This excellent collection, edited by Alexander Maxwell and Daša Ličen, examines one of the essential elements of the Habsburg state, its civil service. Despite the important role bureaucrats played in their society, they have traditionally been reduced to near caricatures. As the editors point out in their introduction, this tendency reflects both the continuing influence of successor states’ efforts to portray the Habsburg monarchy as overbearing and repressive as well as nostalgic perspectives of the dynastic state as a more peaceful alternative to the disruptive world that followed. Recent scholarship has moved beyond these generalized stereotypes, exploring the important role the civil service played in the development of the monarchy and in crafting the Rechtsstaat that defined its final decades. The chapters contained in this collection build on the momentum of this work, pushing it in new and innovative directions. In selecting these contributions, the editors have not only prioritized well-crafted scholarship but also have ensured that the collection reflects the geographic and linguistic diversity of the monarchy. The individual contributors are equally selected with care.

The chapters easily stand alone on their own merits, but the editors have organized them in a way that creates a strong and cohesive whole. They are arranged blending both chronological order and thematic grouping. The first three chapters explore the period of “national awakening” before and after the Revolutions of 1848. Questions related to nationalist agitation are an inescapable part of Habsburg history, and these chapters examine the extent to which the Habsburg civil service contributed to or mollified these conflicts. A chapter by Hugo Lane illustrates the ways in which Habsburg officials supported Ruthenian activists in Galicia in an effort to bolster the state against what was perceived to be the questionable loyalty of the crownland’s Polish elites. Lane’s work provides further evidence that the Habsburg state often cultivated the very nationalist sentiments that proved so rancorous by the end of the nineteenth century. Alexander Maxwell’s chapter, which examines the shifting ways in which officials categorized Slavic languages when crafting policies, adds nuance to this observation. It demonstrates that national and linguistic categories were mutable in the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, Maxwell proves that Habsburg officials were influenced by the work of nationalist voices in crafting these classifications.

The second grouping of chapters looks at the role the civil service played as the defenders and face of the Habsburg state during the dualist period. Marco Jaimes offers an innovative comparison of the role teachers and prosecutors had in cultivating loyalty to Franz Joseph I. Building on the work of others who have similarly examined the efforts to develop state patriotism, he shows that schools helped to enhance the perception that the emperor was a force of modernization and prosperity. Jaimes also concludes that, contrary to earlier assumptions, prosecutors were typically light-handed when dealing with instances of slander and insult directed at the emperor, unless they came during periods of political unrest. In his chapter, Wolfgang Göderle gives a nuanced discussion of the bureaucracy by compiling an impressive array of statistics detailing the range of functions the civil service provided. He also uses these services to successfully argue that attitudes toward the bureaucracy varied based on what it did. So, for example, people had a more negative view of the police than those tasked with economic modernization. He then concludes the chapter with a microlevel examination of this reality, exploring how officials in Dalmatia worked to improve the safety of parks and trails to encourage tourism. Zdeněk Nebřenský’s chapter similarly describes the important role factory inspectors played in implementing labor and safety reforms in the Bohemian Lands.

Göderle’s and Nebřenský’s case studies deftly illustrate how individual officials navigated pressure from local and state agencies, outside political groups, and their own sense of duty while performing their jobs. These tensions are also essential to David Smrček’s excellent chapter looking at the actions of Prague police during periods of urban unrest. His work is the first of the collection’s final section, which covers topics related to periods of crisis toward the end of the monarchy. Nationalist conflict and violence in Prague have been of perennial interest to Habsburg historians, but few have studied such episodes from the perspective of those tasked with maintaining order. John Deak provides a similarly innovative approach to understanding Habsburg civil service by looking at the conflicts between military and civilian bureaucracies in Dalmatia in the years before World War I. He proves that while civilian officials often viewed perceived nationalist agitation in nuanced ways and were committed to the Rechtsstaat, military officials considered nationalism to be an intrinsic threat to the stability of the state. They also felt that existing state structures were not equipped to defend against this challenge. His chapter is crucial for understanding why the Habsburg state so easily suspended regular constitutional order once the war began.

To better recognize how individual civil servants conceptualized their role in the state, there are also two compelling biographical studies, the first by Judit Pál and Vlad Popvici, looking at officials in Transylvania in the early nineteenth century, the second by J. Alexander Killion, profiling a nutrition officer navigating the growing hunger crisis created by World War I. Each of these contributions augments one of this collection’s primary strengths, the ability to study Habsburg civil servants in a way that gives them agency and subjectivity. Like all edited collections, each contribution is constrained by the necessity of a strict page limit. This reality does not impact their individual effectiveness or that of the collection as a whole. It is an innovative and important contribution to our understanding of Habsburg history and one can only hope that it inspires future work.