Although the goods produced were rather crude in quality, in the region around Andrychów in the western district, this rural population also produced linen commodities for foreign markets in Western Europe and the American colonies overseas, while a small fraction of their output also was sold on markets in Bohemia and Austria in the 1780s.49 The data suggest that the number of manufactories in these regions contracted between the 1770s and the early nineteenth century, which is confirmed by other sources documenting the increasing competitive pressure posed by Bohemian and Austrian proto-industrial goods on the Galician market. The tendency, therefore, is the exact opposite of the one that unfolded in the core regions of the Monarchy.50

Similarly, Hungary was not limited exclusively to agricultural activities, as the mining plants (especially copper), iron, and linen production in Upper Hungary underline. And proto-industrial activities stretched far beyond what today is Slovakia, so that in three phases (between the 1710s and the 1730s, during the 1760s, and again between 1784 and 1789), manufactories were founded in a vast range of branches (including textile production, chemical and paper fabrication, and ironworks) in the Hungarian territories. However, the number of these companies was smaller, the quality of their products lower, and their production means less advanced than in the Bohemian and Austrian core areas.51 Thus, by 1770, in Hungary (not including Transylvania) there were 19 manufactories compared with 58 in the Bohemian and Austrian provinces.52 Most of these plants, which had been chiefly founded between 1765 and 1770, were gone by 1784 because of the arrival of Bohemian and Austrian proto-industrial goods. At a later stage, new textile manufactories were founded in Hungary, but the quality of their products never reached the standards of those being produced in the western core areas.53 In any case, proto-industrial production in Hungary covered a rather tiny fraction of the regional demand, as the rising export figures of the western regions to Hungary and Transylvania demonstrate. Thus, in 1784 86.9 percent of Austro-Bohemian exports to the Hungarian territories consisted of manufactures, while this value amounted to 89.1 percent in the case of Galicia. Among the most relevant commodities sold in Hungary and Transylvania, woolen products ranked first (2.2 million florins), followed in importance by linen (1.3 million), silk (1.2 million), and processed mining products (618,702 florins). Conversely, imports to Austria and Bohemia essentially consisted of foodstuffs and raw materials (61.6 percent in the case of Hungary and 92.3 percent in the case of Galicia).54 This clearly underlines the status of Hungary and Galicia as internal peripheries within Habsburg Central Europe, as they provided consumer markets for finished commodities and raw materials and foodstuffs necessary to the core areas, which these areas needed for the creation of these products, both in terms of direct means of production and as nourishment for workers.

This position of Hungary and Galicia as export markets for the Bohemian and Austrian proto-industries was not a new phenomenon emerging in the 1770s and 1780s. According to commercial statistics for 1735, Bohemia exported woolen cloth for a value of 1 million florins, which constituted one sixth of the total exports, to a range of countries and regions, which included Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania.55 With the increasing woolen production and the diversification of proto-industrial activities in the Austrian and Bohemian provinces, these export figures rose significantly. According to the Hungarian trade statistic, 56.6 percent of overall imports in 1748 were composed of semi-finished and finished commodities, a value that grew slightly to 61.5 percent by 1782.56 These structural changes were intrinsically linked to a massive quantitative expansion of commodity exchange. While the exports of the western Hereditary Lands grew modestly between 1733–39/41 and 1743/52 from 2.1 million florins by annual average to 2.5 million florins, afterwards they increased rapidly to 6.6 million florins between 1767 and 1780.57

This growth tendency continued in the following decades, so that exports of the western regions to the Hungarian territories reached an annual average of 9.8 million florins between 1783 and 1785 according to the statistics of the Austro-Bohemian customs union (and a much lower 7.2 million florins according to the Hungarian statistics in 1783/84).58 By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, this value had more than doubled. While the increase over this rather long period was clearly more modest than it had been in the previous decades, downward effects of the wars have to be taken into account. A dynamic growth of the western regions’ exports to the Hungarian territories, nevertheless, set in precisely in the immediate post-Napoleonic years, reaching 25.1 million florins in 1815 and 34.7 million florins in 1816, but this value could not be exceeded in the following years, as 31.3 million florins was the top export value in 1822.59

Apart from Hungary, the exports from the western regions also expanded to the Galician market, the annexation of which in the first partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1772 led to a politically-induced competitive edge for the Habsburg proto-industry on a formerly external market. This institutionally supported advantage translated into an overwhelmingly rapid expansion of exports, as the fivefold increase of the western regions’ exports to Galicia in only four years (between 1779 and 1783) from 343,043 to 1,706,197.21 florins demonstrates.60

In any case, foreign export markets were still more relevant to the western Habsburg proto-industry, claims and narratives on Habsburg protectionism notwithstanding. While in 1783, 17.2 million florins of foreign exports clearly exceeded the 11 million florins of commodities sold on domestic markets, in 1818, 31.3 million florins of foreign exports took the lead over 28.1 million florins of domestic exports, and in 1822 the corresponding figures were 42.2 million against 31.4 million florins, pointing to a growing ratio in favor of foreign export markets after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Domestic markets were only more important temporarily in 1816 and 1817 (with margins of 5.5. and 4.8 million florins respectively).61 However, domestic markets are statistically underestimated, as all market transaction within the western regions forming part of the customs union were not registered anymore due to the prevailing custom regimes.

