New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. 
 

This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of 

its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

 
  

  JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH 
 

 

 

Orientalism and the Geoculture of the World System:  
Discursive Othering, Political Economy and the Cameralist Division of Labor in Habsburg 

Central Europe (1713-1815) 

 
 
Klemens Kaps 
Universität Wien  

klemens.kaps@univie.ac.at 

 

 

 

ISSN: 1076-156X   |   Vol. 22   Issue 2 Pages 315-348   |                                              

DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619   |   jwsr.org 

 

Vol. 1 |  DOI 10.5195/JWSR.1 

Abstract 

This article addresses the question of to what degree the concept of geoculture can be brought in line with research 

on Orientalist stereotypes and imaginary. Following Said’s original definition of orientalism discourses of the 18th-

century political economy are reassessed by focusing on their perception of spatial hierarchies in Eastern Europe. 

This article reconsiders these discourses as an active factor in the struggle for power and a tool in the hands of the 

geopolitical interests of absolutist monarchs in Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Russia in the age of 

mercantilism, as demonstrated by the Partitions of Poland-Lithuania. By focusing on the Habsburg Monarchy 

between the Spanish War of Succession and the Congress of Vienna, it is demonstrated here that, territorial 

landlocked empires within Europe used a similar language as colonial maritime empires in order to justify their 

geopolitical expansion and territorial domination of Eastern Europe. In a second step, it is shown that this discourse 

was part of the geopolitical culture of the World System and was instrumental in setting ideological conditions for 

cameralist-driven institutional transformations in favor of the core regions within the Habsburg dominions in 

Central Europe.  

Keywords: Geoculture; orientalism; Central Europe; spatial inequalities; cameralist division of labour 

http://www.library.pitt.edu/
http://www.pitt.edu/
http://www.library.pitt.edu/articles/digpubtype/index.html
http://upress.pitt.edu/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

316 

Geoculture, Orientalism and the World System in the 18th Century: Theoretical and 

Methodological Reflections 

Among some historians, supporters and critics of World Systems Analysis alike, the notion of the 

World System is perceived skeptically, as being at odds with other currents of historical 

scholarship. Apart from prompting the more general debate on the relationship between systemic 

and agency-driven approaches, which are especially relevant for political and social history, the 

cultural and linguistic turn also came to increase the perception that a chasm existed between 

approaches (Middell 1994). It does seem, however, that the obvious affinities of the World System 

approach with cultural and political histories are all too often overlooked: Hans-Heinrich Nolte’s 

works have opened up numerous possibilities of not only building bridges between different 

approaches, but also of neatly integrating political, social, and cultural history into the systemic 

approach (Nolte 1993: 2005). Another way to close the divide between the systemic narrative and 

historical subjects, both on the individual and collective levels, is to integrate social-cultural 

anthropology into the analysis of World Systems (Forte 1998: 32-33). In addition, some 

researchers insist upon the World System approach having room for further development; 

therefore, the analysis of peripheral and semi-peripheral actor groups, who sometimes remain at 

the margin of Immanuel Wallerstein’s narrative of the Early Modern age, may be easily 

incorporated into the existing guidelines of World System narratives (Adamcyzk 2001; Dhogson 

1993). Moreover, there is a lot to say in favor of Nolte’s idea of combining research on regional 

or national stereotypes with World System analysis (Nolte 2002).  

 This comes very close to the question that this article aims to discuss: Without neglecting 

the abundant bibliography on stereotypes, nation-building and mental maps, in this case 

stereotypes will be regarded in close relationship to the structural claims of world-systemic 

approaches. In a broader context, the relationship between culture, knowledge and power, between 

imaginaries and social structure in the context of empire will be explored, following the ideas first 

proposed by Foucault and Bourdieu (Dirks et al 1994: 10, 15, 17, 29) as well as Said (1993, 2003). 

To what degree did stereotypes and images of otherness not only reflect spatial disparities between 

centers and peripheries, but also acted as formative devices, directly affecting the shape of regional 

hierarchies? In other words, to what degree, and in which form, did perceptions of cultural 

otherness become tools for legitimizing and justifying an unequal world order?  

Wallerstein himself proposed a concept that could be essential for this perspective. The 

geoculture of World Systems addresses the impact of political economies, institutional setting, and 

cultural identities on the division of labor and on center-periphery relations. The geoculture of 

World Systems can therefore be used as an analytical tool for the examination of the multiple 

factors that shaped the construction of unequal hierarchies (Wallerstein 1992).  



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

317 

The fourth volume of Wallerstein’s world-system history points out that the French 

Revolution was a breakthrough for the geoculture of the World System. The revolution resulted in 

new ideological premises and altered the prevalent social configuration, both of which were 

essential conditions for the rise of centrist liberalism as the system’s predominant ideology and 

main check to conservatism and socialism over the long 19th century, between 1789 and 1914 

(Wallerstein 2011: 1-19). The revolutions of 1848, in turn, were the point of departure for the 

emergence of the working class as a historical subject on a world-wide scale and, hence, greatly 

contributed to deepen the divide between liberals and socialists. The 1848 revolution was, 

therefore, the first event to set limits on the imperative for equality, the first event to act upon the 

contradiction that existed between its own postulates and their obvious theoretical and practical 

limitations. While class, race, and gender set the limits to the equality claims which characterized 

the 19th century,  within the context of the progressive expansion of civil-rights, race and 

“civilization” were the main concepts with which Europe’s political domination and the unequal 

division of labor in Asia and Africa was legitimized (Wallerstein 2011: 86, 88-90, 156-217). It is 

worth taking this focus on geoculture further, in both chronological and thematic terms: First, some 

attention should be paid to the pre-1789 configuration of the World System in order to explore 

what kind of geoculture was behind the expansion of the World System before it took the 

aforementioned turn toward a centrist liberal configuration. Secondly, it is interesting to examine 

how this socio-political order legitimized the World System and its steady expansion into new 

territories, an expansion which transformed the spatial and socio-cultural configuration of the 

system. 

According to a reading of Wallerstein, one might assume that from the early 17th century 

mercantilism played such a legitimizing role. Since the early 16th century, “to the extent an 

ideology seemed to prevail, it was statism, the raison d’etat” (Wallerstein 1974: 67). However, the 

(nation)-state as the basic unit for the political organization of global capitalism appears to be a 

necessary but not a sufficient prerequisite for the expansion of the World System. This seems to 

point to a more general pattern, according to which cultural debasement, political domination and 

economic exploitation went hand in hand (Said 1993: 6). Following such a perspective means 

accepting that “the construction of cultural boundaries and political demarcations occurs within a 

larger context of power politics and contentions for the control of productive resources” (Forte 

1998: 41). 

