Zensus und Ethnizität: Zur Herstellung von Wissen über soziale Wirklichkeiten im Habsburgerreich zwischen 1848 und 1910 by Wolfgang Göderle (review)

Wolfgang Göderle's book on the census in the Habsburg Empire sets out to understand the practices and processes of the "Durchethnisierung" of Central Europe in the nineteenth century. As the title suggests, Göderle is interested how knowledge creation, especially by scholars and administrators working for the Habsburg state and in the fields of statistics, contributed to the process in which people in Central Europe saw themselves as members of ethnic groups. This book is difficult and dense but is written in a way that does not violate the social contract between the author and reader. Concepts are articulated slowly and unfolded with historical evidence and any scholar, even one unfamiliar with research on the history of knowledge, can follow the arguments. As such, Göderle's book makes a new and valuable contribution to the field of nationalism in central Europe, a field which has itself undergone a revolution in the past two decades with the work of Pieter Judson, Jeremy King, Tara Zahra, and others.

Göderle's contribution focuses on the connections between Wissenschaft and administration, precisely in the moment when the Habsburg Empire and all of Europe was deeply involved in building the foundations of modern states with sophisticated bureaucratic apparatuses that received orders from and reported back to the capital. In order to administer and to improve commercial infrastructure, in order to tax, in order to deliver mail, and, finally, in order to recruit troops, the state had first to know and to understand its territory. It is this process of knowledge creation, led by scholars and scientists who were simultaneously bureaucrats and officials, that Göderle investigates.

The book itself is divided into four main chapters. The first presents a comprehensive overview of the converging historiographies of Imperial history, the history of knowledge, and postcolonial histories that inform the book's methods and approaches. First and foremost, Göderle presents Habsburg central Europe—indeed all of Europe—as a diverse space. Moreover, the ways in which it is diverse are not themselves products of a natural order of things, but have to be invented and discovered, turned into a way of knowledge and understanding, and inscribed into books, treatises, charts, and laws. Put another way, Göderle is interested in charting how ethnicity becomes a way of understanding differences between people, as well as the ways that ethnicity was understood as a category.

Chapters 2 through 4 follow the processes in which knowledge and the state-building project were intertwined in Central Europe. To his credit Göderle sees this process as a European one, in which the Habsburg Empire took part—not a process that marked the Habsburg Empire as some type of anachronistic outlier. Chapter 2 introduces us in particular to Bruno Latour's concept of the circulating reference and the larger constructions of knowledge in Latour's actor-network theory. Göderle takes the state-building project of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European state and puts it in this framework with the explicit ways of interpreting information found in the implementation of a state census. Here, Göderle points out that, in order to enact a census, states had to spatially inscribe as belonging to a network of places (an intellectual process) and, at the same time, bring them under physical control through the marking of territorial borders and the policing of the countryside by gendarmes. In this bordered and ordered territory, the state further prepared these spaces to be studied and understood by physically numbering the houses and buildings. From the state, understood as a whole territory, to its subsequent parts of provinces, counties, districts, cities, towns, communes, and houses, space was hierarchized, ordered, and was now "knowable."

In this physical-intellectual context, the first real census took place in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire in 1869. Göderle explains the...