With his 2007 study Reisen ohne Wiederkehr, Stephan Steiner provided a fresh perspective on the often neglected deportation of Carinthian Protestants to eighteenth-century Transylvania. In his massive new book, the interdisciplinary Austrian historian presents an all-embracing picture of deportations as a tool of governmental repression in the Habsburg monarchy. He puts this measure into its wider chronological and comparative context and draws lines of continuity to the present.
Steiner defines deportations as governmentally arranged and typically permanent coercive resettlements of select populations. He distinguishes them from related phenomena such as forced emigrations and expulsions by their intent to also control the deportees at their destination. In the Habsburg monarchy, they served as punishment for real or purported delinquency, but also as a means to remove various categories of undesirables and as an instrument of population policy. Therefore, the author also places them in the context of criminal justice and such punishments as banishment, sentencing to the galleys, forced labor, and induction into the military. After delineating the theoretical discussion and the existing literature on deportations, Steiner rounds off his introductory section with an examination of related practices in other parts of early modern Europe. This useful survey also demonstrates the extensive transfer of unwanted Europeans to distant colonies.
The core of the study consists of eleven case studies from the Habsburg monarchy. They cover the period from the early 1600s to the late 1700s. Affected populations differed widely. When the originally not unwelcome piracy of the South Slavic Uskoks had become a foreign policy liability, they were transferred from the Dalmatian coast to the interior. Exiled Habsburg supporters from Bourbon Spain proved difficult to integrate in Vienna and were passed on to the newly acquired Banat region. Obstinate German or Croatian peasants and townsmen were transferred to different parts of the monarchy.
Numerically most important were the transplantations of socially or religiously unwelcome Alpine populations to the eastern rim of the empire. Thousands of Protestant holdouts were transferred from their Alpine retreats to multidenominational Habsburg Transylvania in a measure that corresponded better to mercantilist thought than the previously encouraged emigration to foreign countries. These transmigrations formed the most lasting deportation measure in the Habsburg monarchy, with the resettlement of the so-called Deists from the Bohemian lands even extending beyond the 1781 Edict of Toleration. Yet the removal of social undesirables such as women of ill repute, drifters, or poachers from Vienna and its surroundings stretched over many decades. All in all, Steiner describes these deportations as not only unjust and arbitrary but also failures according to their own standards. High mortality rates and insufficient integration of the involuntary arrivals drastically reduced the demographic benefits of the endeavors. The often substantial expenses were rarely recovered.
Stephan Steiner has delivered an important analysis of social disciplining in the early modern Habsburg monarchy. The author demonstrates thorough familiarity with both the primary source material and international literature. His comprehensive examination contains a theoretical and comparative introduction of around 100 pages, about 400 pages of case studies from the Habsburg monarchy, and approximately twenty pages of concluding perspectivism. The remaining 100 pages consist of bibliography, explanations, and sources. The case studies are predominantly descriptive and focus as much on the prehistory of the deportations as on the measures themselves. The degree of detail and the nature of the analysis depend on the available source material; the most attention is given to the transfer of social outcasts from Vienna to the Banat. Interpretation often draws on the work of Cambridge historian William O'Reilly, who has placed Habsburg deportations in a colonial context.
Some historians will object to a tendency toward anachronism. His attention to modern sensibilities induces the author to replace now-controversial designations such as Gypsy in direct quotes and utilize current place names in periods when they did not yet exist. In his perspectivism, the author approaches his subject with numerous concepts developed for later historical periods. This approach can be legitimate, even refreshing, but it requires a deeper engagement with theory than is provided in the fairly compact conclusion. As it stands, the author invokes modern concepts rather than applying them.
Consequently, the volume leaves a mixed impression. It is based on an impressive body of sources and literature and provides a broad and thorough description of the practice of deportation in the early modern Habsburg monarchy. Its broad scope and the dearth of existing literature make the new study a virtual handbook on the subject. Some of its ambitious interpretations remain impressionistic, however, and would have profited from a more extensive and open-ended discussion of theory and evidence.
