Márta Fata is senior researcher at the Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde in Tübingen, Germany (www.idglbw.de), and an active contributor to the social and cultural history of Germans in early modern Hungary. Her recent study, accepted as her Habilitationsschrift at the University of Tübingen in 2011, is a long-awaited overview of the German immigration into the Habsburg monarchy during the eighteenth century. This research topic was influenced by tragic events of the twentieth century, and it often served for extreme political purposes as well. As a result, it was less willingly researched by historians after World War II, and students of the eighteenth-century Habsburg monarchy had to rely on Konrad Schünemann's publications of the early 1930s.

Fata's book covers the migration history starting at 1689, after large parts of Hungary were liberated from Ottoman rule in the Great Turkish War, and extends at some points into the nineteenth century. After a historiographical introduction and an overview of the immigration policies for Hungary from 1689 until 1771, the main body of research is presented in chapters C (77–164) and D (165–306) with particular focus on Joseph II's policies from the late 1760s onward. Chapter E presents some interesting points from the immigrants' point of view, and chapter F concludes the main body of the text; an extensive bibliography and index round out the volume.

As for the theory, Fata addresses seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cameralism, which put population size at the very center of its views on government, society, and economy. Government papers repeated and extended these ideas, arguing for policies and solutions that should have raised the strength of the state, the economic output, and tax revenues. On the same basis, voluminous materials were produced for the education of Archduke Joseph in the 1750s, as well as systematic information on different lands and provinces of the monarchy.

It is well known that Joseph II was a man of practice who preferred self-experienced reality in loco as the basis of his proposals and decisions. Joseph II visited the Banat several times, in April and May 1768, in May 1770, 1773, and 1783. In 1773, he continued his trip into Transylvania and the newly acquired Galicia. These travel experiences influenced the coregent's proposals which in turn influenced and modified the policies of Maria Theresa in the 1770s and also Joseph II's own measures, introduced unambiguously during his sole reign in the 1780s. Agrarian reforms (including Urbarialregulation, Raabisation, and Robotabolition), tax reforms, mapping, and land survey, as well as attempts to foster crafts and industry, went hand in hand with the state-organized migration within and into the monarchy. Several thousand settler families from the Holy Roman Empire, for example, arrived in Hungary and were equipped with all life necessities. Many settled in the Banat, which was reincorporated into Hungary in 1778, the neighboring Bácska, and in Galicia (see maps on 224 and 261). Less costly and thus often preferred by the government was the spontaneous immigration from the Ottoman Empire. Simultaneous conflicts over land, as well as over ethnicity, religion, or methods of cultivation among the local population, inland settlers, and immigrants from faraway regions, encumbered the state administration with the need for careful planning, preparation, and monitoring.

In contrast to Hungary, no organized immigration from German territories was planned in Bukovina, acquired from the Ottoman Empire in the mid 1770s. Nevertheless, some spontaneous immigration from neighboring territories did occur: for instance, the resettlement of Székely refugees from Moldavia, since this corner of the monarchy was designed as a cattle- and horse-producing region for military purposes. The case of Transylvania was different still, because the agrarian reform (Urbarialregulation) failed there (see the earlier publications of Professor Jenő Berlász). Instead of promoting immigration, the government had to struggle to prevent emigration into the neighboring territories.

In addition to printed sources and literature, the study relies heavily on a great number of primary sources from archives in Vienna, Budapest, Germany, Slovakia, and Serbia. Drawing on mainly government files, Fata tells the story with careful precision, and develops the ups and downs of migration policies and reforms under Joseph II. Moreover, letters and similar “ego-documents” of the immigrants helped the author to identify some bases of settlers' self-conception (307–24).

Altogether, Márta Fata's book is a reliable study of migration policies, as well as of related views and argumentations in eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy. It contains a very detailed and descriptive account of the measures of Maria Theresa and Joseph II for Hungary and Galicia in the 1770s and 1780s. For students in these fields, it also makes accessible a great amount of historical archive material, which might later serve as the basis for further analysis of forced socioeconomic change.