This volume on the history of immigration policies about refugees, edited by Börries Kuzmany and Rita Garstenauer, comes just in time, as hardly any topic has such an ongoing impact on current public discourse in Europe than the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Asia and Africa in 2015 and 2016. As the title of the book promises, together with the introduction, the nine chapters, which were originally presented at a conference at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in September 2016, address in various ways the mass mobility of refugees from, to, and within the Habsburg Empire and the Republic of Austria. The topics vary from migrants who entered Habsburg Lands from the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century by Timothy Olin, to refugee movements during the French Revolution by Matthias Winkler, and Jews who fled from Russian Pogroms in the late nineteenth century by Börries Kuzmany. Hannelore Burger also focuses on Jewish refugees who lost their citizenship during both World Wars, while Dieter Bacher and Niklas Perzi analyze forced laborers, displaced persons, and expellees in Central Europe after 1945. The chapters by Maximilian Graf and Sarah Knoll address migrants who fled socialist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s, while Hasan Softić’s chapter on Bosnians coming to Enns (a town in Upper Austria) during the Bosnian War in the 1990s is a case study on chain migration patterns. In the introduction, Rita Garstenauer and Börries Kuzmany carefully place their book within the wider context of historical migration and refugee studies by emphasizing the importance of the topic in current public discourse.

According to the editors, all chapters raise issues about conditions of forced migrations, the numbers of people concerned, modes and conditions of resettlement to a new country, especially the situation of refugees in Austria, chances and ambitions of the newcomers, as well as public discourse in various periods. Only the chapter on Bosnian refugees follows a different order because it presents a case study. Even when dealing with highly variable quantitative and qualitative phenomenon, the stories told in all other chapters are comparable. However, the authors prioritize various aspects of expulsion and flight over the three centuries. The volume thereby arranges mostly forced migration patterns within one concise story line and sheds lights on a major topic of today's migration research, which is not always guaranteed by books that summarize conference papers.

Two aspects are of special importance when speaking of international migrations and adaptation of newcomers: What were conditions and rules for migrants, and did the receiving society consider migrants and refugees a potential thread or benefit? While in the eighteenth century, the Habsburg migration regime invited certain groups to settle at the border of the Ottoman Empire and even used these people for border management, Habsburg administration was against integrating French refugees after 1789 due to safety concerns. In the late nineteenth century, the biggest concern of Habsburg authorities was the sheer number of Jewish people fleeing pogroms in Russia. During the First World War, mostly Galician refugees were treated as vagrants and the state either interned or deported them out of public suspicion and mistrust against certain groups such as Jews. During the second half of the twentieth century, the Austrian government gradually developed a migration regime that preferred refugees and migrants who might benefit the Austrian economy. For the people who left Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland during the second half of the twentieth century, Austria was more of a transit hub to pass through than a destination country. While in the 1950s, Austrian society considered these people to be victims who needed help, over the course of the next decades, public opinion skeptically turned into a hostile attitude against newcomers.

Given the political relevance of the topic, the usage of terms such as “Wirtschaftsflüchtling” (44) or “Migrationswelle” (55) in the chapter by Timothy Olin is surprising. Such metaphors create images of an excess of people, either as refugees or labor migrants, and suggest a destructive power of such movements. Because this is the only article written by an American author and translated into German it might be due to translation errors. However, even minor changes of wording might have significant impact on political opinion making. Despite this small criticism, what makes this volume innovative and worth reading is the combination of a rich variety of topics on the history of migration regimes in Central Europe. This is an important book on the process from state-sponsored to private charitable support of large refugee populations in the Habsburg Empire and the Republic of Austria.