Gábor Egry, Dr.

Project

An Invisible Empire? The Austro-Hungarian Economic Space in Southeast Europe 1890–1940: Actors, Structures, Embeddedness, Factors of Resilience

This project connects the economic history of the late 19th and early 20th century with the recent trend of looking at Austria-Hungary as an imperial/colonial actor in relation to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Unconventionally but productively using the dissolution of the monarchy as its conceptual starting point, which offers insights into the less visible practices and meanings of the empire before 1918, it aims at revealing 1) how Austro-Hungarian imperialism reached Southeast Europe and integrated it into its economic sphere, 2) the place of this economic space between the European and global ones, and 3) how its post-WWI transformation from more direct forms of asset ownership to indirect ones created a laboratory of financialization of capitalism. The continuity of Austro-Hungarian businesses in the face of economic nationalist policies after 1918 highlights the importance of their previous practices of local embedding for the persistence of this space after the political structure that supported business expansion disappeared. This reinterpretation of Austro-Hungarian presence contributes to the understanding of the embedding of economic activity through interactions, how these interactions created structural features for the economy, and how the legal and political changes after 1918 did not change the interactional embeddedness, while the reconfiguration of structures still changed the face of capitalism to a more financialized one.

Recommended Reading

Egry, Gábor. “Unholy Alliances? Language Exams, Loyalty, and Identification in Interwar Romania.” Slavic Review 76, no. 4 (2017): 959–982.
–. The Empire’s New Clothes: How Austria-Hungary’s Legacy Kept the Successor States Running. Austrian Studies Lecture. Leiden: Foundation for Austrian Studies, 2022.
–. "The Rise of Titans? Economic Transition and Local Elites in Post-1918 Banat and Transylvania.” European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’Histoire 31 (forthcoming).

Publications from the Fellows' Library

Egry, Gábor (Cambridge, 2017)

Unholy Alliances? Language exams, loyalty, and identification in interwar Romania