Volume 2 (2017): Issue 1 (September 2017)

A particular relationship with space, usually called territoriality, is one of the essential characteristics of the modern state. This statement was long considered a commonplace. Recent debates, however, have raised new fundamental questions about both space and the state which require a re-examination of both terms, and thus of the connections between them as well. This introduction maps out some of the terminological and theoretical ground for research into these questions. We successively examine the conceptual history of the state, of public administration, and of space, pointing out reifying uses of all three notions which have been repudiated in theoretical debates but remain influential in many historiographical accounts, as well as in popular discourse. We highlight alternative approaches suggested by newer authors. In particular, we describe both the state and administration in terms of assemblages of people, institutions, and objects. Given that this perspective is also used in some current socio-cultural theories of space, we conclude that states and administrations not only exist in space, use space, and create and shape spaces, but that they are themselves spaces and can be analyzed using the methodological tools which apply to spaces of any kind.

On the basis of what structures, and according to what kinds of deliberations and considerations, did premodern administrations work? This article uses the example of early modern visitations in Bavaria to show how important pragmatism was in administrative practice, and how and with what consequences routines were developed. It is a plea for an interpretation of administrative work beyond current assumptions and epoch boundaries.

In the light of the relevant terms of this issue, »state«, »space« and »administration«, this contribution considers the intertwining between representations of order, their administration, and the governance of the subjects in the sovereignty areas of Salzburg and Tyrol in the Zillertal. The different ideas of space – investigated from the perspectives of various groups of the population, of local officials, and of the government centers – changed throughout the examined period. At its beginning, the authorities in the government centers endeavored to keep the borders open for mutual exchange, whereas the local officials used their administrative tools to stage a competition with the officials of the neighboring district, e.g. by blocking and redirecting the subjects’ pathways of movement. In this situation, a more open construction of space confronted a more mistrustful one aimed at enclosure and the guarding of borders. In the context of negotiations for a general border settlement between Tyrol and Salzburg, and on the basis of newly developed conceptions of a state as having a clearly defined sovereignty area, capable of being governed without any foreign influence up to its borders, the interventions of the government centers started to change. Borders were adjusted and a clear assignment of the subjects was demanded. However, the more an exact correspondence between space and sovereignty was pursued, the more obvious the impossibility of this undertaking became. Seemingly well-demarcated border lines appeared vague when regarded closely. Their official description was at odds with the subjects’ construction and usage of spaces. While their spatial behaviors were determined by the norms of the sovereign centers and controlled by the administrative work of the officials, the subjects developed their own strategies for dealing with these interventions in their constructions of space and adjusting to them.

Consulates, both in the 19th century and today, exist in a sort of hybrid space: Established by one sovereign entity in the territory of another, on the basis of exterritorial concessions, they depend on not one but two sets of legislation without being wholly defined by either one. This paper takes a local approach to a global phenomenon by considering the French consulate in Salonica (Thessaloniki) from the late 18th to the early 20th century from the perspective of a ›history of administrative reality‹. It shows how this consulate was located at the intersection of two state-building projects: those of France and the Ottoman Empire, both vying for control of the local space in which the consulate was active. While the French state strove to integrate its consulates into the internal logic of its expanding bureaucracy, and thus to extend its legal space beyond the borders of its own territory, the modernizing efforts of the Empire tended to reduce the immunities of exterritorial institutions with a view toward homogenizing and effectively controlling imperial space. The gaps and conflicts between the rival state-building agendas, as well as local factors beyond the control of either, created a local reality in which the consular personnel had the challenge and the opportunity to shape their own space of action. In this way, the consular district appears as a spatial entity somewhat resembling a state in miniature.

From the late 18th century to the end of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, Vienna’s two Greek Orthodox communities administered a remarkable number of endowments. By founding endowments the benefactors acted between several spaces and subspaces. The transgression of boundaries by endowments addressed to the benefactors’ hometowns in the Ottoman Empire as well as the instability of these boundaries in the 19th century led to various problems in the interaction with the state authorities. But also endowments given to Viennese institutions were sometimes problematic, depending on the benefactors’ character as either Ottoman or Habsburg subjects. In contrast to Ottoman subjects, Habsburg subjects could also endow real estate and thus show their integration into the Viennese bourgeoisie. In this article we discuss the legal frameworks for the administration of endowments in the two Greek communities in Vienna as well as its practical realization in interaction with the Habsburg authorities.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the relation between manorial administration, the emerging state, and space in the Austrian and Bohemian lands of the Habsburg monarchy between the end of the 18th century and the abolishment of the manorial system in 1848. The themes that will be discussed are the spaces of manorial administration, with a focus on the various manorial rights and their spatial relation to each other; the role of manors in the state-building process, which in the Habsburg Monarchy is closely linked with the reform period in the second half of the 18th century; and finally the relationship between state, manors, and subjects in the first half of the 19th century, with emphasis on administrative practice.

This article explores the spatial generation and perception of administrative districts. It has a particular focus on how certain administrative practices contributed to diminishing spatial distance between district offices and local society, that is, residents and municipalities, from the early 19th century to the 1870S in the Grand Duchy of Baden. TWO different administrative systems – a centralized one introduced in 1809 and a more participative one dating from 1863/1865 – characterize the period under consideration. With regard to the methodological approach, the understanding of the generation and perception of administrative spaces is informed by cultural, communications, and media studies.

With respect to the spatial generation and perception of the administrative districts, two administrative practices are of particular interest. Firstly, administrative visitations (›Ortsbereisungen‹) were periodically carried out in the villages by the district officers, starting in the early 19th century, to gather information as the basis of a ›close‹ description of the administrative, agricultural, economic, infrastructural, security, welfare and health conditions in the districts for the purpose of administrative reports. Oral communication and immediacy in conducting the administrative visitations contributed in particular to reducing distance between district administrations and local society.

