Stephan Steiner begins his book with a lament, “Violence has turned out to be a hydra that seems less tamable the more complex the society” (xiv). Earlier in his career, Steiner verified this sad truth via studies of genocide in modern Europe and Africa. Now, he has focused his highly trained lens on the early modern period, resulting in a series of vivid, thought-provoking, and theoretically sophisticated studies of violence in the Habsburg Empire. Combating the Hydra includes ten such studies – seven previously published articles, one previously presented paper, and two new pieces – that all revolve around the concept of state violence in the Habsburg Empire from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. The book ends with a published conversation between Steiner and Carlo Ginzburg about methodology, a conversation that does not seem misplaced considering Steiner's extensive use of microhistory. Overall, the eleven chapters of Combating the Hydra hold together well and present a fascinating, dark image of an emerging empire brutalizing its population.
The book begins with three chapters that consider the use of deportation in the Habsburg Empire. In chapter 1, Steiner situates the empire's use of deportation within the broader context of European forced migration schemes, demonstrating that even without overseas colonies, the Habsburgs still participated in Europe's “deportation frenzy” (9). Chapter 2 investigates the Temesvarer Wasserschub, a biannual deportation of unwanted people from Vienna via riverboat to the Banat of Timişoara in the mid-eighteenth century. Steiner captures the cruelty of the Wasserschub via statistical and anecdotal evidence. Chapter 3 offers an intellectual history of deportation and deportation schemes from the Wasserschub to World War I. Steiner proves that deportation was an early modern phenomenon, and in so doing, he corrects a stubborn misconception amongst historians and social theorists that forced relocation in the early modern era was fundamentally dissimilar from forced relocation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Seyla Benhabib, “Disaggregation of Citizenship Rights,” 2005) (Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 2013). Historians have begun to attack this epochal division (Philipp Ther, The Outsiders, 2019) (Maximilian Scholz, Strange Brethren, 2022), and Steiner provides an especially powerful reappraisal by investigating eighteenth-century deportation and tracing its influence on twentieth-century deportation.
In the second portion of the book, Steiner studies the limits of state violence in the early modern Habsburg Empire. Steiner demonstrates both methodological depth and mastery of extensive archival materials. In chapter 4, he illuminates the nuances of Protestant resistance to Habsburg confessional conformity while paying close attention to the “variety of religious regimes” (48) at work in the many Habsburg lands. In chapter 5, Steiner uses letters from Protestant farmers who were forcibly deported to Transylvania to investigate the emotional impact of such displacement, paying special attention to the experience of women. Chapter 6 studies the coexistence of Protestants and Catholics in Vienna, demonstrating that several avenues for exchange and cooperation existed, though mostly for the learned.
Steiner uses the third portion of his book to examine the “lived experiences of Gypsies in the Habsburg empire” (xviii). Historians prone to feelings of inadequacy should avoid this section as Steiner dazzles the reader with his mastery of the archives, languages, and literatures of eastern European countries that once composed the Habsburg Empire. In chapter 7, he follows Ginzburg's lead and constructs a microhistory of a “Gypsy trial” to learn about the life and culture of the victims via the “many tiny items that frame, decorate, and detail” the trial (97). This is microhistory at its best and should be assigned to graduate students in history courses on methodology. Chapter 8 examines “Gypsy warning signs” (111) and finds that “Gypsies were seen and treated as internal enemies . . . as spies” (106). Steiner's ninth chapter takes four letters authored by people accused of being “Gypsies” and uses these letters to depict such people “not as passive prey but as participants in power games with quite undetermined endings” (118). Such people manipulated, exploited, and avoided legal structures. Chapter 10 is a previously unpublished study of the “process of Gypsy emancipation” in Bukovina after at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth century. Steiner explains that emancipation in Bukovina was “remarkable because of both its early date and its effectiveness” yet “not a single standard history of the Habsburg empire remembers it” (133). Steiner uses archival sources from Ukraine and Poland to reconstruct the subtleties of slavery in Bukovina, distinguishing among “princely slaves, monastery slaves . . . and boyars’ slaves” and showing how Habsburg officials had to respect these subtle distinctions in order to effectively abolish slavery (137).
Combating the Hydra ends with a cordial interview with Ginzburg, the famous advocate of microhistory. Steiner and Ginzburg discuss several fascinating dichotomies that define the historical profession: archival sources v. printed sources; historical questions v. historical answers; essays v. books; and microhistory vs. macrohistory. The conversation between the two is inspiring and reinforced this reader's assessment of Combating the Hydra as an ideal text for courses on historical methodology.
The great strength of Stephan Steiner's book is its deft blending of rigorous archival research and sophisticated social science theory. In addition to being an essential read for those interested in the Habsburg Empire, Combating the Hydra deserves a place on the bookshelves of students and scholars of migration history, European history, religious history, and historical theory, in addition to social scientists studying violence, migration, and diversity. There is much to like about this stimulating book.
