Science and Empire in Eastern Europe: Imperial Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th Century ed. by Jan Arend (review)

Jan Arend's edited collection of fifteen essays contributes to the interwoven history of science and empires. This field has been intensively developing in recent years, if only somewhat unevenly in terms of geographical concentration. Whereas the overseas empires of France and Great Britain are relatively well researched, much less is known about the contiguous empires' operationalization of and dependence on science. The book compensates for this disbalance by exploring how science was shaped by the imperial order and how scientific practices influenced imperial order in the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary. It sets out to critically reflect upon the notion of backwardness so often attributed to the European land empires and to show that they "were no less 'modern' than their sea-going and colonial counterparts" (P. 21).

The book chapters are distributed among seven thematic sections focused on specific disciplines and different forms of scholarship institutionalization. Despite this rigid structure, individual chapters do not "rhyme" with each other, even when placed in the same section. Published side by side, a Habsburg and a Russian case study, as a rule, differ thematically and conceptually. With few interconnections among multiple extremely diverse themes, the collection makes a reviewer's task particularly challenging. To sustain some coherence of the concise review, I opted to focus only on contributions dealing with the history of the Russian Empire.

Two chapters in the first section deal with amateur scholarship produced outside the official academy: within the Czech Academy for Sciences, Literature, and Arts in Prague (Martin Franc) and by scientific associations in partitioned Poland (Maciej Janowski). Janowski describes how self-organized associations created for Polish intelligentsia a common transborder public sphere. Its academic nature legitimized the intellectual activity in the eyes of local imperial authorities suspicious of Polish nationalism. In the second section, dedicated to imperial universities, Andrej Andreev turns to the opposite segment of knowledge production: the officially institutionalized academe. Moreover, he focuses not on professors but on university administrators, and on the most notorious type of them for that matter: the infamous superintendents (popechiteli) of educational districts during the first half of the nineteenth century. (In two other chapters of this section, Jan Surman discusses Habsburg higher education as viewed by foreigners, whereas Mark Hengerer and Sabrina Rospert compare course catalogs of the universities of Budapest and Vienna in 1866, 1886, and 1906.) Andreev aspires to revise the stereotypical negative image of the superintendents as authoritarian champions of reactionary academic policy. Along the way, he presents a more nuanced understanding of the superintendents, whose power was checked by the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Ministry of People's Enlightenment.

In the third section, "Science on the Imperial Periphery," Daniel Baric discusses classical archaeology in Sarajevo at the turn of the twentieth century, and Matthias Golbeck surveys the activities of Nikolai F. Petrovskii (1837–1908) in Central Asia. Working for the State Comptroller's office and then as a Russian consul-general in Kashgar (Xinjiang), Petrovskii spent three decades in the region. Besides his political role in the Great Game, he became known as an amateur scholar of Turkestan's geography, archaeology, and history. Golbeck argues that empire provided the main framework for Petrovskii's scholarly interests and shaped his approaches to the study of Turkestan.

This chapter directly relates to the next, fourth section of the collection, dedicated to the academic discipline of oriental studies. Similar to Golbeck's treatment of Petrovskii, in this section, Johannes Feichtinger positions "Orientalistik" in Austro-Hungary between "imperial pragmatism" and "pure" scholarship. Arpine Maniero examines the differences of opinions between Russian scholars and authorities in the capital, on the one hand, and in the imperial periphery, on the other. As elsewhere, Oriental studies served a twofold role in the Russian Empire: to advance scholarship and to serve political goals, including...