Reviewed by: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century ed. by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons John Deak Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Edited by peter crooks and timothy h. parsons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xxii, 474 pp. $126.00 (hardcover); $35.99 (paper); $29.00 (ebook). This volume of eighteen essays, spanning over 450 pages of text, collectively examines the intersection of empire and bureaucracy. Call them what you will: bean-counters, pedants, mustachioed Napoleons in love with their arbitrary authority, officials—"bureaucrats" is not necessarily a neutral term—were necessary for princes, kings, emperors, trading and colonial corporations, and imperial governments to project power and build and maintain their empire. Empires have been with us for millennia, but how did they "rule over different peoples across vast expanses of space and time?" Following the "imperial turn," which has established how much empires have been the rule and nation-states the exception, these essays ask how "real empires actually ran" (p. 3). Together these eighteen essays, including a very good introductory essay by the editors, examine empires in terms of their bureaucracies, the officials who did the work of ruling. Their subject then, is not on the discourses and mentalities that undergirded the economies of empires and the internalization of discipline, but rather on the "formal institutions of imperial governance" (p. 7). This is admittedly history of the old school, but one that has been informed by the accumulation of knowledge and practices of the social and cultural histories. [End Page 433] The essays themselves span a breathtaking breadth of time and space. Patricia Ebrey contributes an examination of bureaucracy in Song China (960–1276 a.d.). She argues that Chinese officials provided the necessary infrastructure to govern over 100 million subjects with relative effectiveness and stability. István T. Kristó-Nagy writes about Arab rulers and Persian administrators in the early years of Arab-Islamic conquest. From there we move forward in time to the Incan Empire (Chris Given-Wilson) and the Ottoman Empire (Karen Barkey). These essays help expand our idea of administrators, who they were and what they did, and how often enough they could come up with effective ways of projecting power from the center. From there, the book shifts back to the center of Europe with five essays covering the period from the late Roman Empire to the Middle Ages. Michael Whitby argues in an essay on the late Roman Empire that it was above all administrative competence combined with a unified and unifying culture that glued the disparate pieces of the Roman Empire together. A strong essay by John Haldon on bureaucracy in Byzantium makes the argument that the Eastern Roman Empire was indeed a bureaucratic state. It was the deeply-rooted institutions, staffed by Byzantine officials, which allowed the empire to weather crises. Moreover, the bureaucracy itself, belonging to a common social class, could forge connections with one another—often enough providing flexibility to a system that may have looked more rigid on paper than it actually was or needed to be. Essays follow on Carolingian military administration, for bureaucrats were often needed to raise and maintain an army; the crisis of the English State and the Angevin Empire in the turn of the thirteenth century (John Gillingham); and an essay on the importance of the word and the medium of parchment in the Late Middle Ages (Len Scales). Finally, Peter Crooks contributes an essay on England and the "brittleness of bureaucracy" from 1259 to 1453. The last section of six essays turns to the modern period and the commercial empires of Spain, Britain, and France. Christopher Storrs' essay on Spain elaborates on how an effective bureaucracy gave way to encroachment by local elites in the New World, so much so that when Spain sought to reassert its authority by promoting administrative efficiency in the early nineteenth century, it provoked resentment among its colonial subjects. Jack P. Greene's essay on Britain's overseas empire echoes this sentiment, the American colonies being a case in point. A wonderful essay by Michael Broers on Napoleon's empire...
Abstract Chapter abstract: This chapter discusses the era of reform into the 1860s. Government by bureaucrats is an expensive prospect. Austria could not solve its financial difficulties and secure necessary loans without parliamentary assistance and institutions of self-government. The Austrian state experimented with federalism, the development of local institutions of self-government, and parliamentary government during the 1860s, never fully replacing one system with the other. By the time Hungary had become its own constitutional entity and the Habsburg monarchy became the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy in 1867, the Austrian side of the monarchy had developed institutions of federalism, centralism, local government, and a strong, interventionist bureaucracy. A key feature of Austria's political development, and one which made the state all the more complicated, was that Austria had become a multinational state, with representative institutions, a monarch who continued to wear the military uniform, and a largely independent bureaucracy.
