Stephan Sander-Faes has previously written on the socioeconomic history of the Habsburg monarchy in the early modern period. His latest book suggests a shift of focus to changes in criminal justice, and the timespan covered promises to bridge the traditional chronology. One could formulate its goal as a revision of some claims about top-down state building and a rehabilitation of the Vormärz period.

Assessments of the whole period of 1790–1848 in the Habsburg monarchy have ranged widely, and it is to be appreciated that this work puts it in focus again. The largely negative view of this era by liberal historians, who saw it as beset by political repression and economic stagnation, partly changed after the publication of Pieter Judson’s synthetic work (The Habsburg Empire: A New History [Cambridge, 2016]). Sander-Faes comes to terms with the era mainly by emphasizing non-state actors outside the political center. He assumes that the patrimonial system (and the “ancien régime”) survived in the monarchy until 1848–49 and claims that, after the Theresian and Josephinian reforms, the “state” began to affect daily life at manorial estates only slowly.

Focusing on patrimonial administration at several manors in Lower Austria, Sander-Faes bases his claims primarily on an analysis of wanted notes from the collections of the Zwettl Abbey from 1756 to 1779 and 1813. In his view, while the handwritten wanted notes were in the eighteenth century within the competence of local officials, the latter printed ones were issued by the central Viennese authorities, and one can apparently find in them medical and sociological characterizations written by university educated state officials removed from the rural reality. This “hybrid administration” (a term Sander-Faes coins for this period) is allegedly reflected in the co-production of warrant forms, printed in the center and filled in by local officials.

The division between high (sovereign) and low (patrimonial) justice was reflected also in the 1803 criminal code, which differentiated between crimes and severe police delicts. It should be noted, however, that the latter were not within the autonomous power of seigneurial officials. These officials were (at least in Bohemia) examined by the circle authorities on their knowledge of the second part of the code: there was little space for personal interpretation. According to Sander-Faes, this code (like the abovementioned printed wanted notes) brought extrapatrimonial influences and values into the justice system of the manors.

However, the distinction between two types of delicts had already been introduced by Joseph II’s groundbreaking penal code in 1787, which Sander-Faes does not analyze. He also overlooks the earlier penal norms for Lower Austria, the Theresiana (1768) and the Ferdinandea (1656). Local courts had to follow this sovereign legislation in capital cases. Similarly, when the author speaks about the “immigration service,” claiming that this agenda was managed by a “hybrid patrimonial-state administrative apparatus” (54), it should be noted that immigration, or the rounding-up and forced transportation of vagrants, was by 1720s organized by the central state authorities and coordinated by circle offices (“Schub und Heimatrecht” [Vienna, 2000]). Although these measures were implemented by patrimonial officials—just like land laws were applied by local courts—the impulse, organization, and legal framework came from the center. The individual domains could not negotiate among themselves measures against itinerants, ways of punishing offenses, or the coordination of disseminating wanted notes. Even on a regional level, one can observe since the mid-eighteenth century a significant strengthening of the central power, regardless of whether we call it “sovereign” or “state” power.

In addition to his weakly argued interpretation, Sander-Faes’s specific sources (wanted notes, investigation files, and court decisions) say little about competencies and internal communication of individual offices. Neither the collections of circle authorities nor the patrimonial archives were explored to this end. Richer and older evidence of this kind from Bohemia indicates that the state had a strong presence at the manors at the latest since the 1770s, and the police and administrative reforms of the 1780s subordinated the regions to the center even more.

The recruitment and qualifications of patrimonial officials is supposed to be analyzed in chapter 3, but it is based rather on indirect indications in unrelated sources (a diary, legal codes, medical terms in wanted notes). Save for references to older literature, the author does not follow actual careers of officials. Chapter 4 (“The Material Culture of the Rural Poor”) likewise veers off its stated topic, digressing to things such as the language of the wanted notes, the detailed description of stolen cattle, or the Austrian state bankruptcy of 1811. Sander-Faes thus points to various lacunae in existing research rather than filling them himself. The repeated emphasis on his own innovation and primacy could moreover oftentimes be challenged, for example, in the case of allegedly nonexistent research on the clothing culture of the lower classes in Central Europe.

The interpretation of a hybrid, patrimonial-state administration is not set into a unified theoretical framework; different concepts appear occasionally, as emblems, and their application to concrete examples is problematic, for example, Geertz’s “thick description” (The Interpretation of Cultures [New York, 1973]) applied to the detailed descriptions of commodities or Berger and Luckmann’s “human co-production” of society (The Social Construction of Reality [London, 1966]) related to the production of wanted notes at various levels. Nor can the “dual character of administration” be aptly characterized by terms such as “fragmentation, contradictions and pluralit[ies]” because Giovanni Levi used this phrase for socially differentiated manifestations of seemingly uniform symbolic structures (On Microhistory [Cambridge, 1991]). Finally, the increasing use of “characterology” (sweeping personality characterizations) in the wanted notes paradoxically supports criticized Foucauldian assertion about the shift of emphasis from the crime to the criminal.

Sander-Faes’s book highlights the ambivalence of the change from a patrimonial to a civil society: a somewhat progressive civil code on the one hand and personal interconnectedness of the lower courts and administration or rule “by the grace of God” on the other. However, the author does so in a needlessly polemic way while underestimating the infrastructural presence of the state within society. The book’s ambitions, including its name, go above what can be achieved with the sources employed. Whether and what state was actually present in the lives of subjects in the Austrian monarchy in the first half of the nineteenth century thus remains a question to be answered by further research.