The topic of European empire inspires polemic. Within the vast literature on the subject, there has been a long-standing tendency to justify Europe's empires as forces fostering modernization and relatively benign supranational political environments or else to vilify them as exemplars of economic exploitation and structural violence. The raucous debate surrounding Niall Ferguson's Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2002), a book that many regarded as an apology for the British Empire, is indicative of the strong passions the topic can release.

It is to Benno Gammerl's credit that he takes an objective approach to the question of empire in Subjects, Citizens, and Others. His focus is the patterns of nationality and citizenship that pertained within the sea-based British Empire and the landlocked Habsburg monarchy between 1867 and 1918. It is an important topic and one that has received scant scholarly attention. Although these empires were contemporaneous and similar in terms of the diversity of their populations, no study prior to this one has chosen to study them comparatively. Appropriately, Gammerl takes his cues from the comparative-historical methods pioneered by Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, and Barrington Moore, as well as from the relevant literature on the social construction of identity. The timeframe of the book is significant, for it was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that nationalism and democracy emerged to challenge the integrity of the British and Habsburg imperial orders, prompting them to consider deliberate policies regarding nationhood and ethnicity. These, however, proved insufficient to curb the centrifugal tendencies that accompanied the First World War. The result was an “unravelling of unity” after 1918 (252).

How exactly, Gammerl asks, did the British and Habsburgs administer the ethnic diversity within their respective empires? How did they decide who should belong and who should be excluded within their constituent parts? If the British had to make decisions about India, East Africa, and a politically assertive Canada, the Habsburgs were faced with the national aspirations of the Czechs and the Bosnians. In each case, the imperial strategy was pragmatic. In Gammerl's telling, far from being stolid monoliths premised on the iron triad of “sovereignty, death and the law,” the British and Habsburg empires responded in an ad hoc fashion to local energies that bubbled up from the ground. Drawing on Foucault, Gammerl marshals the concept of biopower to explain how governing classes focused on legal and organizational solutions to issues of imperial integration. In this sense, structures of power based on that aimed to “promote, foster and preserve life” (228), such as health insurance and pensions, proved more efficacious than methods of outright coercion.

Gammerl's first chapters outline three approaches, sometimes overlapping, used by the two empires to manage ethnic difference. One of these was the embrace of the nation-state model, which promoted assimilation into an ethnically homogeneous body politic within the framework of the nation. Here Gammerl points to the example of Canada, semi-autonomous within the British Empire, and Hungary, a component of the Dual Monarchy. According to the logic of the nation-state, Canada welcomed European, especially British, immigrants with open arms while barring the way for Indians, Chinese, and other nonwhite British subjects and relegating the First Nations to second-class citizenship (native Canadians would not attain the federal franchise until 1960). Hungary accepted other nationals, including Slovaks, Romanians, and Germans, but only if they underwent a process of Magyarization. The second is a model of statist neutrality, implemented most clearly in imperial Austria and India, which sought to treat all citizens equally regardless of ethnic and religious identity. Yet here too the policy fell short, in Austria at the local level where Jews and Czechs were victims of exclusionary politics and in India where the post-Mutiny discourse of ethno-religious neutrality was progressively diluted in ways that favored European subjects. The third pattern is one of overt imperialist discrimination, mostly on racial grounds, such as unfolded in the British East Africa Protectorate and in the Habsburg appendage of Bosnia. While Bosnian subjects were deprived of citizenship and political representation, indigenous Kenyans were, in addition, segregated and expelled from ancestral lands by treaties and police action.

In the book's second part, Gammerl takes stock of the two empires. The biggest difference between them is also the most obvious: unlike in the Habsburg monarchy where population movement was generally into neighboring lands, the British Empire was marked by it dynamic expansion overseas and by its robust white settler communities. Yet, in Gammerl's account and contrary to the stereotype, it is the Habsburgs that shine more brightly: the racial discrimination of the British dominions and in colonies such as East Africa do not compare well with the generally more inclusive statist strategies of ethnic representation in Austria and the all-encompassing nation-state polices in Hungary.

Originally published as Untertanen, Staatsbürger und Andere: Der Umgang mit ethnischer Heterogenität im britischen Weltreich und im Habsburgerreich 1867–1918 (Göttingen, 2010), the book has been expertly rendered into English; the prose is clear and concise. Behind it is an impressive record of archival research in London and Vienna. The work is thought-provoking and promises to hold up as a model for future works of comparative study on empire.