The social scientist Bogdan B. Popescu analyzes the historical and sociological characteristics of the military frontier (1519–1881) on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire on the basis of statistics, archival maps, travelogues, and primary and secondary sources. In this work, he approaches the institutional setup and family structures and their postimperial, long-term economic and social legacy from the perspective of anthropology and historical political economy. Popescu scrutinizes his data in a global context using a variety of quantitative historiographical tools, comparatively examining different British, French, and Russian imperial models. Through the lenses of three issues—the use of force, limited property, and the under-provision of public goods—this book offers a series of interdisciplinary insights (state-building, extractive institutions, and historical legacies, to name three) relevant to political science, history, economics, and sociology.

The novelty of Popescu’s book is that it narrates the history of the Habsburg military frontier in the context of global colonial studies, making the state-building strategies, social hierarchies, and cultural structures observed here comparable with those of the overseas colonies of European empires. The book describes the asymmetric relationship between center and periphery in terms of the specific local social hierarchy (legal categories, gender roles) and economic development (income, productivity, consumption, education, empowerment, etc.). The main idea of Popescu’s work is that the zadruga (family clan), the basic social unit in the Habsburg military frontier, maintained its basic attitudes toward state-building and social changes long after 1918. The economic underdevelopment of areas of the former military frontier today, according to him, can be traced back to the Habsburg period.

One of the main strengths of the book is that the author explores relevant issues regarding a historical-geographical territory that is less known in Western literature. Popescu has an impressive theoretical background in the political, legal, philosophical, sociological, and cultural models and research methods and definitions of colonialism and imperialism. In the context of the military frontier, for example, he lists the typological features, similarities, and differences of these specific administrative units, from the Roman Empire to the Russian Empire, from Africa to British India. He concludes that the closest parallels to the Habsburg military colony were the Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish borders under the Tudors, the military frontier between Spain and France after 1722 (201–2), and Russian and French examples from Central Asia and North Africa.

The most fascinating part of the book is a case study in which Popescu links imperial politics to the survival strategies of the zadruga, based on the multi-generational history of the Varžić family clan. As the author puts it, “Showing how people lived within such communities is crucial to understand why it was cost-effective for the state to utilize such social structures and the long-term implications for the day-to-day interactions of people” (151). Chapter 5 convincingly demonstrates how the attitudes and norms of the Varžić family clan had been passed down through the generations as a kind of “cultural baggage” over the centuries. The figures, maps, and statistics that visualize the author’s explanations are very impressive as quantitative tools of analysis.

However, research on historical topics also poses dangers for social scientists: first, they are inclined to trust published primary and secondary sources without due criticism; second, they lack the necessary historical knowledge; and third, they tend to impose the regional phenomena under study into global models in a teleological manner. Popescu falls into all three of these traps. The Habsburg military frontier is a typical field of research in which an exploration of archival sources cannot be replaced by secondary sources that are full of misinformation. A clear example of this is the author’s following statement, which can be clearly refuted on the basis of unpublished Viennese archival sources: “The land of the grenzers in the Habsburg Empire was not the home of the fugitive, mobile population running away from state-making processes and whose mode of existence would become intractable to the state” (200). The setup of military frontier in the region is not the merit of the Habsburg dynasty: this type of administration units had been present in Southeastern Europe since the early Middle Ages (Mark, thema, krajina, gyepű, bánság). The zadruga is a feature of the whole Balkan Peninsula and did not emerge on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire. Finally, there are internationally known researchers in the region who regularly publish in English on the topics Popescu is dealing with. However, the writings of Karl Kaser (Balkan anthropology), Walter Sauer (Habsburg colonialism), Andrea Komlosy (internal colonialism, imperial periphery), and Gábor Demeter (territorial inequalities based on Graphical Information System [GIS] maps) are sadly not included in the bibliography of the volume.

Why is the book worth reading? Because this volume argues convincingly that specific cases of colonialism in the history of Eastern and Western Europe, such as military colonialism, are comparable.