One of the main factors of cultural division before 1789 was religion. The exclusively 

Christian nature of the World System until the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire in the 18 th 

century (Nolte 1993: 56) played an important role in the expansion of the system both to the east 

and the west. Early European colonialism in the Americas was facilitated by the Roman Catholic 

Church, which provided the Iberian monarchies with the tools to construct the idea of a civilizing 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

318 

mission and a feeling of superiority, a phenomenon in which clergymen participated actively 

(Weber 2004: 24). After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) the system took a secular as well as a 

confessionalist turn, including cultural boundaries in a complex interplay between religion, the 

emergent proto-national identities, and new secular ideas that in the 18th century came to be 

influenced by Enlightenment thinkers and the meta-category of civilization (Nolte 1993: 58, 71, 

98; Nolte 2001: 14; Carey and Trakulhun 2009: 8). In turn, subaltern groups, such as slaves or 

women, were defined as being close to a state of “nature,” which was a way to justify their 

subjugation under the Western European male order (Nolte 1993: 72). While secularization was a 

key factor in the transformation of the geoculture of the World System in the 19th century, it was 

within this secular framework that modern racism, mainly towards Africans and Asians, marked 

the beginning of a truly distinct phase of colonial domination and the repression of alien cultures: 

political misgovernment and mass plundering of natural resources after 1878.   

It is important to stress that secularization and racism were mutually linked phenomena 

(Wallerstein 1992: 146-148; Hobsbawm 2002: 56-83). The different nature of the geoculture of 

the World System in each of these periods corresponds with different political economies. Thus, 

while mercantilism can be associated with the increasingly secular justification of inequality based 

on “civilization,” secular liberalism was built on the hegemony of the doctrines of free trade, and 

inequalities appear as a result of the operation of free market forces, symbolized by Adam Smith’s 

“invisible hand.” Here again, ideas of civilization, but increasingly of race, played an important 

role in justifying unequal developments. These cultural differences were not drawn between 

“Europe” and “the rest of the world.” Both the religious and the increasingly secular definitions of 

difference (both through “civilization” and race) had an effect on the expansion of the system 

within Europe as much as beyond its borders. The key question thus arises: How did this way of 

legitimizing inequality work on the micro-level; that is, how did images of “the other” reflect, 

influence, and construct political economies and the unequal division of labor? The present article 

explores this question mainly by analyzing a variety of sources that are linked to the political -

economy discourse—from published works and descriptive statistics to travel accounts and 

governmental reports, internal files and public decrees. First, the theoretical foundations for the 

combination of orientalism and world-system analysis will be explained. Afterwards, the case of 

the Habsburg Monarchy will be introduced, with a particular focus on the nexus between orientalist 

discourses and economic change. Finally, orientalist practices which were part of the strategy used 

in order to give shape to the internal division of labour in Habsburg Central Europe will be studied. 

 

 

 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

319 

Orientalism as Essentialist Spatial Othering: Stereotypes and Hierarchization of Space in 

the World System During the 18th Century 

The 18th century, the age of reason and mercantilism, seems like an interesting case study for this 

enquiry: How were spatial inequalities created and reproduced by the legitimization of the pre -

equality discursive imperative? In this case, Edward Said’s concept of orientalism appears to be 

particularly suggestive: “a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over 

the Orient” (Said 2003: 3). Said focused on how the construction of the Orient preceded the 

Western political, economic and military domination of the Middle East, which ultimately led to 

its formal colonization in the wake of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and 

early 20th centuries (Said 2003: 35, 39). This sequence of events outlines the affinities between 

postcolonial (dominants/subalterns) and World System analysis vocabularies (center/periphery). 

British colonial rule in Egypt starting in 1882 largely based its “authority” to “speak” about and 

on behalf of the Orient on superior knowledge; that is, British authority relied upon a discourse 

constructed around the alleged superiority of British “civilization” (Said 2003: 32-34).  

 The correlation with economic conditions is quite clear, although Said was silent about 

both the impact of materiality on texts and the broader social context within which this discourse 

was disseminated (Turner 1994: 7, 18). Nevertheless, Said himself points implicitly to this 

relationship when he writes that, Egypt “was until its annexation by England, an almost academic 

example of backwardness; it was to become the triumph of English knowledge and power […] 

British exports to Egypt equaled those to the whole of Africa; that certainly indicated a sort of 

financial prosperity, for Egypt and England (somewhat unevenly) together” (Said 2003: 35). Thus, 

the relationship between orientalist discourse and socioeconomic processes can be studied on the 

basis of the scheme outlined by Said, but this has to be systematized and developed in a more 

detailed fashion in order to be placed within the framework of world-system analysis. In 

consequence, strategies of othering will be analyzed in relation to the position of the corresponding 

territories in the world-wide division of labor. Also, the analysis will examine how negative 

stereotypes reflected a certain position within the world-system or if they in fact contributed to the 

emergence of a core/periphery-structure, for example by providing the geocultural legitimation for 

the system.  

Although the aforementioned example corresponds to the process of colonization of Africa 

and Asia by European powers during the 19th century, the pattern appears earlier. The 18th century 

had already bred arguments that legitimized an unequal division of labor (Boatcă 2015: 79). Said 

(2003: 22) finds a fundamental shift in the orientalist discourse in the last third of the 18th century, 

which largely coincides with Wallerstein’s timing for the emergence of a new centrist liberal 

geoculture of the World System. Other authors point to the importance of Enlightenment concepts, 

among which the key idea of “civilization” stands out. Since the 1750s, the French physiocrats 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

320 

used the term frequently in their writings on commerce and wealth. According to them, economic 

success was linked to a set of behavioral norms that could be summarized under the umbrella-idea 

“civilization,” which was increasingly used to denote refinement of manners and behavior. From 

that moment, the term became a meta-category for the comparison of different peoples around the 

globe, linking economic, political, social and cultural categories (Wolff 2007: 10-11; Wolff 1995: 

12-14). This was a tremendous change: The creation of a secular, universal category for the 

evaluation and classification not only of societies, but also of spatial entities. Moreover, the 

category could be easily instrumentalized for the legitimization of the unequal division of labor 

that characterized the World System, serving both pre-1789 (mercantilism) and post-1789 

conceptions (liberalism). The notion of “civilization” appeared a few decades before the system 

embraced liberalism as its new leading principle, and thus it can also be regarded as part of the 

transformative process toward the imperative of formal equality and persisting socio-economic 

differentiation (Nolte 1993: 101). The universal code of “civilization” versus “barbarism” 

notwithstanding (Said 1993: xxv), different nation-states espoused different orientalist discourses, 

without this contradicting the general tendency to other the “oriental” (Turner 2000: 6, 8; Turner 

1994: 5). Also, orientalism was not an entirely new paradigm for the world-system as the 

perception of indigenous cultures in the Americas since the late 15th century demonstrates which 

can be labelled “occidentalism” (Boatcă 2015: 79). 

Analytically, the bridge between both axiomatic paradigms—World-System and 

orientalism—may be described by the concept of mental mapping. Mental maps are imaginative 

geographic constructs that spatialize cultural stereotypes, e.g. by depicting the contraposition 

between “civilized” and “barbaric” peoples. These maps largely coincide with the classification of 

centers and peripheries, as Maria Todorova (1997) and Larry Wolff (1995) have demonstrated 

regarding the placement of Balkan-centered discourses in the emergence of a discourse on Eastern 

Europe and the construction of Eastern Europe in the political and cultural notions of the 18 th-

century Western European Enlightenment respectively. Enlightenment concepts shifted spatial 

divides: The axis between the Occident and the Orient was increasingly identified with the line 

that divided Eastern and Western Europe, to the detriment of the north-south-divide which had 

prevailed so far. Said (2003: 54) makes this point explicit when he writes about the “hard-and-fast 

distinctions as ‘East’ and ‘West’ which were the basic meta-categories for the “imaginative 

geography of the ‘our land – barbarian land’ variety […] to set up these boundaries in our minds.” 