Nevertheless, these figures underline a steady growth in foreign exports at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This growth was strong in the 1780s, when the exports of commodities produced in the Hereditary lands to international markets rose from 17.2 million to 19.1 million florins between 1783 and 1787 (thus by a rate of 2.6 percent as an annual average). This expansion was exceeded between 1816 and 1822 (with a 6.3 percent annual average growth rate), despite the postwar depression and the often-noted effects of increasing competition from British manufacture imports on the European continent.62 Only during the war and the continental blockade did foreign exports grow far less dynamical (by 1.5 percent as an annual average between 1787 and 1814), although there were strong oscillations during the long war, with some years already exceeding the value of 1814.63

Apart from distortions these data may hide because of the irregular adaption of prices,64 the export figures suggest that the western regions of the Habsburg Monarchy enlarged the exports of their commodities at quite a substantial rate, which only for the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century meant an overall increase of exports both on domestic and international markets by a factor of 2.6 (from 28.3 million florins in 1783 to 73.6 million florins in 1822).65 This enlargement of sales was thus an important factor explaining the industrial transformation of the western regions of the Habsburg Monarchy, even if not all of them participated equally in this developmental process.

Still, while this expansion of Bohemian and Austrian proto-industrial exports to the eastern peripheries was an undeniably important element of these regions’ growth and their economic transformation, this does not necessarily mean that the imbalance of trade structures led automatically to a quantitative imbalance in trade. Quite the opposite took place, at least concerning the Hungarian territories. While the surplus for the Hungarian lands in trade with the custom unions between the Bohemian and Austrian lands had amounted to 1.6 million florins in 1743 and 1752, it rose dynamically to 2.9 million florins between 1767 and 178066 before reaching spectacular values of 7.2 and 6.7 million florins in 1783 and 1784 respectively.67 Only after the turn of the century did this tendency reverse, so that after the Hungarian trade balance surplus with the western provinces (which by then included Galicia) hit a record value of 13.6 million florins in 1814, the deficit for the western regions shrank rapidly (to 5.8 million florins in 1815) before turning into substantial surplus values between 1816 and 1818 (13.1 million florins in sum). But already in 1822, the trade balance tilted again in favor of the Hungarian part.68 The trade balance between the Hereditary Lands and Galicia, in turn, showed a clear albeit not spectacular advantage for the western regions (here including Tyrol and the Littoral) of 169,806 florins in 1779, which rose dynamically to 797,729.63 florins four years later.69

Thus, the direct and imminently measurable advantage that the western core areas of the Habsburg Monarchy reaped from the structurally unequal trade with the Eastern peripheries differed according to time and space and was quite relative regarding the Hungarian territories in the eighteenth century. However, although the Hungarian territories seemed to earn a lot more money from their commodity exchange with the western provinces, this may simply have been a form of necessary compensation for Hungary’s heavily negative balance of payment.70 In addition, negative trade accounts meant neither that Hungarian consumer markets were not beneficial for the western proto-industry nor that this relationship did not hamper Hungary’s chances for proto-industrial development in the period.

Microeconomic data reveals the significance of domestic consumer markets for the expanding proto-industrial enterprises in the Bohemian and Austrian lands. In 1773, the manager of the estate of Buchlau/Buchlov in Moravia, Prosper Count Berchtold, directed a petition to the Court Chamber in Vienna requiring an import ban or at least a high import duty for Prussian glass to newly acquired Galicia. Berchtold sought to recover an export market for the glass manufactory on his estate which he had lost in part to a newly established glass mill in Prussian Silesia.71 A similar petition sent the Bohemian nobleman Prince Auersperg through the Galician governor to Maria Theresia in February 1774. Auersperg was lobbying to lower the Galician import duty for the fustian produced on his estate of Tuppadl/Tupadly in Bohemia. Auersperg argued that this measure was compensation for the high transport costs he had to incur when exporting his textile products to the Galician markets, on which, he quickly added, the success of his entire fustian manufactory depended.72

These examples testify to the significance of the eastern peripheries’ consumer markets for the business success of the Bohemian and Austrian proto-industry precisely in its phase of expansion in the second half of the eighteenth century. And these cases also indicate clearly the role of political measures supporting this division of labor. Here again, the 1770s did not represent a new turning point. The Viennese Court had used one of his few central policy instruments, that is custom policy, to support the emergence of regionally differing and specialized economies. In 1754, the Hungarian import tariff for finished commodities from Bohemia and Austria was reduced from 30 percent to 3 percent, while duties had to be paid on Hungarian products, both industrial and agrarian, of up to 30 percent when these products were exported to the west.73 This tariff remained in force even after internal custom duties were abolished between the Bohemian and Austrian provinces in 1775, largely due to the persistent refusal of the Hungarian nobility to accept the modes of property taxation implemented in 1749 in the Bohemian and Austrian provinces.74 But still within this fiscal logic, the Court institutions pursued a very clear economic policy favoring western proto-industry to the detriment of the Hungarian periphery.

In addition to providing consumer markets, the peripheries also offered important raw materials for proto-industry, such as wool, hemp, flax, gall oak, and potash, as well as foodstuffs, mainly grain and meat. In order to guarantee provisions for the western producers and work force with these commodities, the Court institutions imposed sound high tariffs and even bans on the export of these goods abroad. This led to the increased sale of these commodities on the Habsburg domestic markets in the west, and it may also have lowered prices and led to a loss of income and profits from export abroad. This was even more severe, as the domestic market in the western provinces could not absorb the whole export production of the Hungarian territories, for example in the case of grain.75 Although not quantifiable, this loss severely damaged the development of the economy of the Hungarian territories, even in a purely peripheral framework.