In a suspension of reverse micelles, in which the surfactant sodium dioctyl sulfosuccinate (AOT) separates a water nanodroplet from a bulk nonpolar CCl4 phase, ultrafast vibrational spectroscopy was used to study vibrational energy transfer from the nanodroplet through the AOT interfacial monolayer to the surrounding CCl4. Most of the vibrational energy from the nanodroplet was transferred to the polar AOT head group within 1.8 picoseconds and then out to the CCl4 within 10 picoseconds. Vibrational energy pumped directly into the AOT tail resulted in a slower 20- to 40-picosecond transfer of energy to the CCl4.
The many wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe put pressure on Europe’s ruling houses to develop new techniques for producing revenue to fund larger armies, build stronger fortifications, and bankroll longer campaigns. Scholars have described this dynamic in terms of the emergence of the fiscal-military state. In the words of Charles Tilly, ‘war makes the state and the state makes war’. Historians long have been able to examine the records of this process which had concrete and long-term effects, including the hiring of officials, the changes in administrative organization, altering of tax policies and methods of wealth extraction. Trickier and more elusive has been the uses and abuses of credit and finance and the ideas of political economy that underpinned the use of credit as armies became larger and wars more costly. Simon Adler’s Political Economy in the Habsburg Monarchy focuses on the writings and intellectual circle...
Reviewed by: Glanz—Gewalt—Gehorsam: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 bis 1918) ed. by Laurence Cole, Christa Hämmerle, and Martin Scheutz John Deak Glanz—Gewalt—Gehorsam: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800 bis 1918). Edited by Laurence Cole, Christa Hämmerle, and Martin Scheutz. Essen: Klartext, 2011. Pp. 433. Paper €22.00. ISBN 978-3837504095. Historical studies of Austria-Hungary have long been dominated by the paradigm of “Vienna 1900,” modernism, and the preeminence of cultural and intellectual history. The social and political history of the Habsburg Monarchy has generally focused on the nationality question in the multinational empire, with the military being hidden away or cordoned off from the rest of society. Every now and then, historians and cultural studies of the old monarchy wheel out the local military band to listen to the Radetzky March in the central square of town, as a quaint reminder that Old Austria once stood among the great powers of Europe. What we have collectively forgotten is how militarized Habsburg society was. This volume is a useful reminder that military life deeply penetrated the depths of imperial Austrian and royal Hungarian society. This observation serves as the starting point for the volume, which includes an extensive introduction, fourteen research-based articles, and a bibliographic essay. The editors explain in their introductory essay that military history, marginalized and embattled as it is, has begun to reinvent itself and is searching for interlocutors in the academy. But such reinvention has been late to come to the Habsburg Monarchy, where historical work on the military has been left to antiquarians and has often failed to participate in academic discussions. Moreover, attempts at a critical military historiography of the Habsburg Monarchy have been further marginalized by the nationally focused historiographical traditions of the central European successor states to the monarchy. This volume and its essays seek to rectify both omissions: the volume provides a truly Habsburg military history that attempts, on the one hand, to include as many former regions of the monarchy as possible and, on the other, to increase the status of military history within the framework of Habsburg central European history. This is an ambitious project, to be sure. The essays cover a number of regions, styles, and methods. As several of them mention, general conscription came one year after the introduction of parliamentary and constitutional government in 1867. While such reforms were meant to modernize the army while also opening it up to greater contact with civil society, the introduction of universal conscription had the important consequence of pulling many Austro-Hungarian citizens into the planetary orbit of military discipline, values, and ideals. Several fruitful essays explore the ways in which this integration of society and military produced frictions and how those frictions were resolved, subsumed, or healed. For instance, Rok Stergar contributes an article on the relationship of the Monarchy’s Slovenes to universal conscription. This piece discusses how universal conscription served as an equalizer and leveler among classes and national groups, as well as how [End Page 187] varied and complicated the response to military service could be within the various groupings of the Monarchy. In a similar vein, Christa Hämmerle writes on military discipline and the abuse of soldiers after the introduction of new military penal law, likewise introduced at the dawn of the constitutional era. Nicola Fontana’s article on the fortress city of Trent reminds us that civil/military relations were complicated by a multitude of factors besides national identity. Rather, the status of “fortress city” brought with it to Trent not only more soldiers and their business, but also a significant tax burden so that the city could provide adequate housing for them. Other essays investigate topics using categories of discipline, violence, and gender. While one looks at Polish and Ukrainian women-legionnaires who dressed as men to serve in combat units in World War I, another presents the case of Austro-Hungarian men who dressed as women to depict them on stages in Russian POW camps. This was intended to uphold order and remind officers of the normal lives to which they would one day return. An essay by...
