In Imperial Borderlands, Bogdan G. Popescu explores colonialism from the margins. His monograph discusses an understudied area, the Habsburg Military Frontier, as an extractive colonial institution integral to the functioning of the Austrian empire. Investigating the long-term economic, political, and social legacies of Habsburg military colonialism, the book comprehensively analyzes imperial institutions and their continuing effect on the region.
The Habsburg Military Frontier was established during the sixteenth century in order to protect the empire’s southern territories from Ottoman incursions. It gradually expanded during the eighteenth century, ultimately stretching from Croatia proper to eastern Transylvania. As Popescu demonstrates, the effects of this vast militarized zone went beyond its strategic purpose. By the mid-nineteenth century, its population surpassed one million people, attracted by promises of free land and the abrogation of serfdom. In return for these privileges, Popescu argues, graničari accepted “extractive institutions”: forced military conscription, communal property rights, and minimal public investment. These institutions, in turn, had a lasting influence on the long-term development of the region. Their legacy can be found in the region today through lower levels of social capital, trust, and political participation.
The book combines economic history, political science, and sociology to make its case, and mostly relies on econometric analysis. Popescu situates the Military Frontier within a broad framework of imperialism and colonialism, evaluating the region alongside western colonial enterprises overseas. Forced recruitment of local populations, limited access to public goods, and rigid communal property systems are all explored, drawing striking parallels with other colonial contexts. Most convincingly so in Ch. 7, which discusses the Habsburg Frontier as a model settler-military society for the French in Algeria, and the Russians in Ukraine. It is unfortunate this chapter was not developed with insight from recent work on Habsburg overseas colonialism (Jonathan Singerton, “An Austrian Atlantic: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century,” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 20, no. 4 [2023]: 673–97; Walter Sauer, “Habsburg Colonial: Austria-Hungary’s Role in European Overseas Expansion Reconsidered,” Austrian Studies 20 [2012]: 5–23). Sections of the Military Frontier were managed by Spanish Habsburg loyalists from colonial entrepôts Barcelona, Cádiz and Seville, translating settler techniques and crops to the borderlands. The Military Frontier fits within the story of European colonialism both empirically and theoretically.
The book’s central strength lies in its ambition. Popescu asks brave questions: What did colonialism look like inside Europe? How does empire shape the social and political world of its subjects? What are the long-term effects of empire once its political structures are gone? For answers, the author turns to quantitative analysis, drawing on a wealth of historical documents, archival sources, and geospatial data. The research is methodical and carefully explained, its statistical prowess refreshing to see after an era dominated by discursive analysis.
Some babies were thrown out with the bathwater as well. The book stays close to its macro perspective, with unfortunate consequences. It is unclear how much of its source-base (exclusive to the Croatian segment of the Frontier) could be extrapolated to Slavonia or the Banat. Likewise, the discussion of family structure and kinship in Ch. 5 relies almost exclusively on western travelers, administrators, and ethnographers. The overall argument for the far-reaching influence of the state on family life stands to reason, but sources which describe people as “docile and obedient” (140) and the area as “half-barbaric” (144) should have received more critical treatment. Reading outsider reports of life on the frontier as examples of imperial projection would have enriched the overall argument.
Interethnic violence is given short shrift, too. In Ch. 4, for example, Popescu concludes that migration and ethnic sorting was “unlikely” (110) in the borderlands. While the conclusion may ring true for the imperial period, the radical shifts of the twentieth century should not be taken for granted. Genocide and ethnic cleansing during WWII and the Yugoslav Wars are both well-documented, including in the area of the former Military Frontier. In 1990, a Serb separatist state named itself after the Frontier (Krajina), suggesting more complex imperial afterlives, particularly for national myth-making and political violence.
None of these are critical faults, per se. Popescu has done a tremendous amount of research and asks innovative questions about social stratification within empires, the long-term legacy of imperial institutions, and the global reach of imperial extractivism. His methodology is refreshing and statistical skills impressive. Imperial Borderlands leaves Habsburg and Balkan scholars with much to think about, and could do so for historians of global empire as well.