While this commercial pattern between the Austro-Bohemian lands and Hungary and Galicia could be interpreted as reflecting regional specialization, in fact, it was an expression of the imbalances and spatial inequalities produced by this specific form of interregional division of labor. The impact of the unequal trade relations can be illustrated by the regional differences in income level. In 1785, a rough estimate shows that average per capita income in Austria (28 florins) and Bohemia (24 florins) was well above that in Galicia (11 florins), while the difference with Hungary (20 florins) was less strong.76 This reflects widening interregional disparities after 1750.77

It is important to underline that the dichotomy between cores and peripheries does not solely depend on the importance of agricultural and proto-industrial activities, as this would be a problematic oversimplification of production processes and relations. In fact, as Maxine Berg has pointed out, no successful proto-industrialization process could take place in the absence of a highly productive and commercialized agricultural sector.78 It is thus rather the inefficient agricultural sector of the eastern Habsburg internal peripheries (which relied on extensively managed large estates, harsh conditions of serfdom, and a traditional three-field cultivation system) that hampered its progress. In contrast, the agricultural modernization of the western regions was well underway by the end of the eighteenth century.79

Cameralism and the Creation of the Other: Images, Stereotypes, and the Civilization Discourse

The perception of these internal disparities and dependencies followed various currents of economic doctrines of the Enlightenment, among which cameralism was the most important.80 Originating in the second half of the seventeenth century in the states of the Holy Roman Empire and often described as the Central European version of mercantilism, cameralism was initially mainly concerned with fiscal arguments concerning how to increase the prince’s revenue. However, cameralist thinkers gradually developed a sophisticated theoretical system on economic development between the late seventeenth century and late eighteenth century. In their thinking, the more intense effort of the work- force occupied as central a role as trade, both domestic and international. While cameralists advocated a protectionist trade policy to spur the proto-industrial development of the domestic economy, they were strong supporters of internal market integration through the abolition of monopolies and internal custom duties and the construction of roads and canals. This stance was linked to a particular concern with space in the writings of later cameralists such as Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi or Josef von Sonnenfels, who claimed that market integration should lead to diminishing regional disparities as production factors could move freely over the state territory. Nevertheless, this should not be confounded with a free market space, as cameralists defined economic relations always within state territories and, subsequently, ascribed a major role to the state in shaping processes of economic development.81

In the Habsburg Monarchy cameralist thinking was present from the late seventeenth century, embodied mainly in the idea of “universal commerce” (Universalkommerz), understood as domestic market integration, represented by thinkers such as Wilhelm Schröder, Johann Joachim Becher, and his brother-in-law Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk, who at the same time was also the secretary of another influential cameralist, Cristobal Rojas y Spínola.82 In the course of the eighteenth century, Justi and Sonnenfels delivered a remodeled influence on the economic policies of the court and its institutions.83

Based on these arguments, I will examine here the degree to which cameralist thinkers shaped the institutional prerequisites of the internal division of labor differentiating between cores and peripheries. In particular, I consider whether this regionalization and spacialization of economic processes were linked to cultural images and stereotypes in the sense of Said’s and Chakabarty’s orientalist and postcolonial theories.

In order to trace back these images and discourses, I examine descriptive statistics, so characteristic of political discourse (Polizeiwissenschaft) in German-speaking states, and official documents. Austria over all, if she only will, a key cameralist treatise written by the above-mentioned Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk in 1684, presented a picture of the relative economic subordination of the Habsburg Monarchy to the core areas of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands and France. Although in von Hörnigk’s famous work no internal disequilibrium is detected in the Habsburg economy, it nonetheless contains the first hints at the regional imbalances. Thus, von Hörnigk points to the production of woolen and linen textiles in Silesia and Upper and Inner Austria, praising the “diligence” of Silesian weavers, while Hungary is labeled a “true bread, lard, and meat pit.”84

These early differences between a proto-industrial West and an agrarian East became progressively more acute and were more directly linked with economic factors over the course of the eighteenth century. In 1770/71, the Council of War ordered a series of reports in order to assess the military capacity of the Monarchy’s population. The political comments in the reports concerning Bohemia and Austria pointed out differences in the degree of development and occasionally linked these differences to the ethnic identities of Slavs (Czechs, Slovenes) and Germans. While work ethos, social discipline concerning housekeeping and alcohol consumption, and health conditions were scrutinized, in the western regions of the Habsburg Monarchy these differences were not mapped according to orientalist models.85 In other words, these differences in the degree of development did not lead to the construction of stereotypes, which suggests that the imbalances between internal cores and peripheries within the western half of the Monarchy were not as severe as between the West and the East.

The disparities between western cores and eastern peripheries were, in turn, visible in the discourse. Between the 1780s and early 1820s, several statistical works were published that constructed a pejorative image of eastern territories such as Hungary, Transylvania, the Banat, Croatia, and Galicia. In particular, the native populations (Magyars, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews) were accused of laziness, drunkenness, leading a dirty lifestyle, bad housekeeping, irresponsible use of money, and, as follows, indebtedness.86 In contrast, German settlers were praised for their well-built houses and their diligence. These descriptions were brimming with openly pejorative adjectives. Serbian peasants settling in the military frontier in Croatia were compared to “wild animals” by the statistician Andreas Demián in 1804.87 Serbs, Croats, and Vlachs (Romanians) were labeled “natural men” (by Demian and Martin Schwartner), who needed “civilizing” before they could partake of economic progress.88 Also, Galicia was targeted by the civilizing discourse after its annexation in 1772. In the 1780s and up to the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Poles, Jews and Ruthenians were repeatedly labeled backward, “dirty,” and “lazy.” Their low cultural status required that they be civilized before they could become part of enlightened mankind and participate in the Monarchy’s wealth-generating projects. The invention of a new province, as pointed out by Larry Wolff,89 went hand in hand with the portrayal of a backward space which “had not yet become as advanced as its neighbours”90 and which, it follows, had to be “lifted up” and “civilized” by the Habsburg authorities.91 At the peak of this discourse, Galicia was compared to “El Dorado,” Peru, India, and Siberia, i.e. it was symbolically identified with non-European colonies.92

Cultural Images and the Interregional Division of Labor

As these examples clearly illustrate, the core-periphery-dichotomy in Habsburg Central Europe was translated into a definition of the peripheral “other” in pejorative cultural terms. This “other” was dirty, did not work assiduously, was prone to drinking too much, spent too much, and in general had only a low cultural status. This orientalizing discourse explained regional development differences according to a culturalist agenda: it is the culture inherent to peripheral societies which makes them poorer than core regions. Consequently, the dominant narrative claimed that these obstacles had to be removed before any successful catch-up with core regions could occur.