Larry Wolff (1995: 7-8, 43, 165, 185-186, 357) has pointed out the affinities between Said’s (2003: 

49-73) orientalization and the discursive construction of Eastern Europe as a spatial category, 

subordinated to the “West” and suffering from a deeply-rooted “backwardness” that Western 

concepts  outlined as a distinct notion. This underlines the possibility of applying orientalism as a 

specific form of mental mapping to the territories of Eastern Europe as well as Asia. 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

321 

Although Wolff openly rejects World System analysis and sees it as a variation of the 

discursive “invention” of Eastern Europe (Wolff 1995: 8-9), his book effectively linked 

orientalization with the unequal division of labor between Eastern and Western Europe in the 18th 

century. The discourse of the Enlightenment, expressed in a variety of formats from travel books 

to philosophical treatises, related the meta-categories of “civilized” and “barbarians” to 

archetypical signs of economic underdevelopment: bad roads, an allegedly lazy population and a 

“wild, uncivilized nobility,” to name just a few. In 1772, Madame Geoffrin published a book about 

her trip to Warsaw six years earlier, in which she wrote “[…] roads that were not roads, going to 

bed in stables where it was necessary to evacuate the beasts to make a place, inedible bread, 

detestable water” (Wolff 1995: 254); Voltaire, for his part, addressed the French ambassador in 

Warsaw, Pierre Henin, in the following terms in 1761: “I still give five hundred years to the Poles 

to make the fabrics of Lyon and the porcelain of Sévres” (Wolff 1995: 261). 

In modern terms, we might speak of a deficient infrastructure, insufficient productivity of 

the labor force, social inequalities, and mass poverty. However, these phenomena were embedded 

in a narrative of cultural hegemony and largely essentialized, as Voltaire’s time framework for 

Poland catching-up with France clearly indicates. Hubert Orłowski (1996) made a similar reading 

of the German discourse on Poland in a broader temporal framework, which covers the period 

between the 16th and the 20th centuries. Here, the reference to the social and economic aspects is 

accentuated even more. From the mid-18th century, the term “Polish economy” (Polnische 

Wirtschaft) became a general meta-stereotype for the German perceptions of the neighboring 

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which a number of negative categories were bundled 

together. At a later stage, this discourse was instrumental in legitimizing German rule over 

partitioned Poland between 1772 and 1918 (Orłowski 1996: 12, 60, 64-65, 313-314), thus once 

more linking cultural images not only to geoculture but also to geopolitics (Said 1993: 7). It is 

important to stress that it is not so much the description of poverty, social inequalities, and deficits 

in production that made this discourse orientalist, but the essentialist framework within which they 

were presented as natural and unchangeable. This is also the reason why it is not sufficient to state 

that stereotypes, for example bad and dirty roads, also can be found regarding Western countries 

(Struck 2004); it was the function that these respective discourses had that is relevant. Even when 

positive transformations occurred, according to the framework set out by dominant Western 

European powers, they were interpreted as the West’s own achievement for bringing 

“civilization,” rather than the result of subaltern efforts (Orłowski 1996: 314). From the early 18th 

century civilization as a meta-category gradually  became a yardstick with which to measure the 

state of progress and development of societies and a tool to rank them  in a hierarchical taxonomic 

order (Chakrabarty 2005: 8-9). 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

322 

On a linguistic level, this is expressed by a comparison of Eastern Europe with colonial 

spaces in America and Australia: In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith claimed that the 

Mexican Aztecs and the Peruvian Incas were, at the time of their colonization by Hernan Cortés 

and Francisco Pizarro, respectively, more ignorant of the arts, agriculture and commerce than the 

Ukrainian Tartars (Wolff 1995: 272). Travel writers compared serfs in Russia and Poland with 

black slaves in the Caribbean (Wolff 1995: 81, 86), and the Polish population was labeled 

“orangutans” in a satirical text published in 1780, after the First Partition of the Commonwealth 

(Anonymous 1780). This links the orientalist discourse and the geopolitical interest of Prussia, the 

Habsburg Monarchy, and Russia in carving up Poland-Lithuania between 1772 and 1795 (Wolff 

1995: 185) and is directly reminiscent of Said’s claim with regard to the Middle East and, 

especially, Egypt (Said 2003: 39, 80-83, 86, 92). 

This situation underlines the relationship between orientalist images and the geopolitical 

expansion of three empires on the European continent. Although it has to be stressed that Russia 

was also subject of orientalizing practices without being geopolitically subordinated, as the above-

mentioned example demonstrates. This imaginary, nevertheless, played a key role in legitimizing 

the alteration of national borders in particular if this was in violation of the principles of 

international politics and territorial sovereignty, as was the case with the partition of the Polish -

Lithuanian Commonwealth (Orłowski 1996). Territorial sovereignty and international treaties had 

been the leading principles of the geoculture of the World System at least from the Peace of 

Westphalia (Wallerstein 1992:145). 

The Polish-Lithuanian case may be an episodic event in which the circumvention of 

international standards was justified by a forced Partition Treaty, thus dispelling the widely held 

impression that three major states had violated the rules of international policy. Yet, Orientalism 

was also part of the geoculture of the World System on a much more general level, and it provided 

a language and a vocabulary with which to frame spatial hierarchies in combination with political 

sovereignty and an unequal division of labor. In other words, the structure of centers and 

peripheries was justified by orientalist explanatory schemes. This is transparently shown in the 

way orientalist-based arguments were used to justify the position of a formally not colonized 

geographical area such as Eastern Europe. 

The analogies that the contemporary discourses drew between the Eastern European 

regions and the Latin American colonies reflect this hierarchization of space in the perspectives of 

Central and Western European intellectual elites, government bureaucrats and rulers. Orientalist 

imaginaries offered the opportunity to design civilizing missions, which included the 

implementation of development policies (Schröder 2005: 28-30). These alleged modernization 

reform programs were inevitably intertwined with the interests of the “civilizing” states, whose 

bureaucracies and nascent civil societies were both involved in the construction of these images 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

323 

and receptive to this kind of perception. Larry Wolff (1995: 267-268) reports the example of the 

French physiocrat Nicolas Baudeau, who in 1767/68 envisaged that Poland-Lithuania’s economic 

problems could be addressed by liberalizing trade and introducing a property law. However, he 

and other physiocrats saw that the country’s future was in agricultural production and claimed that 

its crafts (but also its agriculture) were in a precarious state; Baudeau was interested in fostering 

grain exports to France, which according to his plans, could build up reserves to feed its population 

for three years. 

This clearly demonstrates that the formulation of economic reform programs for other 

regions was part of the center-periphery structure between Western and Eastern Europe. The 

orientalizing element here is the unchangeable nature ascribed to relations that were perceived as 

“backward:” Accordingly, poverty in the periphery can at best be reduced within the existing 

parameters of a peripheral economy, which is inevitably intertwined with the core’s economic 

interest in maintaining the same economic model that stood in the background of the reforms. In 

the end this meant prolonging the periphery’s status, in open contradiction between official claims 

and political practice. 

