Until the end of the grant period, SpoilsofWAR has achieved important scientific objectives and implemented an ambitious workplan. We have built a diverse and dynamic team of researchers with complementary language skills, regional specialisms, and analytical know-how bridging the fields of economic and business history, historical economic geography, and historical political economy. This transnational and interdisciplinary character reflected the aims of our scholarly ambition. Despite dramatic disruptions and delays suffered during the two years dominated by the global pandemic, our collective efforts yielded an impressive list of research contributions, most of them already published or accepted for publication. These include one monograph by Cambridge University Press, four articles published in Business History, Explorations in Economic History, the Economic History Review, and the Journal of Historical Political Economy, and two articles forthcoming in the Journal of Economic History. One more article is under revision at the Journal of Development Economics and two more articles are in preparation and will soon be submitted for review. As a final output of the project, we launched an edited volume with international collaborators and following a successful conference submitted the book proposal for review. Our research team also contributed chapters to important edited volumes and textbook published or in preparation outside the framework of the project.
We organized three conferences at the Host Institution: a book conference to discuss the manuscript of Imperial Borderlands: The Institutions and Legacies of the Habsburg Military Frontier i(Cambridge University Press, 2023) n 2021, an international conference on The New Economic History of Empires in Eastern Europe and a book conference for Globalizing Firms in a Deglobalizing World: Industrial Enterprise in Central Europe between the Wars (under review). We organized sessions at international congresses, incl. the European Social Science History Conference in 2021, the European Historical Economics Society Conference in 2022, the European Business History Association Congress in 2024, and the World Economic History Congress in 2025.
Our research has contributed to four main themes: (i) regional economic development in the Habsburg Empire before the Great War, (ii) economic legacies of imperial and post-imperial borders, (iii) cross-country and regional income inequality in Central and Southeast Europe, and (iv) industrial firms in the Habsburg war economy and in post-imperial Central Europe. We are committed to giving free access to the databases that we have generated in a dedicated section of our project website. We have already published a large database of economic and trade statistics for Yugoslav cities before 1929. Three additional databases on (i) regional industrialization in Austria-Hungary in 1900-1910, (ii) the industrial military contractors of Austria-Hungary in the Great War, and (iii) the development of the 200 largest war contractors until 1930, will be made available after the publication of the relevant research articles.