However, a critical analysis of these discourses and their relation to expressions of economic interests and self-representation of the core areas exposes them as a mercantilist agenda expressed in orientalist terms. One prime example is trade. A government report dated March 1, 1762 stated, “The true commercial relationship between Hungary and the German Hereditary lands seems to respond to the principle ceteribus paribus; Hungarians, as favored subjects, should not become too rich in terms of money, but should remain prosperous in terms of natural products, so that these can be the food of Austria, which, desirably, should increase its population, industry, and manufactories.”93 Only a few years later, the Commercial Council claimed that proto-industrial production in Hungary was to be limited to the absolute bare minimum in order to maintain the “natural trade so profitable for the state.” Hungary should be confined to the proto-industrial activities that posed no competition to the western core areas, but should, above all, deliver the materials necessary for proto-industrial production in Austria and Bohemia.94

This is a restatement of the mercantilist principle according to which money should not cross the borders of the state, so it can add to the wealth of the prince and his subjects. Interestingly, however, in this, case the principle is applied to territories that were part of the Habsburg state, although they had been left out of the administrative and fiscal reforms implemented after the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748. While this was one of the reasons why Hungary had been excluded from the abolition of custom tariffs between Austria and Bohemia in 1775, custom policy had farther-reaching goals, such as maintaining the structural differences between a proto-industrial west and an agrarian east, which contradicted cameralist concepts, which in theory envisaged equilibrated regional development.95 A practical institutional consequence of this discourse was the already mentioned unequal custom duties that were levied on western against Hungarian products after 1754.

This stance of leading court institutions was eventually also shared by the monarch. Queen Maria Theresia, who in 1765 had stressed the “usefulness” of the foundation of manufactories in Hungary and had even issued a decree that liberated state subsidies and permitted privileges to be granted to newly founded manufactories in Hungary,96 changed her position dramatically in 1767, after failing to persuade the Hungarian nobility to accept property taxation in exchange for easing custom duties. In 1771, she stated that as long as the Hungarian nobility did not accept taxation, no support or official recognition was to be granted to manufactories in Hungary that potentially would threaten the sales of Bohemian and Austrian proto-industrial plants. Here, the unequal custom duties were reaffirmed.97

Although during Joseph II’s reign between 1780 and 1790, the Viennese Court declared its willingness to support the development of proto-industry in Hungary, the measures imposed earlier where not derogated. The abolition of the Hungarian import custom duties on western industrial products between 1786 and 1793 strengthened the position of the core areas’ proto-industrial enterprises on the Hungarian markets even further. The court, however, now supported the immigration of skilled workers to Hungary, granted subsidies to selected manufactories, and eliminated the internal customs barrier between Hungary and Transylvania in 1784. This policy, however, was abandoned after Joseph’s death. At the same time, the protectionist foreign custom regime introduced in 1784 and reinforced four years later also strengthened the position of Bohemian and Austrian proto-industrial enterprise in Hungary against foreign competitors. Despite the (in any case limited) measures for fostering proto-industrial activity in Hungary, as late as the early nineteenth century, Hungary was still an agriculturally-dominated economy, which confirms its status as an internal periphery.98

Galicia, which was incorporated into the Bohemian and Austrian customs regime in 1785, was given a similar role in the internal division of labor.99 Even before the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania, the local Commercial Council in Austrian Silesia defined the neighboring territory as “a second America” and hoped to “attract Cracow, L’viv and Kamieniec-Podolski’s trade to Austria.”100 Colonial imaginary, therefore, provided a readymade pretext for an argument in support of the application of mercantilist policies in a territory over which political control should be established. After imperial troops had occupied the new province in summer 1772, the merchant guild of Inner Austria addressed the Court Chamber to express its interest in “being among the first to draw benefits from this new successful acquisition” and expand trade with the northeastern province, as the provincial governor reported to the Court Chamber in Vienna.101 In fact, single entrepreneurs and proto-industrial activities were granted custom privileges in the first years after the annexation of Galicia, while the import of foreign competitors was forbidden, as mentioned above.102

However, while the Court Chamber was eager to promote the export of Bohemian and Austrian manufactures to Galicia, it handled Galicia’s custom policy carefully. Already in 1774, export tariffs were lowered to only 5/12 percent, and in 1776 import duties for Galician commodities to the western regions were cut from 20 to 4 percent.103 After attempts to persuade Prussia to sign a trade agreement that would have guaranteed Galicia’s exports on the Vistula River to Gdańsk failed, the new province was incorporated into the Austro-Bohemian customs union in 1785.104 While no institutional barriers prevented Galicia from integrating economically with the western regions from that moment, Galicia’s trade structure was further peripheralized.105

