Project description
Knowledge and state power in the Habsburg monarchy
Administrative institutions like civil services, statistics offices and record systems help manage society by collecting information about people. This raises several questions about how the information is produced, collected and interpreted. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the BURKNOW project examines how bureaucratic knowledge was produced and circulated within the Habsburg monarchy between 1867 and 1914, focusing on how civil servants in regions such as Styria, Croatia-Slavonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina collected, classified and communicated information about local societies. The project analyses administrative routines and information flows within the state hierarchy.
Objective
This project investigates how bureaucratic knowledge practices functioned in the Habsburg monarchy from 1867 to 1914. Using case studies from the monarchy’s three constituent parts—the province of Styria (Austria), the kingdom of Croatia–Slavonia (Hungary), and the occupied and later annexed territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina—it analyses how civil servants carried out surveillance of local society and how they communicated their findings within the structures of the state administration. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of surveillance, utilising the outlook of surveillance studies that frames surveillance practices as a broader social process defined by the collection, categorization, and ordering of information about human beings and their surroundings. Bringing together the approaches of new imperial history and the history of knowledge, I take as my starting point the idea that Habsburg civil servants mobilized context-specific knowledge practices and were expected to adhere to the rules of the state administrative hierarchy, which provided a way to organize the social and material world of the monarchy. I examine the different practices and sources bureaucrats at the lowest administrative offices of the central state used to gather information about local society, how they and their superiors interpreted and refashioned this data to circulate it through the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state as well as the degree to which these practices constituted a state knowledge order. By focusing on bureaucratic routines and practices, the project demonstrates that Habsburg rulers relied not only on individual projects to meet specific knowledge needs, but that knowledge practices were inherent in the state’s bureaucratic apparatus. Knowledge production was a core function of the state. This has important implications for how we understand the ways states exert power.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
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