 

Economy and Political Economy in 18th-Century Habsburg Europe 

These frictions can be seen even more clearly in the Habsburg Monarchy’s political economy. The 

Habsburg dominions acted as a bridge between Central and Eastern Europe and are in general 

classified as a semi-periphery (Wallerstein 1974: 85, 171, 181, 185, 197, 307-308; Wallerstein 

1980: 232; Komlosy 2003: 15; Kaps 2008). Since the 13th century, the Habsburg dynasty had a 

wide range of territories under their control. These territories were very different from one another, 

not only in terms of legal status, but also in terms of their socio-economic profile. After the 

reunification of all Austrian and Bohemian territories under the Viennese Habsburg line, in 1620 

and 1665 respectively, and after the Siege of Vienna in 1683, the Habsburgs started their eastern 

expansion in alliance with Polish, Saxon and Bavarian forces, pushing back the Ottoman Empire 

towards south-eastern Europe (Ingrao 2000: 3, 9, 75-83; Macartney 1968: 3, 6). 

In the 18th century, therefore, the dominions of the Habsburgs included a multiplicity of 

territories under a single polity. Among them, Upper and Lower Austria, Styria and Bohemia or 

Silesia (until 1740), were close to qualifying as core areas, due to their socioeconomic 

characteristics, in particular commercial services and their crafts and proto-industrial sectors. In 

these areas, metal and textile production was integrated with international markets, especially in 

Eastern and Western Europe, but also the Ottoman Empire, Atlantic Africa, and the Spanish and 

British colonies in America (Pohl 1963: 126-129; Klíma 1959-60: 6; Kriedte 1983: 83; 

Weber/Schulte-Beerbühl 2011: 80-83). Other core areas under the Habsburgs were territorially 

detached from the rest of the monarchy, for example Lombardy and the Southern Netherlands, 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

324 

which the House of Habsburg had acquired at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-

1713). These regions may be regarded as core areas even within a European or global context 

(Macartney 1968: 11, 33; Vocelka 2001: 94, 113). To the semi-peripheral areas we may add the 

largely agricultural Carniola, a large part of the Adriatic Littoral, Carinthia and Tyrol, although 

metal industries and mining were sources of prosperity in the case of Carinthia and Tyrol, 

respectively. The eastern regions of the Empire can easily be defined as peripheral: These were 

agricultural regions where a severe regime of serfdom prevailed. Peasants managed little land for 

themselves, since the vast and growing majority of landed property was in the hands of the 

aristocracy. Towns were few and small, craft production limited, and commerce was poorly 

developed. This zone included large tracts of Hungary, as far as Transylvania, the Banat of 

Timişoara, and Croatia. Later, the Habsburg peripheral zone expanded further to Galicia (from 

1772), Bukovina (1774) and Dalmatia (1797) (Dickson 1987/vol.1: 115-116; Balázs 1997: 125-

132; Macartney 1968: 6-9; Kann 1974: 121-123; Kaps 2015). 

The 18th century is a key period in which this interregional division of labor was 

accentuated further. Politically, most of the territorial growth of the Habsburg Empire was to the 

detriment of the Ottoman Empire (1683-1699, 1716-1718); military success laid the foundations 

for the political incorporation of the eastern peripheries. In addition, the annexation of Galicia after 

the First Partition of Poland (1772) can be considered the start of a new phase, after the Empire’s 

loss of Silesia to Prussia (1742). 

The political economy of the Habsburg Monarchy between the Spanish War of Succession 

and the Congress of Vienna was mainly characterized by three elements: a) the creation of an 

internal market; b) the mobilization of labor, still largely locally, for both agriculture and industrial 

production, which was in part directed to trans-regional and international markets; and, c) the 

consolidation of the state in financial and military terms (Komlosy 2003: 12, 33-45; 103-106; 133-

145; Dickson 1987; Pieper 2012; Hochedlinger 2009). 

Economic policies were to a large extent inspired by the cameralist paradigm that took the 

lead in shaping economic policy within the Habsburg Monarchy since the late 17th century (Ingrao 

2000: 92-94). According to the cameral sciences commercial exchange should be promoted in 

order to foster agricultural and industrial production and increase general prosperity and, the 

revenue of the state. Cameralist theoreticians such as Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi and the 

Viennese professor Joseph von Sonnenfels argued for an active role of the state in the promotion 

of factories and the creation of the necessary institutional conditions for productive activities, 

including customs reforms, the abolition of commercial privileges, favorable fiscal policies, the 

reform of serfdom and the redistribution of land, the construction of infrastructures, and the 

promotion of an educated workforce (Freudenberger 2003: 86-87; Balázs 1997: 75, 80, 84). 

Obviously, other economic theories, such as physiocracy and early liberalism, also had an 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

325 

influence upon the Habsburg political economy, but to a much lesser extent than the cameralist 

doctrines (Bálazs 1997: 27). 

After the mid-18th century, cameralism developed a particular concern with space, owing 

to the increasing trans-regional integration of the European economies. Thus, trade and the 

circulation of goods turned into a central factor for cameralist ideas, which saw the exchange of 

goods as a tool to balance affluence and scarcity. In pursuance of this axiom, cameralist 

theoreticians proposed measures in support of trade. In this sense, trade connected regions with 

different productive profiles and even contributed to shape these different profiles as they became 

progressively more entangled. Late cameralists were very aware of spatial differentiations and the 

increasing connectivity of local and regional economies, and argued for economic policies aimed 

at reducing regional imbalances. This approach followed the cameralists’ general guidelines that 

pretended to promote social redistribution and equality (Sandl 1999: 280, 282, 284, 295). 

The economic development of the Habsburg Monarchy during the 18th century, however, 

stresses the obvious contradictions in these ideas: economic development occurred but exacerbated 

the regional differences. Central government institutions concerned with economic policy, mainly 

the Court Chamber (Hofkammer), but sometimes also the Directorium in publicis et cameralibus 

(1749-1761) and the Bohemian-Austrian Court Chancellery (Böhmisch-Österreichische 

Hofkanzlei, since 1761),  fostered proto-industrial development, mainly in textiles (wool, linen and 

cotton): They granted tax privileges and subsidies to big manufactories, reduced guild restrictions 

to the introduction and/or the expansion of industrial production (1754), abolished internal custom 

tariffs (in 1775) as well as all private bridge, road and waterway tolls (in 1783/84) and introduced 

increasingly protectionist legislation (in 1784 and 1787/88) (Freudenberger 2003: 17, 61-62; 

Hassinger 1964: 73-74, 83; Sandgruber 1982: 94-95; Otruba 1981: 101). The success of these 

policies led to a significant increase in the proto-industrial production of linen, silk, wool and later 

also cotton in northern Austria and Bohemia, and eventually also in other provinces. Iron 

production grew constantly in Styria, equaling England’s total output in 1767, and glass production 

expanded, mainly in Bohemia and Alpine areas (Good 1984: 20-21; Sandgruber 1982: 96; 

Freudenberger 1977). 