This was clearly in line with the perception of the bureaucracy, which by and large considered Galicia “destined to agriculture by nature,” as the provincial councilor Ernest Traugott Kortum stated in 1786.106 In addition, custom policy was only one instrument with which to regulate regional economic development and supra-regional competition. As in the case of Hungary, in Galicia crafts and industrial policy was another one. Thus, while granting loans, subsidies, and privileges to single proto-industrial businessmen in Galicia between the 1770s and the early 1790s, the bureaucracy up to the monarchs carefully ensured that these new plants not create additional competition for the Austrian and Bohemian firms on the Galician market so that support was only granted after assuring that these initiatives put forward were complementary to, and did not pose a competitive risk to, existing manufactories in the Bohemian and Austrian core regions.107 In some cases, the impact of pejorative cultural images on the arguments backing the rejection of funding applications is visible, for example when Emperor Joseph II turned down a funding petition for support for a silk manufactory with this claim that “Galicia is not a country where silk manufactories can be a successful business.”108 In the 1790s, the state withdrew its support entirely owing to financial shortages.109

In sum, while both custom and industrial policies were not at all designed to harm the eastern peripheries, they persistently were characterized by a prevalence of the interests of the Austrian and Bohemian core regions and their proto-industry, both in terms of maintaining consumer markets in the periphery as well as by obtaining resources, in particular raw materials, for their production. The state policy was thereby influenced by a pejorative perception of the peripheries’ economy and society, which started as a description of poverty and underdevelopment but all too easily ended up in a justification of the imbalances and an explanation and at the same time dismissal of them as the result of cultural or ethnic factors. From this, it was only one step to the instrumentalization and operationalization of this discourse in order to reinforce the institutional arrangement that supported the core regions’ economic dominance over the eastern peripheries.

Conclusions

Habsburg Central Europe was characterized by profound dichotomies between core and peripheral areas after the middle of the eighteenth century. While proto-industrial regions in the west managed to expand their economic profile in terms of both quantitative growth and qualitative development, extensive agrarian production in eastern peripheries did not undergo a comparable transformation. While the East-West-dichotomy is an oversimplification obscuring the presence of peripheral spaces in the west, such as raw material extraction and low-productive agriculture, and core areas in the east, such as craft production sites, it is, to some extent, justified by the fact that peripheral spaces in the west could expect to fare a good deal better than core areas in the east as far as future development was concerned. The East–West split is attested to not only by the productive profiles of each region, but also by their mutual exchange relations. Western regions largely exported manufactured products to the Hungarian and Galician territories in the east, while mainly importing foodstuffs and raw materials. Even if this exchange relation did not bring the western core regions imminently measurable gains in terms of commercial balance surplus, the core regions benefitted by these enlarged consumer markets and the relatively cheap acquisition of raw materials and foodstuffs. This relationship was heavily supported by the court institutions and their customs, trade, and industrial policies. Cultural perception is the other face of this coin and does nothing but confirm the analysis. First, the perception of spatial differences intensified over the course of the eighteenth century, as economic factors were translated into a culturalist narrative defining the eastern peripheries’ status. These stereotypes covered a wide range of clichés: a low work ethos, high alcohol consumption, a tendency to spend more than means would warrant, widespread social poverty, all condensed into narratives surrounding the idea of the “natural man” and the “wild animal.” Subsequently, a civilizing mission was advocated, a mission the alleged goal of which was to create the conditions necessary for these regions and their populations to participate effectively in economic progress. This discourse clearly demonstrates an orientalist logic, as spatial disparities are blamed on the attitude of the peripheral population, rather than on structural economic factors, including power relations. The official and statistical discourse of the government, for its part, assumed and displayed these power relations in policies concerning trade and proto-industry, where the interests of core areas prevailed over those of peripheries. The pejorative cultural images of the eastern peripheries not only expressed the hegemony of the core areas, but effectively contributed to maintaining the peripheral status of some regions within the Habsburg economy in the late eighteenth century.

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1 Hopkins and Wallerstein, “Grundzüge.”

2 Nolte, Internal Peripheries; idem, Europäische Innere Peripherien; idem and Bähre, Innere Peripherien.

3 Nolte, “Konzept.”

4 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

5 Said, Orientalism.

6 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe.

7 Wallerstein, World-System II, 234.

8 Ibid., 234–36.

9 Otruba, “Schlesien,” 95; Boldorf, “Weltwirtschaftliche Verflechtungen,” 129.

10 Dickson, Finance and Government, 2:99.

11 Gasser, “Karl VI.,” 35; Beer, “Handelspolitik,” 30; Klíma, “English Merchant Capital,” 36.

12 Komlosy, Grenze, 25, 45, 61–63, 103, 133; Freudenberger, Lost Momentum, 24.

13 Regarding the difference between growth of output as quantitative criteria and qualitative development understood as structural economic change, see DuPlessis, Transitions, XI–XII.

14 Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte, 172, 177; Freudenberger, Lost Momentum, 18–19.

15 Matis, “Betriebsorganisation,” 411.

16 Ibid., 427; Cerman and Ogilvie, “Einleitung,” 10–11; DuPlessis, Transitions, 206–07.

17 Matis, “Betriebsorganisation,” 413–14, 431–33.

18 Cerman and Ogilvie, “Einleitung,” 18.

19 Ibid., 31, 102; Tremel, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, 256, 260; Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte, 132.

20 Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik, 171, 180; Häusler, Massenarmut, 27.

21 Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 93; Komlosy, “Austria and Czechoslovakia,” 50.

22 Klíma, “English Merchant Capital,” 41–42; idem, “Manufakturen,” 145–46.

23 Freudenberger, Lost Momentum, 210.

24 Idem, “Woollen-Goods Industry,” 390.

25 Klíma, “Manufakturen,” 145.

26 Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 109.

