Benno Gammerl has written an impressive study within the tradition of comparative historical sociology of the state. How, he asks in Subjects, Citizens, and Others, did the British Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy manage ethnic difference, broadly understood, in distinguishing their own subjects from others? And how did they manage ethnic difference among subjects endowed with material rights (i.e., among citizens)? When and in which British and Habsburg territories did law and administrative practice follow a “nation-state” logic, promoting assimilation to a particular ethnicity? When and where did an “étatist” logic prevail instead, directed at making subjects and citizens of all inhabitants through policies of ethnic neutrality or of egalitarian recognition of multiple ethnicities? Or an “imperial” logic, dictating discrimination on the basis of ethnic hierarchy?

After posing these questions in a dense and deft introduction, Gammerl turns to comparing three British territories with three Habsburg ones. The first pairing helps to explain the starting date of the book: Canada and Hungary, through the British North America Act and the Habsburg-Hungarian Compromise, both won extensive autonomy in 1867. Canada and Hungary also managed ethnic difference through different versions of nation-state logic. British subjects, defined primarily by their birth on British soil (ius soli), faced few legal barriers to civic equality within Canada. Getting to Canada proved difficult for nonwhite subjects, though, because of racist barriers to entry. Nonwhite natives were denied meaningful citizenship, or even subjecthood, but white Francophones fared considerably better. Hungarian subjects, defined primarily by their birth to a male Hungarian subject (ius sanguinis), were ethnically quite varied; they spoke, among other languages, Hungarian, German, Slovak, and Romanian. Claiming to be ethnically neutral, the Hungarian state in fact gave extra weight in elections to Hungarian-speaking districts. Yet it embraced ethnic converts, whatever their origin.

The second pairing, India and imperial Austria, concerns étatist logic. At first ethnically neutral, Austria gradually developed policies of ethnic recognition, especially in education and in the voting rights of Austria's German, Czech, Croatian, Italian, and other citizens. India, when taken under direct British control in 1858, was guaranteed “equal and impartial protection of the law” for all subjects, be they “of whatever race or creed.” After 1900, the ethnic partitioning of elections signaled a policy of recognition. But hugely disproportionate privileges for whites, the product of a countervailing imperial logic, combined with “communal representation” to yield white rule over subjects divided among themselves. Gammerl notes that ethnicity centered in Austria on language but in India on phenotypes and religion; the latter lent themselves to cheaper, sloppier administrative practices.

The third pairing is British East Africa and the sole Habsburg colony, Bosnia and Herzegovina. There, as in Austria, ethnic policy shifted from neutrality toward recognition. Racist thinking was socially “virulent” (p. 207), yet the absolutist administration shied away from discriminating against Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, or Jews. Internally, Habsburg policy was étatist to the end. An imperial logic held sway only externally, vis-à-vis Austria-Hungary, in which Bosnian subjects had neither representation nor citizenship. In British East Africa, however, political structures complemented racist thought rather than contradicting it. White settlers demanded and got harsh discrimination against “Asiatic” Indians and against natives, who were denied even the status of subjects.

The second part of the book compares the two empires as a whole, particularly their treatment of subjects abroad. True to its dualist nature, the Habsburg Monarchy presented two faces to the world through its consulates: an Austrian, étatist one, and a Hungarian, nation-state one, more concerned with sustaining ties to subjects after they had emigrated. The British Empire, for its part, increased its use of imperial-discriminatory mechanisms—radically expanding, for example, the number of “protected persons,” a status that carried all the obligations of subjecthood but none of the rights of citizenship. In both empires, law and administration underwent ethnicization after about 1900, but in different directions. British law lacked a tradition of legal equality for all subjects and developed in the direction of discrimination against nonwhites on the basis of summary classification. Habsburg law, in contrast, did know equality before the law, and jurists developed extensive procedures to protect it. The British Empire was no liberal paradise of political inclusivity, and the Habsburg Monarchy no east European outpost of ethnic exclusivity, no prison of peoples. In a thoughtful conclusion, Gammerl emphasizes that the British Empire's rapid expansion, intense internal migration, and powerful white settlers had no equivalent in the Habsburg Monarchy. There expansion was into neighboring lands and did not involve upheaval and mixing so great as to stigmatize ethnic difference.

Gammerl tackles big questions through archival detail in clear prose and knows the relevant literatures. He makes walking in continent-crossing boots look almost easy. An argument concerning promoting and prohibiting mechanisms failed, though, to open insights for this reader. The salvaging of the Habsburg Monarchy's reputation from what amounts to recycled memories of propaganda by anti-Habsburg exiles in London and Paris during World War I is less than innovative, at least for historians specialized in the field. Gammerl seems unaware that his three logics of managing ethnic difference were anticipated by Ludwig Gumplowicz in Das Recht der Nationalitäten und Sprachen in Oesterreich-Ungarn (1879), and developed in a complementary direction by Rudolf Herrmann von Herrnritt in Nationalität und Recht (1899). The discussion of Magyarization policy in chapter one would have been richer had Gammerl known Andrew Janos's Politics of Backwardness in Hungary (1982). The discussion of communal representation and classificatory procedure in chapter two could have drawn on Marc Galanter's Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (1984). And surely Gammerl could have acknowledged the troubling afterlife of Austria's policies of “separate but equal” under Henlein and Hitler. These, though, are quibbles about a bold and successful book.