 

The Case for Orientalism in Central Europe Under the Habsburgs During the 18th 

Century 

The improved position of the Habsburg internal core areas within the international division of 

labor is visible in trade statistics from the late 18th century. These statistics demonstrate that a large 

proportion of industrial products was exported from these areas, which also imported large 

quantities of raw materials and food (Kaps 2008: 109). This meant that internal differences 

between agricultural peripheries and industrial centers were becoming more acute. An early and 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

326 

rough estimate of the aggregate income for 1785 shows that per capita wealth in Austria (28 

florins) and Bohemia (24 florins) was well above that in Hungary (20 florins) and Galicia (11 

florins) (Kaps 2009: 306). It is here, where the apparent friction between the cameralist theories 

concerning the division of labor, which argued for balanced development, and the practice which 

led to an ever-increasing chasm, came to be smoothed out through the operation of orientalist 

practices. The relationship between political economy and cultural stereotypes can be approached 

by analyzing descriptive statistical treatises that were published in the Habsburg Monarchy, mainly 

in the capital, Vienna, between the 1790s and the 1820s. These treatises had a significant impact 

on the public opinion. These works describe the habits and customs, productive potential, living 

standards, and material culture in the Habsburg lands and reflect the highly-detailed  knowledge 

that university-trained statisticians had of the Monarchy’s economy (Vári 2003: 39-41). The 

Hungarian provinces, in particular the easternmost borderlands and Galicia, were pigeonholed in 

a cultural narrative in which certain ethnic groups were defined by a set of fixed characteristics. In 

Transylvania, the Banat of Timişoara, Hungary and Galicia, the well-constructed houses and tidily 

maintained villages and towns of German settlers were compared with the lazily built shanty 

dwellings of the native populations (Hungarians, Serbs, Vlachs, Poles, Ruthenians and Slovaks). 

Subsequently, their “idleness” was contrasted to German “industriousness.”  

 Apart from material culture and work ethos, the authors criticized the alcohol consumption 

and lacking thriftiness of the population: In general, statisticians assessed alcohol consumption by 

both the quantities consumed and the quality of the specific beverages. Beer was considered 

preferable to spirits, and Romanians and also Poles in Galicia were heavily criticized for their high 

spirit consumption, while Hungarians, Romanians and Croats were praised for their high -quality 

wine, which was regarded as a solid alternative to spirits. Similarly, the celebration of large 

weddings and christenings were assessed critically, pointing to the fact that the resources were 

rarely sufficient to cover the expenditure. However, hierarchies were not coherent or constant, so 

that the less diligent and orderly cattle-raising practices in Hungary, was in contrast with the efforts 

of both Germans and Slovaks. Concerning housing and construction techniques, Hungarians were 

once more at the bottom of the table, in opposition not only to top-rank German houses but also to 

Slovaks, who were placed in the middle as a reward for their attempts to imitate German-style 

house-building  (Vári 2003: 43, 48-50; Kaps 2015: 236-237). 

Material culture, work ethos, and lifestyle were not only assessed on the basis of cameralist 

political and economic principles or of more general enlightened philosophical doctrines; these 

descriptions were used to construct different ethnic groups and order them in a hierarchical rank. 

There is but one step between descriptions and explanations. Michael Lebrecht’s Über den 

National-Charakter der in Siebenbürgen befindlichen Nationen (On the national character of 

existing Nations in Transylvania), published in 1792 after the demise of Josephinist reformism, 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

327 

praised Transylvanian Hungarians’ “warm-heartedness” and “hospitality” before turning to the 

less commendable side of their character as “vain, hot-tempered, irascible […] That is why they 

have too little economic spirit, little drive to industriousness, too little order in their houses and 

activities” (Vári 2003: 44).  

Also visible in the statisticians’ accounts, early ethno-social profiles were linked to the 

economic productivity of the population in the Eastern Habsburg possessions; cultural habits were 

the underlying cause of the social and economic potential of the population, and isolated 

observations were soon translated into generalizations. These perceptions were bundled into more 

general categories that reflected the ranking of these populations on a scale based on enlightened, 

cameralist taxonomies. Already in the 1750s, and thus before the onset of the statistical discourse, 

the Supreme Commercial Intendency (Suprema Intendanza Commerciale) in Trieste labeled the 

Croatian littoral population in the nearby harbor town of Zengg/Senj as “half-wild people” in order 

to justify the fact that the administrator of the district governor (Hauptmannamtsverwalter) 

received a higher billet compensation (Quartiergeld) there than his colleague in nearby 

Fiume/Rijeka (Faber 1995: 172). Half a century later, the statistician Andreas Demián compared 

the Southern Slavonic inhabitants of the military frontier in Croatia to “wild animals” (Vári 2003: 

44). As previously noted, these views were part of a more general perspective on Eastern Europe 

and eventually led to the classification of these subaltern groups with the label “natural man” 

(Naturmensch) in statistical works published in the 1790s and early 1800s. Statisticians Demián 

and Martin Schwartner saw Vlachs, Croats and Serbs as “wild people” and “natural men” who had 

to be “civilized” before they could partake of social and economic progress.  

Also in Galicia, statisticians and officials, up to the Emperor Joseph II, argued recurrently 

about their civilizing mission after the annexation of the province in 1772 (Wolff 2004; Maner 

2007: 11, 35-38). Thus, these subaltern groups were explicitly ascribed a low rank in the 

enlightened taxonomy of progress, at the head of which was “civilization” and the “civilized” man. 

“Natural men”, in turn, had to be “civilized” before they were fit for progress and an enlightened 

way of life (Vári 2003: 45-46). The use of the expression “wild” and “natural man” demonstrates 

that the inhabitants of the Habsburg Monarchy’s eastern peripheries were being orientalized by 

German-speaking statisticians at the turn of the 19th century: Some population groups in the 

Eastern Habsburg territories were eventually excluded from the human genre and compared to 

animals or wild people. They were, however, still perceived to be ready for receiving “culture” 

and thus being transformed into useful citizens of the state. These ethnic stereotypes were linked 

to a spatial perspective and the subsequent construction of mental maps. Thus, in the 1790s 

travellers described the lower Bačka in the Banat as “wild, empty and marshy” (Thomas 1999: 

18); in 1813, statistician Christian Karl Andre stated without ambiguity:  



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

328 

Therefore, in Austria as well as in Russia, one can climb up a stepladder from a 

coarse non-culture to the finest civilization, from old, secular, orientalism, to the 

manifold new conveniences, customs, amenities, pleasures and comforts of life that 

characterize the West in terms of art, science and progress in liberty of thought, 

religion, civility and morals (Andre 1813: 330). 

 

Thus, the social hierarchy of “civilization” versus “barbarism” that was linked to specific 

criteria of cultural behavior, social discipline and economic capacity, was translated into a spatial 

framework according to which the Habsburg Monarchy was ascribed a “semi-oriental” status, a 

place where “civilization” coexisted with “wildness.” Here, it becomes palpable how discourses 

in 18th-century Habsburg Central Europe were oscillating between external and internal forms of 

orientalism (Turner 2000: 14), in the sense that the other was to be found within the empire’s own 

borders and thus had to care for its transformation. These assessments were, in short, part of a 

broader tendency to rank the territories of the Habsburg Monarchy according to a mental map that 

codified peripheries as culturally subaltern spaces and, thus, created the discursive meta-structure 

for the unequal division of labor that cameralism practiced, in stark contrast with what cameral 

sciences claimed to want in theory. Three examples will show how this mental map was related to 

cameralist economic policies. 