27 Freudenberger, Lost Momentum, 42.

28 Komlosy, “Austria and Czechoslovakia,” 50–51; Freudenberger, Industrialization, 22, 26–27, 42, 49; Klíma, “Manufakturen,” 150–51; idem, “Probleme,” 105.

29 Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik, 180–81; idem, Konsumgesellschaft, 278.

30 Ibid., 279.

31 Idem, Ökonomie und Politik, 181–82.

32 Freudenberger, “Woolen-Goods Industry,” 393–95, 397. For inflation see: Otruba, “Staatshaushalt,” 219.

33 Komlosy, “Austria and Czechoslovakia,” 50.

34 Cerman, “Proto-industrielle Entwicklung,” 161–62, 164, 174; Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik, 182–83.

35 Komlos, “Austria,” 220.

36 Klíma, “Glassmaking Industry,” 505.

37 Komlos, “Austria,” 220; Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik, 184.

38 DuPlessis, Transitions, 220; Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 109; idem, Ökonomie und Politik, 185.

39 Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 99.

40 Kaps, “Gescheitertes Aufholen,” 109.

41 Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte, 172.

42 Good, Aufstieg, 29; Komlosy, Grenze, 127.

43 Bernard, “Poverty,” 240; Häusler, Massenarmut, 29, 37, 39, 49; Freudenberger, Lost Momentum, 108, 113, 147; Good, Aufstieg, 33; Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 110; Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte, 178, 180–82, 184–85.

44 Freudenberger, Lost Momentum, 98.

45 Komlosy, “Austria and Czechoslovakia,” 53; Liebel-Weckowitz, “Modernisierungsmotive,” 156.

46 Good, Aufstieg, 38.

47 Ibid., 29.

48 Kaps, Ungleiche Entwicklung, 113.

49 Ibid., 271–72, 288–89.

50 Ibid., 285–87.

51 Heckenast, “Zustand,” 241.

52 Špiesz, “Wirtschaftspolitik,” 62–63.

53 Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 109; Cerman, “Proto-industrielle Entwicklung,” 164; Špiesz, “Wirtschaftspolitik,” 67.

54 Own calculation according to the official trade statistics: Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), Kabinettsarchiv (KA), Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschriften, 118:523–90.

55 Myška,“Proto-Industrialisierung in Böhmen,” 184.

56 Hassinger, “Außenhandel,” 86.

57 Wellmann, “Handelspolitik,” 284.

58 Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA), Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv (FHKA), Neue Hofkammer (NHK), Kommerz Nr.144: OÖ + NÖ Akten 1785–1795, 49 ex Julio 1786, Fol.706: Hauptsummarium der Waaren-Ein- und Ausfuhr im Militair Jahr 1783 aus den Merkantil-Tabellen der Deutschen dem Tarif vom Jahre 1775 unterworfenen Erbländer gezogen, Waaren-Ausfuhr im Militair Jahr 1783; HHStA, KA, Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift, 118:321–77, 411–19, 523–90, 643–45, 651–53; 119:35–96.

59  ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerzakten, Nr.1723, Fol.306, 393–95, 526–27; Nr.1724, Fol.633–34, 857–58; Nr.1725, Fol.201–02.

60  Own calculation: Grossmann, “Statistik,” 225; HHStA, KA, Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift 118:200–01.

61  Own calculation: ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerz Nr.144: OÖ + NÖ Akten 1785–1795, 49 ex Julio 1786, Fol.706; Kommerzakten, Nr.1723, Fol.306, 393–95, 526–27; Nr.1724, Fol.633–34, 857–58; Nr.1725, Fol.201–02.

62 Freudenberger, Lost Momentum, 81.

63 All growth rates represent my calculations based on: HHStA, KA, Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift 118:39; ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerzakten, Nr.1723, Fol.306, 393–95, 526–27; Nr.1724, Fol.633–34, 857–58; Nr.1725; Fol.201–02. Hassinger, “Außenhandel,” 79–80. For values during the wars see: Otruba, “Aussenhandel,” 37–39.

64 On this problematic see: Kaps, “Trade statistics.”

65 Own calculation based on: ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerz Nr.144: OÖ + NÖ Akten 1785–1795, 49 ex Julio 1786, Fol.706; Nr.1725, Fol.201–02.

66 Wellmann, “Handelspolitik,” 316, 318.

67 Own calculation according to Hungary’s trade statistics for 1783 and 1784: HHStA, KA, Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift 118:411–19, 643–45, 651–53.

68 Own calculation according to the official trade statistics for 1814–18, 1822 and 1825/26, 1841–50: ÖStA, FHKA Kommerzakten Nr.1723, Fol. 306, 526–27; Nr.1724, Fol. 633–34, 857–58; Nr. 1726, Fol. 749–50; 1031–32; Statistische Tafeln 1828.

69 Own calculation according to Galicia’s trade statistics for 1779 and 1783: Grossmann, “Statistik,” 225; HHStA, KA, Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift 118:200–01.h

70 Wellmann, “Handelspolitik,” 264.

71 ÖStA, FHKA NHK Kommerz U Akten Nr.1556, 10 ex Junio 1773 Hung, Fol. 10–12.

72 ÖStA, FHKA NHK Kommerz U Akten Nr.1556, 13 ex Martio 1774 Hung, Fol. 133.

73 Špiesz, “Wirtschaftspolitik,” 62.

74 Beer, “Zollpolitik,” 304.

75 Wellmann, “Handelspolitik,” 263–66.

76 Author’s own calculations according to income and population data in: Dickson, Finance and Government, 1: 134, 137, 438–39.