Secondly, the article explores the role of honorary district councillors as middlemen between local society and district administration from the mid-1860s. In their roles as experts, advisors, and mediators – which they also fulfilled in the context of administrative visitations – the honorary district councillors enhanced the proximity of local society to the district administration and in this way contributed to the perception of the district as a rather small space.

In contrast to the image of the Netherlands as a solid state since the early modern period, this article argues that Dutch statehood was the product of a hard-won process that required a good part of the 19th century to reach any sort of administrative consolidation. We look at state building from a decentered perspective, not so much from above or below, but rather from the middle, concentrating on the province of South Holland, and from within, foregrounding the piecemeal fine-tuning of the administrative system at the provincial level. We show that every administrative intervention had a spatial element or – to put it differently – created its own spatiality. The province, in that sense, was not a fixed territorial entity, but an amalgamation of spatial properties, depending on the administrative issue at stake.

The paper deals with the question of the administrative districts in an overall Prussian perspective and emphasizes, above all, the central political role played by the provincial districts and their main authorities within the spaces of the state and of administrative activity. On this basis, it will be possible to adequately appreciate the revolutionary but unsuccessful attempt to abolish them in 1848 by the liberaldemocratic wing of the Constitutional Commission of the Prussian National Assembly, as has not yet been accomplished within the existing historiography.

First, the origins of the spatial-territorial division of Prussia existing around the middle of the 19th century are discussed. Within this framework special attention has been paid to the introduction of a provincial division, which led to that organization of internal administration into four instances under the minister (provinces, governmental districts, districts, municipalities) which was a peculiarity of the Prussian political and administrative spatial division compared with the other states of the German Confederation. Questions such as those of the basic division of the state’s space are so radical that they are usually raised with some prospect of success only at the foundation of states or during revolutions. Immediately afterwards, they tend to be included in the list of ›depoliticized technicalities‹, although they retain their fundamental importance for ensuring the political and administrative continuity of the state.

This article considers the role of the local village mayors in East Elbian Prussia and Bavaria during the second half of the 19th century. These actors played an important part in the process of state expansion, but it is still unclear how the unpaid mayors were able to meet the challenges of everyday action between the local community and the state. This problem is explored in this paper on the basis of administrative and local sources as well as different kinds of contemporary instructions. It is shown that long-term learning processes as well as the growing autonomy of local communities made it more likely that village mayors became experienced ›players‹ in meeting the everyday administrative and political demands.

The advantages of the railway were recognized not only in Vienna. In the Habsburg Empire's provinces, too, people banked on this new type of transportation as a bringer of progress. Using the example of Galicia, this article shows how the initiative and the involvement of local actors promoted the building of a railway network in the north-eastern crownland. It focuses on the main motives for the implementation of the railway in Vienna versus those in Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv). The article is divided into three parts. While the first part deals with the expectations raised by the railway, the second part concentrates on the political circumstances which accompanied the construction of the Galician railway network. The third part focuses on the Galician capital as a traffic junction in a polycentric railway network.

This article deals with the introduction of state administrative institutions at the district level in the Habsburg Monarchy and their several reforms in the period from 1848 to 1868. It analyzes these processes in a spatial perspective and with a focus on implementation. First, it shows that new spaces of administration were constructed on several levels, especially the districts themselves and the district offices. This was done not by unilaterally expunging earlier forms of spatial organization, but rather in complex interplay with them. Numerous groups of actors were involved in negotiating this, including not only politicians and bureaucrats, but also members of the general population in various roles. In this sense there was a substantial component of ›state-building from below‹ in the creation of the district administrations. Finally, some consequences arising from the new organization of space are outlined, from the quantitative increase in state administrative activity via improved possibilities for production and use of spatial knowledge to advances in the construction of the territory as a unitary space of the state.

The essay analyses the relationship between administration and territory at the birth of the Italian unitary state. Following the discussions of the time involving scholars of diverse disciplinary provenance, politicians, and administrators, the essay highlights the main problems encountered by the design of the administrative districts of the new Kingdom of Italy: the territorial contradictions and the imbalances that conditioned their initial structure and subsequent history; the legacy of the boundaries and internal territorial divisions of the former states of the peninsula; the various proposals put forward for the country’s regional organization by geographers, statisticians and politicians, even before the completion of unification; the territorial and administrative problems of the new state: natural or artificial districts, small or large provinces, the weight of municipalities, projects of regionalization; the contribution of new sciences, such as geography and statistics; the choice of administrative centralization, with its inevitable consequences on the boundaries of territorial partitions, linked to the ›exceptionality‹ of the historical moment.

This re-reading of Frido Wagener’s »New Construction of Administration« (»Neubau der Verwaltung«, 1969) places this book in the setting of Western Germany’s late 1960s and their quest for an enlightened planning after the mere ›re-construction‹ (of buildings as well as of democracy) in earlier post-war Western Germany. Wagener’s struggle to ›rationalize‹ planning can be seen as a project that was as grand as it was doomed to fail – the judgement of posterity has yet to be spoken.

The volume »Les Maires en France du Consulat à nos jours«, published in France in 1986, was the first historical work to open long-term perspectives on French mayors in the 19th and 20th century. On the one hand, these perspectives resulted from the data obtained within the framework of a quantitative long-term analysis; on the other hand, they relied on qualitative explorations of selected administrative units or regions. In re-reading »Les Maires en France du Consulat à nos jours«, this article shows that the volume has remained a reference work for the history of French municipalities until today, even though it does not always allow answering current research questions.