 

Orientalism and the Cameralist Division of Labor: Trade and Customs Policy 

According to cameralist postulates, trade played a key role in the political economy. Habsburg 

attempts to create a single market stretch as far back as the 1720s, with the implementation of 

measures such as the removal of internal customs duties, passage and bridge tolls, and the 

introduction of a unified weight and measurement system.  These measures gained momentum 

during the Seven Years’ War. At that time, plans were drawn up for the abolition of all internal 

tolls, but this was not realized until 1775 and only affected internal borders within Austria (with 

exception of Tyrol), Bohemia and Hungary, but not the borders that separated the two major 

regional complexes. Thus, there still persisted a tariff line between the Bohemian and Austrian 

lands on the one hand and the Hungarian provinces on the other hand (Liebel-Weckowitz 1979: 

153-154). This tariff regime favored exports of Bohemian and Austrian products (which were only 

burdened with a 5% levy) and taxed Hungarian imports, mainly agricultural produce, sensitively 

higher (with duties up to 20-30%) (Hassinger 1964: 85). The tax structure promoted the already 

existing division of labor between industrial and agricultural regions: Higher customs duties made 

the introduction of Hungarian crafts to the Austrian and Bohemian markets even more difficult, 

while constant demand for agricultural produce kept sales high. 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

329 

While these regulations also responded to the demands of Hungarian elites, which wanted 

to have an autonomous fiscal and administrative regime to protect them from the centralizing 

policies endured by Bohemia and Austria, it also suited the aims of leading politicians and officials 

at the Viennese Court, who thought that Hungary should remain an agricultural producer for the 

industrialized Western regions. Thus, a report dated to March 1, 1762 affirmed,  

 

The true commercial relationship between Hungary and the German Hereditary 

lands seems to respond to the principle ceteribus paribus; Hungarians, as favored 

subjects, should not become too rich in terms of money, but remain prosperous in 

terms of natural products, so that these can be the nutrition of Austria, with its 

desirably increasing population, industry and manufactories (Beer 1894:19). 

 

 This quote demonstrates that cameralist theory was applied only partially and met with a quasi-

colonial discourse of mercantilist inspiration, according to which money was to be kept mainly 

within the Austrian and Bohemian lands. In practice, however, these differences were even more 

pronounced, as the agricultural orientation not only of Carniola and Tyrol, but also of relatively 

industrialized regions such as Bohemia (where agriculture was organized on the basis of large 

estates) and Lower Austria, demonstrates. While this makes it clear that the East-West-divide was 

to a certain extent a constructivist simplification, it cannot refute the fact that the Eastern 

peripheries were supposed to and did concentrate primarily on the production of food and raw 

materials. 

Galicia, which was annexed in 1772 and incorporated into the Bohemian and Austrian 

customs regime in 1784, was to obtain similar status in the internal division of labor (Grossmann 

1914). Even before the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania, the local Commercial Council in 

Austrian Silesia defined the neighboring territory as “a second America,” and hoped to “attract 

Cracow, L’viv and Kamieniec-Podolski’s trade to Austria” (Beer 1899: 92-93). Thus colonial 

imaginary served as pretext for the application of mercantilist policies in a territory over which 

political control should be established. After imperial troops had occupied the new province the 

merchant guild of Inner Austria addressed the Court Chamber to express their interest in “being 

among the first ones to draw benefits from this new successful acquisition” and expanding trade 

with the north-eastern province, as the provincial governor reported to the Court Chamber in 

Vienna (ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerz U Akten 1556, 6 ex xbri 1773, Folio 56). 

These private plans reflected the state’s economic policy, according to which the role of 

Galicia was that of a market for Bohemian and Austrian industrial products and a supplier of raw 

materials. In fact, the Bohemian and Austrian producers successfully lobbied to have porcelain 

and glass imports from Prussia banned and to be granted a preferential import custom duty for 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

330 

fustian in the first years after Galicia’s annexation. After 1772, Galicia was initially placed under 

its own custom regime in order to preserve its traditional ties with Poland, Gdańsk and the Ottoman 

and Russian empires, while also fostering trade with the Habsburg provinces. The above 

mentioned special regulations and import bans introduced on the initiative of Bohemian and 

Austrian industrialists gave producers from the monarchy’s internal core areas a politically 

induced competitive edge and spurred proto-industrial development in the Monarchy’s western 

provinces by facilitating access to new markets at the expense of the inhabitants of Galic ia who 

had to pay more for their manufactured products (as prices for industrial produce were higher in 

the Habsburg dominions than abroad, also because of higher transport costs). This advantage was 

fully capitalized on after Galicia’s integration into the customs union in 1784, and especially after 

the shift to a protectionist external trade policy in the same year which was upgraded in 1787/88. 

The import bans on a range of commodities cut Galicia’s traditional trade relations in favor of the 

Western Habsburg territories and Hungary (Kaps 2015: 238-241, 245-254; Beer 1899: 116-119). 

Cattle and grain imports from Galicia also had to be organized in order to satisfy the needs 

of Bohemia and Austria. In both cases, central authorities in Vienna were not overly concerned 

about the effects that these exports had on Galicia’s precarious economy, but rather on ensuring 

consumer supply in the Western provinces (Grossmann 1914: 222, 228, 280-283, 293-294). In 

1773, following the poor cereal harvest in Bohemia in 1771 and 1772, Karl von Zinzendorf, the 

liberal President of the Court Auditory Chamber (Hofrechenkammer), attempted to calculate 

whether Galicia’s grain could be made to guarantee the Monarchy’s cereal self-sufficiency 

(Zinzendorf 1773). This underlines the fact that economic policies were solely aimed at favoring 

the interests of internal core areas, to the eventual detriment of the peripheries, despite the 

ostensible wishes of officials and politicians alike to spur the economy of a country “which had 

not come as far as its neighbors” (Traunpaur 1787: 2-3). “Elevating” and “civilizing” Galician 

culture were declared “necessary duties” of the Habsburg bureaucracy in the new province (Wolff 

2004: 823). Galicia was repeatedly compared to extra-European colonial spaces such as El Dorado, 

India, or Siberia (Kaps 2015: 213). Colonial comparisons did not stop there, as natural scientist 

Balthasar Hacquet’s explanation demonstrates: “One can imagine Galicia as a newly discovered 

island for the Austrian states; at the beginning, everybody was running into it and squeezing the 

administration in; the locals did not understand what was happening, and took things to be a change 

for the worse, not the best, and for this reason the government there is still somewhat unsettled” 

(Hacquet 1794: VII). 

The comparison with colonial spaces and metaphors stresses the links between 

orientalizing mental maps and the unequal cameralist division of labor. Almost all of Galicia’s 

exports to Bohemia and Austria in 1783 and 1784 consisted of raw materials and agricultural 

products (94.8 and 92.3%), while imports generally consisted of finished products (86.7% and 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

331 

89.1% respectively) (Merkantiltabelle 1783; Merkantiltabelle 1784). It would be wrong to claim 

that this pattern was imposed by government action since the early 1770s: it followed Galicia’s 

economic and social background. Yet, the prevalent orientalist discourse worked in support of the 

Austrian and Bohemian industrialists and merchants, who were granted favorable conditions in the 

Galician market between 1773 and 1784, replicating what Said (2003: 100) referred to as the 

“creation of interest.” In other words, orientalist explanatory schemes gave producers from the 

core areas of the Habsburg Monarchy the discursive power to impose their own conditions.  