77 Komlosy, Grenze.

78 Berg, Age of Manufactures.

79 Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 37–71; Kaps, Ungleiche Entwicklung, 225–28.

80 Brusatti, Österreichische Wirtschaftspolitik, 15, 19–20; Klingenstein, “Mercantilism.”

81 Garner, “Cámeralisme.”

82 Benedikt, “Josephinismus”; Ingrao, Habsburg Monarchy, 92–94; Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik, 137–39.

83 Osterloh, Sonnenfels.

84 Hörnigk, Österreich über alles, 76, 90–91.

85 Hochedlinger – Tantner, Berichte; Kaps, ”Kulturelle Vorstellungswelten,” 187–89.

86 Vári, “Functions.”

87 Ibid., 44.

88 Ibid.

89 Wolff, “Inventing Galicia.”

90 Traunpaur, Dreyssig Briefe, 2–3.

91 Hacquet, Reisen, Zweyter Theil, 8; idem, Reisen, Dritter Theil, 9; Kortum, Magna Charta, 66, 134; Bredetzky, Reisebemerkungen, 2:119; idem, Beytrag, 51.

92 Bredetzky, Beytrag, 22, 58, 62; Hacquet, Reisen, Zweyter Theil, 189, 192; Traunpaur, Dreyssig Briefe, 66.

93 Beer, “Volkswirtschaft,” 19.

94 Ibid., 27.

95 Sandl, Ökonomie des Raumes, 295.

96 Sandgruber, Konsumgesellschaft, 109.

97 Špiesz, “Wirtschaftspolitik,” 63–64; Wellmann, “Handelspolitik,” 259–60, 269–71.

98 Špiesz, “Wirtschaftspolitik,” 65–67; Beer, “Handelspolitik,” 23; Heckenast, “Zustand,” 241.

99 Grossmann, Handelspolitik.

100 Beer, “Handelspolitik,” 92–93.

101 ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerz U Akten Nr.1556, 6 ex xbri 1773, Fol. 56.

102 Grossmann, Handelspolitik, 50–52.

103 Ibid., 59, 107.

104 Ibid., 374–75.

105 Kaps, Ungleiche Entwicklung, 147, 151–54.

106 Grossmann, Handelspolitik, 459.

107 Kaps, Ungleiche Entwicklung, 229–34.

108 ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerz, U Akten Nr.1558, 5 ex Januario 1783, Fol. 593.

109 Bacon, Economic Policy, 181.

2020_3_Introduction

 

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Introduction

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 9 Issue 3 (2020): 385-389 DOI: 10.38145/2020.3.385

Andrea Pető, Alexandra M. Szabó, and András Szécsényi

There was a significant debate in the Hungarian journal of social sciences and culture Kommentár in 2008 initiated by Gábor Gyáni as to whether Hungarian Holocaust research had or had not been successfully integrated into international discourse after 1989.1 One element missing from the debate was that after 1989, main concepts and the language of the discipline derived from the Western side of the (fallen) Iron Curtain. The histories of the Holocaust survivors had been only descriptive in nature, while the experiences of Jewish communities, the members of which had lived under communism was of predominant focus. There was no theoretical inquiry in Holocaust scholarship as long as the objective fact-finding was taking place, expanding on questions as to when, where, and what had happened to which actors. Historical inquiry, however, needs to extend further to explain the uncovered events and experiences.

For instance, a significant element missing from the scholarship in its entirety is gender analysis, and this observation brings to the fore the lack of discussion on methodology and the consequent absence of acknowledging developments. Hungarian scholarship of Holocaust historical inquiry with a central aim evolving around gender analytical perspectives is still nonexistent, yet there are some contributions about women and the Holocaust in the English language, for instance by Andrea Pető.2 This special edition of the Hungarian Historical Review lines up studies which draw on new modes of analyses and frameworks with the aim of achieving knowledge production on a whole new level about the Holocaust in Hungary.

The lack of innovative theoretical frameworks and other new approaches in understandings of the history of the Shoah in the Hungarian context explains the current poor state of institutionalized Hungarian Holocaust research. The consequences are not only prevalent in academia, but also in the public sphere (which influences science policy) and in shifts in public memory of the Holocaust in Hungary.

However, the current struggles for memory are far from a memory policy based on democratic consensus and development. Since illiberal states do not have an ideology but only a memory policy, the weak domestic institutionalization of Hungarian Holocaust research with low international recognition has contributed to the successful reinterpretation of the Holocaust remembrance paradigm by illiberal actors. Scholarly attempts against this were and are still being made, such as the relevant scholarly volume published on the occasion of what is referred to as the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary, which was published in Hungarian and English by CEU Press3 (a year of anniversary that is misleading as it suggests that the Holocaust in Hungary began with the German occupation in 1944 instead of with the labor service system and with the earlier deportations of Hungarian Jews, such as the deportation of Jews to Kamianets-Podilskyi in 1941, where an estimated 23,000 Jewish deportees were massacred in two days). At the same time, historical research workshops operating in Hungary mostly outside the system that ensures scientific standards and outside the international scientific frameworks are growing, and they are pursuing ad hoc research in parallel with the existing research infrastructure in support of the present government’s politics of memory.

Demonstrating the lack of new research directions in Hungary that are prevalent in international Holocaust scholarship, Andrea Pető called for the organization of a conference entitled The Hungarian Holocaust: Victimhood and Memory, together with Gábor Gyáni, Edit Jeges, and András Szécsényi and in cooperation with Central European University and the Humanities Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest on December 18, 2017. A selected number of presentations were considered for publication in Századok, the most prestigious Hungarian historical journal, for its special section dealing with the Hungarian Holocaust. The selection of conference speakers and publications mirrored the work of mostly young researchers who, despite the dwindling research infrastructure, had carried out methodologically innovative work based on archival research. The introduction to this section in Századok was censored for discussing “illiberal memory politics,” although the authors took a clear stand against this suppressive act.4 The presentation of this special issue, which took place on September 25, 2019, was met with unprecedented interest at Central European University, indicating that the Holocaust continues to be a subject of major scholarly and public interest.

