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The Habsburg Civil Service and Beyond: Bureaucracy and Civil Servants from the Vormärz to the Inter-War Years. Edited by Franz Adlgasser and Fredrik Lindström. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019. 300 pp.

The historiography on the Habsburg Monarchy has undergone significant shifts in recent decades, including a reevaluation of the role nationalism played in society and a revision of the economic, social, and political disintegration of the empire prior to the Great War. The Habsburg Civil Service and Beyond, the result of a workshop organized in 2015 in Vienna, contributes to an understanding of these shifts and proposes new perspectives on the history of the civil service. The empirical case studies in the volume, assembled in a more or less chronological order, reflect on two key issues identified in the two introductory chapters (by Fredrik Lindström and Gary B. Cohen). One goal is to overcome “the dominance of nation-state centred historiography in East-Central Europe,” which undermines “the foundation for a proper Habsburg historiography” (p.25). The problem of methodological nationalism is that national and nationalist historiography builds on an analytical category—the nation— that does not spring from scientific concerns but rather from ideological and political influence. Furthermore, the focus on the institutional framework of the Habsburg conglomerate state (multilayered both horizontally and vertically) allows the contributors to the volume to concentrate on the relationship between state and society. Three points stand out in this regard: governmental structures seem to have been more dynamic and adaptable than previously thought, there was a growing popular demand for new services on the part of the state, and the relationship between governmental authority and the citizenry fundamentally changed due to increasingly variegated civil society, political parties, and interest groups. Many of the case studies adopt a social history perspective and describe recruitment patterns and professionalization tendencies in the civil service as well as the social origin, social status, and prestige of the bureaucrats themselves. The common rationale is to provide “biographical and collective biographical research on individuals and groups of civil servants,” which is missing from the works of pioneers such as Waltraud Heindl and Karl Megner (p.7). The micro-level analysis of civil servants outlines considerable cultural and social commonalities in both parts of the Habsburg Monarchy in a manner that helps establish the Habsburg perspective beyond the currently dominant national frameworks. For