After 1785, the removal of internal customs ostensibly followed cameralist notions on 

equal conditions for all within the western provinces of the Monarchy, which brought the 

privileged position of certain sectors and provinces to an end. In practice, the trade balance seems 

to have become more uneven than ever (Kaps 2015: 151-152), and the cameralist policies 

perpetuated unequal exchange by homogenizing legal conditions. Quite apart from the shape of 

formal institutions, imbalance prevailed, and orientalist discourses reveal the outline of these 

unequal policies. In the late 1780s, Johann Pezzl wrote that “apart from Indian Fakirs, there is no 

species of human being that resemble Orangutans as much as a Polish Jew” (Häusler 1979: 78 -

79). The statistician and librarian of the State Chancellor, Wenzel Anton Fürst Kaunitz, was here 

referring mainly to the Jewish petty traders who attended the Viennese fairs. This group included 

many traders from Galicia, where the vast majority of traders were of Jewish background and often 

worked as agents for Viennese Jewish merchants (Karniel 1981: 211). By relegating Jewish traders 

to a lower rank within the taxonomies of the Enlightenment and situating them even outside 

mankind, a leading publicist like Pezzl orientalized the intermediaries in the relationship between 

Galicia and the Western Habsburg regions and contributed to framing these trade relations in 

hegemonic terms.  

The expression of limited trust in a certain group of traders was another way of ensuring 

that the relationship remained on terms that favored core areas against peripheral ones. It must be 

stressed that since the Enlightenment anti-Semitic arguments usually followed orientalist lines 

(Kalmar – Penslar 2005: xv-xvi, xxxviii). While anti-Semitism by no means limited to peripheral 

spaces, the differentiation between Western and Eastern Jews was sometimes coined in orientalist 

terms. The Jewish communities fostered this split among themselves, precisely as a consequence 

of orientalist anti-Jewish stereotypes fueling an “internal orientalism” (Kalmar – Penslar 2005: 

xix). However, this shows that the difference between “Western” and “Eastern” Jews can also be 

found in discourses from outside the Jewish community. The Habsburg Monarchy was not an 

exception: Although anti-Jewish arguments can be found regarding Jewish minorities in Western 

provinces and the capital Vienna as well (Bernard 1968-69: 101, 104), they were to some extent 

different in both style and content to those circulating throughout the Eastern territories. In the 

Western provinces, the discourse largely lacked in orientalizing images, and also considered Jews 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

332 

more productive and useful to the state, which fostered their integration and assimilation according 

to cameralist principles, at least after the release of the Tolerance Patents between 1781 and 1789 

(Karniel 1981: 203-204).  

In Galicia, the Jewish population was much more numerous than in the Western provinces, 

kept to more traditional beliefs and clothing, and was employed in a range of professions within 

both the crafts and the commercial sector (Glassl 1975: 190-192; Maner 2007: 239-241). These 

projects followed physiocratic guidelines and were more unsure and reactionary with regard to the 

assimilation of the Jewish elements (Häusler 1979: 33, 36, 43-45; Maner 2007: 237, 240-241). 

Thus, orientalizing images of Jewish traders were part of both the general discourse on Galicia’s 

Jewish population and the trade policies: By culturally relegating native traders to a low rank 

within the cameralist taxonomy, mistrust was expressed also in economic terms. This othering 

strategy was the justification for the definition of trade terms which responded to the interests of 

the Western regions: Trade should be controlled by wholesale merchants, many of whom should 

come from the Western regions, rather than by Jewish petty traders from Galicia. Although this 

project was not viable in practice, it nevertheless accentuates the core-periphery relationships. The 

norms of these relationships held that Galicia should not only deliver raw materials to the Austrian 

and Bohemian regions but also that this trade should be controlled by merchants from the core 

regions. 

 

Proto-Industry 

Concerning industrial policies, unequal institutional conditions can also be detected, although in 

this case the contradiction between cameralist claims, that regional disparities must be eliminated, 

and practice is more ambiguous (Sandl 1999: 194-195). As previously noted, Hungary’s exclusive 

toll regime was related to the government’s declared aim to discourage proto-industrial enterprises 

there, although they were never actually forbidden (Beer 1895: 21-23). Empress Maria Theresa 

shared this vision, and launched a plan for the economic development of Hungary that was based 

on the cultivation of crops such as woad, flex, and hemp. In addition, cattle- and sheep-breeding 

was to be encouraged (Beer 1895: 23-23, 28-29). In 1768, the Commercial Council declared that 

craft production in Hungary was to be limited to the absolute bare minimum, otherwise the “natural 

trade so profitable for the state” would perish (Beer 1895: 27). In this case, the orientalizing aspect 

is mainly to consider that resource endowment is a stable and unchangeable feature; “natural,” as 

leading bureaucrats in Vienna would have it in the late 1760s. They thus broke with one of the 

leading principles of cameralism: resource optimization. However, most statements barely attempt 

to hide this breach of cameralist theory and go one step further in declaring that, even if resources 

were available, Hungary should deliberately focus exclusively, or at least predominantly, on 

agriculture. The descriptions of statisticians, which present “lazy” Hungarians in a way that closely 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

333 

resembled the “natural man” starting three decades later, strongly suggest that the orientalization 

of the Hungarian population influenced the economic policies and resource allocation criteria 

imposed by the government. State officials deliberately followed orientalizing guidelines in order 

to reinforce the center-periphery structure that existed between Austria and Bohemia on the one 

hand and Hungary on the other. 

In Galicia the issue was more complex. At first glance, government statements were little 

different from those issued regarding Hungary. In 1774, the Galician Court Chancellor Count 

Wrbna declared Galicia “to be naturally predestined to agriculture,” and pleaded that only such 

manufactories should be founded as were necessary to meet local demand (Grossmann 1914: 32). 

In consequence, Wrbna argued in March 1774, that “one of the fundamental advantages that 

Galicia’s acquisition can pose for the other Hereditary Lands is, indisputably, the emergence of 

new markets for domestic craft production” (ÖStA, FHKA NHK Kommerz U Akten 1556, 13 ex 

Martio 1774 Hung, Folio 133). One of the leading officials whose task was ostensibly to care for 

the interest of the new province within the Monarchy, thus pleaded to limit Galicia’s potential 

deliberately to one economic sector which was less profitable than industry and commerce. 

However, Wrbna contradicted himself only a few months later, when he rejected Galicia’s 

incorporation into the Austro-Bohemian customs union arguing that the new province should not 

become a sale market for Austrian and Bohemian products (Ibid., 27 ex Junio 1774, Folio 270). 

In fact, the government never forbade the foundation of industrial enterprises in Galicia, 

and custom policies were never even declared to play a role akin to that which they played in 

Hungary. Some state officials even supported the development of Galicia’s industrial sector. In 

fact, the state went as far as giving public support to certain enterprises, mainly those involved in 

textile production, even after public subsidies and exclusive monopolies had been abolished in 

general. This exceptional support lasted until the 1790s and was followed by a sequence of failures 

(Bacon 1975: 54, 100, 112). However, this support took place within narrowly defined boundaries. 

