Historians of Central Europe have for quite some time studied the issue of how nationality, ethnicity, and ideas of national culture structured reality in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg empire. While one might think that it would become increasingly more difficult to present theoretically interesting accounts, this book, by young historian Wolfgang Göderle, based on his dissertation at the University of Graz, proves the opposite. Although the title does place Habsburg censuses in the foreground, the scope the study covers is much broader. Using methodology from the history of science, mostly from the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Göderle asks how the concept of ethnicity was produced, popularized, and reinforced through the population censuses in the monarchy and how it changed in the first decade of the twentieth century. For this to be possible, Göderle looks in detail at how early censuses were composed and conducted and how categories they used entered the societal discourse, becoming later modified and connected with the racialization discourse.

In comparison to most recent available census analyses, Göderle is not merely interested in “interpreting the results [of the censuses] as statistical results,” but looks at the census “as a process,” applying Bruno Latour's idea of circulating reference (43). This makes possible the observation of translations between different levels, which census concepts—here ethnicity—pass through until they are published, from theoretical debates about the categories at the interface between the imperial administration and professional statisticians, through census takers and counting practices in provincial and central offices, to printing, publishing, and beyond. All these steps, with their specificities and transformations, have influence on the final shape of the “ethnicity” concept—and these specificities are far-reaching. They include arguments on what the Umgangssprache (colloquial language) is, since this concept, central for the census, was new in the nineteenth century and even by 1910 the interviewees had only a very vague idea what the census taker meant (267–69). But these transformations were also of a different nature; for instance, the mechanization of counting produced new results and enabled the manifold and more efficient reshuffling of census cards in comparison to hand counting (152–56).

Göderle takes the discussion of these transformations in many directions, impossible to enumerate here. One worth mentioning is the transformation from administrative statistics into scholarly discipline, which changes the context in which the discussion of census categories took place, from the Viennese court to the international statistical congresses (177–89). For instance, the duty to record the langue parlée, “die Umgangssprache,” in the censuses, was decided in St. Petersburg at the Congress of 1872; while it was against the will of Habsburg statisticians, they did comply (218–19). (As a lovely detail, the head of the Central Commission of Statistics in Cisleithania, Adolf Ficker, rejected the notion of Umgangssprache and in 1880 required the census to record Familiensprache; in the Hungarian part, translation rendered language parlée as anyanyelv—literally the mother tongue [219–20].)

Circulating between the administration and the public, ethnicity could also be interpreted and presented in manifold ways. Apart from the main result of census, numbers, graphs, and tables, giving an appeal of objectivity and impartiality (137), Göderle looks at more refined ways ethnicity was presented, such as in maps and books. Here he discusses Karl Czoernig's famous Ethnographic Map of the Austrian Empire (1855) and the series The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture (1883–1902) as two different ways of representing imperial space and its cultural variety. While the first presented a short living mirage of “short-living neoabsolutist imperial statehood” (207), the second was an act of “re-branding” the monarchy, decorating the idea of monarchy with “pictures, sceneries and cultural monuments” (264).

In the final years of the monarchy, Göderle sees the biologization and racialization of the ethnicity concept. Discussing the “Gypsy Censuses” (1878 in Cisleithania and 1893 in Hungary) (228–50), he argues that racial categories were subliminally entering the discourse on the Habsburg populace. Even persons rejecting ethnic/national categories as a category that could be recorded on an individual level to build up cumulative statistics, such as Adolf Ficker, did not hesitate to decide who was Gypsy and who was not (231).

In his conclusion Göderle also proposes an ANT-based model of researching ethnicity and nationality, concentrating on the moments this concept becomes stable. New research should search for “collectives and alliances that, under specific circumstances, stabilized ‘ethnicity’ and allowed it to act” (272). This research requires minute work researching all the links in the “chain of translation” (See Bruno Latour's The Pasteurization of France [Cambridge, 1988]), but Göderle's book shows a remarkable example of how it can be achieved.

But such narratives also have their pitfalls. The ANT-centered journey, concentrating on the context of transformation and actors and actants, is clearly a conscious choice of the part of the author. It requires, however, a great deal of attention by the reader, who has to find his own way in this tangle. And researching the minutiae of all the links and transformations can reduce their complexity and make some of them seem simplistic. For instance, the intriguing idea of Habsburg “epistemic virtues” (Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity [New York, 2007]) in the section on professionalization of statistics lacks all references to works on indeterminism, claimed in the past several years as the main trait of Habsburg scholarly culture (177–89). Also, quite surprisingly, with all the translations included, translations proper are not discussed, although they were quite likely a source of many conflicts, debates, and transformations that modified the “circulating reference” ethnicity.

These few remarks do not in any case detract from the book's merit. It is a carefully researched study with innovative methodology, which makes it relevant to several discourses and disciplines, from the history of science through the history of administration to nationality studies.