Despite the controversial nature of memory politics and the lack of proper infrastructure, a new generation of researchers worked on this special issue to present new approaches and findings, thus taking an important step towards international exchange by elevating Hungarian Holocaust research onto the international stage and bringing innovative research methods from the international pool into Hungarian scholarship.

The articles in the present volume contribute to historical understandings which primarily work from the perspectives of the victims of the Holocaust. Based on the division of historical inquiry by Raul Hilberg, the Hungarian historiography of the Holocaust focuses on one of categories suggested by Hilberg: perpetrators, victims, or bystanders. This mainstream allocation, however, has been widely criticized in recent decades by many researchers worldwide, and they have offered new approaches which shift the focus to the behaviors, interactions, and dynamics among societies and communities involved in the Shoah, together with closer study of the psychological and sociological perceptions of these groups. This paradigm shift has emerged only recently in Hungarian scholarship, another significant reason as to why Hungarian historiography has only rarely constituted a serious part of the international discourse.

In recent decades, there have mostly been descriptive, fact-finding monographs published that are based on archival sources and avoid the use of private or narrative sources.5 A group of Hungarian Holocaust researchers who mainly belong to the new generation would like to break from this approach and widen the perspective of inquiry. The papers in this issue seek answers to questions concerning how Jews, who were deprived of their basic rights, forced to serve in labor service, and then, in 1944, compelled to live in ghettos and yellow star houses or deported to concentration camps, lived and survived under these extreme conditions. The histories presented here also consider how the survivors remembered their pasts in the immediate postwar setting with a specific focus on the modes in which these experiences were later recounted.

The approaches and viewpoints presented by our authors are of a wider scale. Some papers belong to the field of microhistory, while others closely examine and reflect on specific oral historical sources and narratives. The interpretations largely rest on contemporary and postwar narrative sources (memoirs, diaries, and other notes), in addition to the archival documents, which touch primarily on questions pertinent to individual life stories.

István Pál Ádám examines the case of the butchers of Budapest and considers how the governmental and municipal administration of the late Horthy-era impacted the leftists and the Jewish butchers from the issuance of the 1939 anti-Jewish law. Ádám examines the ways in which the butchers of the capital were forced to change their strategy in the postwar democratic society of Hungary. Tamás Csapody examines diaries, some of them incomplete, written by six inmates of the camps in and around Bor. They were Hungarian citizens of Jewish and other free church denominations who had been deported from Hungary in 1943 and 1944 and taken to the lager-system of Bor (Serbia), later to be brought back to Hungary in the second half of 1944 and then (some of them) taken to German concentration camps. He provides insightful content analysis and examines diaries written by six inmates, one of which is being presented for the first time in this volume. Heléna Huhák analyzes the spatial experiences of some of the inmates who were deported from Hungary to Bergen-Belsen in 1944–1945. She draws on diaries, memoirs, and correspondence in order to explore perceptions of space formed in the memories of camp inmates. Edit Jeges examines survivor accounts by Polish and Hungarian Jewish women and reflects on the nature of her primary sources. She also considers the further potentials of digital storytelling as a source and the importance of survivor memory at a time when fewer and fewer survivors remain among us. Borbála Klacsmann summarizes the roles and the activities of the Government Commission for Abandoned Property regarding the restitution of Hungarian Jews in the first three years of the postwar period, providing specific examples from Pest County through personal accounts and correspondence. Alexandra M. Szabó examines Jewish women’s experiences of miscarriages before, during, and after the Shoah through a specific case study in order to draw attention to the significance of such corporeal events from a social historical point of view. Her study considers the implications of the silence concerning women’s experiences in Holocaust research to show that gender analysis substantially adds to further knowledge production. In his case study, which partly overlaps with Huhák’s paper, András Szécsényi also concentrates on one space, a German DP camp. Szécsényi tries to reconstruct the spatial experiences of György Bognár, a former inmate of Bergen-Belsen who was taken to the Hillersleben DP camp after liberation. The paper explores space perceptions based on Bognár’s diary and the maps he drew, which Szécsényi compares with his own in-person experiences of the sites (or what remains of them). Ferenc Laczó’s paper presents German historiography from recent decades on the Hungarian Holocaust by exploring the relevant findings and conclusions of the most important German histories. Through his findings, he seeks answers to questions concerning why there has been so little institutionalized cooperation between the German and Hungarian research communities.

We would like to dedicate our work to the memory of Randolph L. Braham (1922–2018), who, as the pioneer in Hungarian Holocaust research, was a true inspiration and supportive friend of the scholars whose works are part of the present volume.

1 The articles of this debate can be found in Kommentár, no. 3, 5, 6 of 2008.

2 Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, edited by Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska (Warsaw: IBL PAN, 2015).

3 The Holocaust in Hungary Seventy Years Later, edited by András Kovács and Randolph L. Braham (Budapest: CEU Press, 2016).

4 Andrea Pető, “Áldozatok, emlékezet, jóvátétel a magyarországi holokausztkutatás új irányai,” Századok, no. 4 (2019): 639–40.

5 Gábor Gyáni, “Hungarian Memory of the Holocaust in Hungary,” The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later, edited by András Kovács and Randolph L. Braham (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), 215–30.

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