Stephan Sander-Faes

State Transformation in the Austrian Empire

Despite the copious amounts of research devoted to European state-making, there remains a major lacuna: the crucial contribution of non-state actors to the transformation of pre-modern social formations into modern states and societies, especially east of the Rhine, have not been studied yet. This project will close this gap by delivering a novel account of state-crafting as a co-production of state and non-state actors from around 1780 to 1870. Historically, this period witnessed the drastic, if non-linear, expansion of state authority into areas and contexts where it previously did not exist. Hybridity and multi-variate systems of order co-existed and whose repercussions continue to manifest themselves to this day.

Historians conventionally study the transformation of state power along three trajectories: (i) domestically, as the transition from direct and personal rule to increasingly representative and abstract governance; (ii) as an era of drastic change of intra-state relations due to the reduction of sovereign states; and (iii) through the creation of international organisations, such as the Red Cross (1861) or the Telegraph Union (1865). A reified ‘state’ is presumed the principal mover in all three contexts, by way of absorbing existing structures and territories, as well as ‘outsourcing’ state authority to a different level. Yet, there is considerable historical evidence and a large body of present-day experiences showing that these changes occurred through close cooperation between state and non-state actors, like, e.g., merchants, bankers, industrialists, or patrimonial staff. This is immediately apparent in the context of international organisations that came about by private initiative (e.g., Henri Dunant’s founding of the Red Cross) or were established, in today’s terms, as ‘public-private partnerships’ from the outset.

Until the breakthrough of the ‘institutional state’ in the final quarter of the 19^th century, ‘Europe’ consisted of a wide variety of entities and polities that —like Renaissance Italy or the premodern Holy Roman Empire—contained seemingly endless numbers of (semi)autonomous non-state actors, including merchants, bankers, and guilds. Until the abolition of feudal privileges between 1789/90 and 1848/49, one must also account for the continued existence of traditional patrimonial authority with its many different characteristics, ranging from production (demesne lordship) to social status (subjection), and from the administration of justice to staggered seigneurial rights of patronage. In short: there existed all sorts of governmental functions that are indicative of the absence of a consistent salience within one or the other state; to the contrary, ambiguities, hybrid forms of authority, and variations abounded, and they did so on all levels of power and were widely diffused across time and space.

Emphasis on these complex and contradictory dynamics of implementing centralised authority will free scholarship from prevailing, if anachronistic, projections of intentionality and presumed teleology. Instead, STATECRAFTING will connect the study of institutional development with its political, social, and economic dimensions, thereby revealing the extent to which state-building involved reciprocal, if asymmetrical, exchange between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ within a polity as well as across Europe. Fleshing out the role of state and non-state actors will be the study’s key contribution. In sum, this project will lead to a comprehensive reassessment of the growing reach, scale, and capabilities of the institutional state during The Great Transformation (Karl Polanyi). The study of how these changes were implemented by the state’s collaborators, the non-state actors, has never been told.