This article deals with the goals, practices, and transformations of collaborative research that emerged between and within bureaucratic and bourgeois models of science organization in the late Habsburg monarchy. It offers novel insights into the political, social, and epistemic dimensions of public engagement in research, and evaluates the frameworks, profit expectations, and challenges involved. As will be exemplified by joint undertakings in the High Alps, the “Orient,” and the Adriatic Sea, private-public partnerships in the form of scientific societies or institutional alliances assumed vital functions. Their stakeholders volunteered for large-scale research projects, coordinated and funded infrastructure such as field stations, research vessels, or collecting expeditions, and became driving forces in establishing new forms of intra-imperial and cross-border collaboration. As such, scientific societies are useful indicators for understanding science-related developments and for illuminating the tensions between imperialism, (inter)national aspirations, and civil-society building. Based on sources from the archives of the k.k. Meteorological Society, the Natural Scientific Oriental Society, and the Adriatic Society, this article will analyze scientific collaboration as a purposeful and power-related interaction process, oriented toward mutual benefits, that took place on three levels: between state-owned research facilities and private societies, between bureaucrats and bourgeois, and between scientists and “non-professionals.”

This article examines how the annexation of Austrian (East) Galicia emerged as a distinct political—and ultimately military—mission in St. Petersburg before the First World War. The Russian nationalist project to recover the “lost lands of Rus΄ became an extension of the domestic agenda formulated by Peter Stolypin to promote Russian political and cultural hegemony in the western provinces of the empire. The campaign to liberate Subjugated Rus΄ and defeat “Ukrainian separatism” in Galicia led St. Petersburg to become ever more deeply engaged in the complex borderland politics of the Habsburg empire in the years before the war. By 1914, the idea of Subjugated Rus΄ and “four million persecuted Russians” came to inform the whole of St. Petersburg's understanding of its relations with Vienna and created an expectation that war with Austria-Hungary was inevitable.

In 1848, Habsburg Trieste became the target of German nationalists gathered in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt parliament, born out of the revolutions of 1848, has been widely depicted as a liberal experience. Yet its nationalist stances, which included the creation of a unitary German state through the absorption of vast multiethnic regions of the Habsburg monarchy, whose Austrian crownlands were part of the German Confederation, bear witness to the illiberal nature of the Frankfurt parenthesis of 1848–1849. Notwithstanding the assimilatory tendencies of the Frankfurt parliament, Italian activists in Trieste supported the inclusion of the Habsburg port in an enlarged Germany, hoping to break away from Habsburg rule, which they portrayed as oppressive. This article argues that the contradictory Italian support for the German Confederation highlights the paradoxes at the basis of nationalist movements at their onset, while also pointing to the difficulty that nation-states would soon witness in dealing with other ethnic groups within their borders. On the contrary, it was the Habsburg monarchy that, in its centuries-long tradition of accommodating different ethnicities into its fold, represented what to present-day observers comes closer to political liberalism than the so-called liberal national parties that opposed Habsburg rule.

The Habsburg Monarchy has often been called a “Europe en miniature.” A diversity of political territories and spaces, nations and nationalities, languages, denominations, and churches was typical throughout the 19th century. This article addresses the complexity with a fresh approach. Drawing on the new history of emotion, it combines new perspectives of territories, spaces, and loyalties in order to shed fresh light on nation building processes within the empire.

If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive state in the decades before the First World War, they have yet to fully examine contemporaneous European debates about Austria's legitimacy and place in the future world order. As the intertwined fields of law and social science began during this period to elaborate a binary distinction between “modern” nation-states and “archaic” multinational “empires,” Austria, like other composite monarchies, found itself searching for a legally and scientifically valid justification for its continued existence. This article argues that Austrian sociology provided such a justification and was used to articulate a defense of the Habsburg Monarchy and other supposedly “abnormal” multinational states. While the birth of the social sciences is typically associated with Germany and France, a turn to sociology also occurred in the late Habsburg Monarchy, spurred by legal scholars who feared that the increasingly hegemonic idea of nation-based sovereignty threatened the stability of the pluralistic Austrian state. Proponents of the “sociological idea of the state,” notably the sociologist, politician, and later president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish-Jewish sociologist and jurist Ludwig Gumplowicz, challenged the concept of statehood advanced by mainstream Western European legal philosophy and called for a reform of Austria's law and political science curriculum. I reveal how, more than a century before the “imperial turn,” Habsburg actors came to reject the emerging scholarly distinction between “nations” and “empires” and fought, with considerable success, to institutionalize an alternative to nationalist social scientific discourse.

Rudolf von Habsburg was a recurring motif in Austrian literature after the assumption of an Austrian imperial title by Emperor Francis II/I in 1804. These depictions were nourished by an enthusiasm for the Middle Ages circulating at the beginning of the nineteenth century and focused on the House of Habsburg and the establishment of Habsburg rule in Central Europe in the thirteenth century. As the ancestor of the ruling dynasty, Rudolf von Habsburg was idealized as the symbolic figure of identification for a collective state patriotism, a depiction that emphasized the historic mission of the dynasty and the legitimacy of its rule in the recently established empire. To this end, several complementary strategies—including divine providence, feudal approaches, classical genealogies, German-Austrian patriotism, and historical as well as contemporary references—were employed in texts to construct the Habsburg dynasty's claim to power in Central Europe. The past described in the texts, however, had little in common with historical reality but was rather an artificial design to justify Habsburg hegemony in the region.

This article examines the case of a Bosnian brother and sister at the center of a diplomatic dispute between Austria and the Ottoman Empire in 1852. Mara Illić had to cross the border into Austria in order to board a ship that would take her to Anatolia with the household of a paşa who had been banished. Milan called upon Austrian authorities to “liberate” Mara, whom he claimed had been enslaved when she was “forced” to convert to Islam as a young child. Austria's defense of its seizure of the girl and the Ottomans' insistence that she be returned reflect tension over sovereignty, jurisdiction, and personhood. The border brings into stark relief the conflict between different ways of conceptualizing categories like freedom and slavery, contract and coercion, confession and nationality.