Klemens Kaps's study is essentially a survey of the economic history of Austrian Galicia. This is a welcome and long-overdue work. Despite a remarkable profusion of work on nineteenth-century Galicia during the past three decades, there has been an equally remarkable dearth of historical studies of Galicia's economy. The book under review not only contributes to the region's neglected economic history but offers a synthetic panoramic overview of Galicia's economy throughout the Austrian period.
Several features distinguish Kaps's book from the existing, and mostly outdated, accounts of Galicia's economic history. First, it treats Galicia not as a relatively economically self-sufficient region but one deeply integrated into “supra-regional structures.” Second, it pays careful attention to the political, social, and cultural factors that had influenced Galicia's economic trajectory. While the first part of the study is dedicated to the structural elements of the Galician economy—production, trade, and capital—the second part is dedicated to institutions, actors, and discourses assessed against the background of global economic changes. Such an approach helps to avoid the absolutization and objectification of the economy, and to explore its intertwining with other domains of human experience.
In Kaps's account Galicia emerges as a part of the European “semiperiphery,” economically dependent on capitalism's centers. It was also a semiperiphery that failed to “take off” before World War I—the way Scandinavia or Hungary did—and was characterized by slower rates of development and economic inequality vis-à-vis the imperial political and economic center—largely following the so-called “South European path.” In the regional division of labor Galicia functioned as a capital-starved exporter of raw materials and importer of ready goods. While both the historical baggage and Galicia's actual geographic position contributed to slower development rates, the author argues that policies of the imperial government were the most decisive factor behind Galicia's overly slow development.
At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, cameralist and physiocratic thinking erected customs barriers along the state border and assigned Galicia the role of an agricultural producer in the empire's internal market. In part due to high transportation costs, Galician cottage industry, and textiles in particular, could not compete successfully with the enterprises from the empire's core, especially since the government supported such a division of labor. The replacement of the “cameralist” economic paradigm with the economic liberalism of the industrialization era (1830–73) only worsened Galicia's situation. Because of institutional unpreparedness and a lack of capital, Galicia was helpless against the economic expansion of the imperial core. Galician artisans and craftsmen could not compete with the mechanized and concentrated production of the empire's western regions. Galicia turned into a market for manufactured goods from the empire's core and expanded its role as a supplier of raw materials for the core's industries.
During the last stage, which the author defines as “organized capitalism,” nearly all the actors and institutions involved tried to regulate and direct economic development: The state with its protectionist customs tariffs and “pre-Keynesian” interventions such as large-scale investments and railway nationalization, large and petty agricultural producers through their societies and cooperatives, workers through their unions, and capitalists through the cartelized businesses. During this period the Galician economy was far from stagnant and the province attained unprecedented prosperity. Nonetheless, development was too slow and there was no convergence with the empire's more developed regions.
A short review cannot do justice to the book's numerous insights. Kaps's study will be of great interest even to those interested primarily in Galicia's political or cultural history. One of the many stories told in the book is the history of antisemitism in Galicia, which is intertwined with the province's economic development and the discourses accompanying it, from the cameralist disdain for leaseholders and mediators to the displacement of Jewish craftsmen into petty trade and tavern-keeping during the “liberal” era and organized efforts to oust them from the villages at the turn of the twentieth century.
There are also many debatable points in this book that can generate productive further discussion. In this reviewer's opinion, the author tends to overuse the metaphor of “orientalization,” especially when applied to his discourses about peasants. Arguably, the “peasant” emerged as the economic “Other” of modern industry and entrepreneurship in Enlightenment discourse almost simultaneously with the emergence of the “Orient” as a civilizational “Other” of the purportedly more dynamic Western civilization. While there were similarities between the two discourses, they should not be reduced to one another. The thesis that economic backwardness reinforced ethnic divisions and interethnic competition for scarce resources at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth is not entirely convincing either. There is no evidence that ethnic conflict or antisemitism in Galicia at that time was stronger than in Bohemia or Vienna. During this period, former ethno-social boundaries became permeable while increased cross-ethnic interaction generated not only competition but also cooperation.
As is true for virtually any book of such scope, this one is not completely free of technical mistakes. The ratio between the Joch and the hectare somehow became inverted in the book, with the latter becoming smaller than the former (100), and the length of the Galician railway network in the 1880s–1910s is given as millions of kilometers (405) while in fact it was thousands. These mechanical mistakes, however, do not affect the validity of the book's arguments. Klemens Kaps's book is a true tour de force, and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in Galicia or the nineteenth-century Habsburg empire.