Emperor Joseph II repeatedly refused to lend his support to Galician silk manufactories and 

declared in 1783 that “Galicia is not a country where silk manufactories can be a successful 

business” (Kaps 2015: 231). In this case, the orientalizing element once again resides in the 

consideration of Galicia’s natural endowments as static but also in debasing regional conditions in 

the face of a civilization discourse, and hence the implicit argument for maintaining its peripheral 

profile as a supplier of raw materials and agricultural products. In addition, the authorities claimed 

that some state loans and subsidies to entrepreneurs (Bacon 1975: 60) were rejected because they 

wished to avoid competition with the Bohemian and Austrian proto-industrial sector on the 

Galician market. Thus, in 1782 the Court Chamber denied a loan to the Swiss calico producers 

Isaak Henrie Amiet and Ludwig Abraham Vichaux because there were already “enough” cotton 

and indigo manufactories in the Hereditary Lands. However, the report stressed at the same time 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

334 

that there were “no reasons to set barriers for what is still a very limited industry in such a remote 

revindicated country” (Bacon 1975: 163; ÖStA, FHKA, NHK, Kommerz U Akten 1558, 2 ex Julio 

1782, Folio 534).  

The contradiction between the officially declared policy goal and practice becomes clearly 

visible. Eventually, the bureaucratic apparatus explicitly limited Galicia’s productive structure, 

and thus expressed its subaltern position in the cameralist discourse. In March 1785, Joseph II 

rejected the funding application for the construction of a canvas printing manufacture in L’viv 

arguing that there was already a similar factory in Galicia’s capital. In his conclusion, however, he 

stressed that “this craft is spread everywhere in other Hereditary Lands, and producing enough 

dyed and printed canvas, at hackneyed prices, to cover the still remaining demand in Galicia” 

(ÖStA, FHKA NHK Kommerz U Akten 1559, 2 ex Martio 1785, Folio 998). Other enterprises, 

engaged in cotton printing and the manufacture of mirrors and porcelain, were also denied loans 

during the 1780s with analogous arguments. Only in those cases in which investors wanted to 

improve pre-existing productive structures, or in which the planned enterprises were 

complementary to the Bohemian and Austrian proto-industrial sector, did the state grant support 

(Kaps 2015: 231-232). But even there the administration showed its doubts about the real 

usefulness of this aid.  

A grant of raw materials and 8,000 florins awarded for the installation of 16 weavers from 

Bohemia in Sambir in June 1787, aimed at improving the quality of weaving in Galicia; concerning 

this operation the Court Chamber stated that “the whole plan of the introduction of weaving in 

Galicia was not entirely economically, either perhaps entirely commercially arranged” (ÖStA, 

FHKA NHK Kommerz U Akten 1561, 7 ex Junio 1787, Folio 253). Nevertheless, the authorities 

maintained this plan which was presented as a “civilizing mission,”something quite characteristic 

in the general discourse on know-how and technology transfer. Thus, the state sponsored the 

settlement of Germans from both the Monarchy and other territories of the Holy Roman Empire 

in Galicia also in order to improve agriculture (Lepucki 1938; Maner 2007: 49-52). In 1812, the 

Protestant Superintendent in Galicia, Samuel Bredetzky wrote regarding German settlements in 

Galicia: “Austria focused […] on civilizing this nation, which was profoundly oppressed due to 

civil unrest, and especially the despotism of aristocrats and their control of agriculture” (Bredetzky 

1812: 51). 

From the 1790s onwards the state stopped providing this kind of support, which did not 

mean that it pulled out of intervening in industrial policies altogether. State officials proclaimed 

repeatedly that Galicia’s dependence on external iron imports should come to an end in order to 

avoid depending on Prussia. While the state was eager to supply the blacksmiths in Biała, in 

Western Galicia, with iron from Cieszyn Silesia and Upper Hungary (ÖStA, FHKA NHK 

Kommerz U Akten 1562, 7 ex Martio 1792, Folio 888-890), the Court Chamber passed a decree 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

335 

in March 1806, in which it ordered the Galician Governor to put pressure on the proprietors of iron 

works to introduce better management criteria in their factories (ÖStA, FHKA NHK Kommerz U 

Akten 1568, 5 ex Martio 1806, Folio 1593). In 1813, after success had failed to materialise, the 

Court Chamber ascribed the lack of progress in the iron sector to the “indolence” of producers 

(ÖStA, FHKA NHK Kommerz U Akten 1575, 87 ex Januario 1813, Fol. 1347-1387). The 

bureaucrats thus reduced the complex issue of insufficient or deficient iron production to the 

anthropological category of “indolence,” instead of looking for more systematic and structural 

causes. 

Orientalizing categories can be similarly found in the description of the workforce. While 

complaints about the  “idleness” of workers, which was by no means  limited to the discourse on 

Galicia (Hochedlinger/Tantner 2005), are found regularly in governmental reports and files, there 

are passages where their orientalist character appears to be particularly transparent: On 20 January 

1809, the district office (Kreisamt) in Jasło, in central Galicia, associated the scarcity of labor for 

the highly successful cotton factory in Kołaczyce to the “idleness that characterise both urban 

people and peasantry” (ÖStA, FHKA NHK Kommerz U Akten 1571, 2 ex Aprili 1809, Folio 

1360). While the district office demanded measures to transform the “idleness” of the local 

population into “activity,” two weeks later the Galician Governor addressed a more radical report 

to the Court Chamber in Vienna. The Governor required that “due to the passivity which, as is 

known, is an innate feature of the local population, many idle and sluttish persons, as well as those 

who start begging with the pretext of their corporal afflictions, even if these do not hinder them 

from taking up work,” should to be put under police control by the authorities in the district of 

Jasło, but also in a few other districts in the central and southern sectors of the country, such as 

Tarnów, Rzeszów and Sanok (Ibid., Folio 1356). Large parts of the workforce, both rural and 

urban, in substantial parts of Galicia were thus portrayed as deviant from the required work ethos, 

using anthropological categories. The essentialism contained within this discourse is the key to its 

orientalistic character, which makes it different to other accounts concerning the Western regions 

of the Habsburg Monarchy and Western countries, in which the eventual need for discipline is 

presented in a very different way. An account from the Disctrict Governor of Biała is revealing in 

this regard. This report, dated to 1804, stated: “The scarcity of spinners is due […] to a tendency 

to passivity which is innate to the Polish Nation” (HHStA, KA, Nachlass Baldacci, Karton 3, IV). 

Therefore, the main problem for Galicia’s industrial sector was the failure of the population to 

follow the appropriate failing work ethos; this was presented in essentialist terms, and, in 

consequence, largely viewed the possibility of reform and change as extremely unlikely. 

In summary, among the different ways in which orientalist narratives legitimated an 

unequal division of labor, those referring to institutional conditions and the characteristics of the 

workforce stand out. In consequence, investments were generally viewed with skepticism, while 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

336 

the interests of the administrative center as socioeconomic core are in some cases particularly 

visible—for instance when the funding of new factories was rejected in order to avoid greater 

competition by new industrial establishments in the periphery. All these measures demonstrate 

that the cameralist economic policies regulated interregional competition and specialization and 

discriminated against some regions, a process in which orientalist codes played an important role. 

Even so, the authorities promoted Galician craft production whenever it did not compete with the 

industrial development of the core areas, but was either independent from, or complementary to, 

it. This, however, still means that economic policies were aimed at maintaining the specialization 

of the peripheries  at the lower end of the commodity chains (production of dyestuffs, hemp, flax 

and food) while carefully supporting the progressive upgrading of commodity chains in the 

western provinces, in particular linen, wool and cotton production (Komlosy 2010). Habsburg 

Orientalism thus oscillated between exclusion and inclusion; the other was a necessary part of the 

national culture and had to be dealt with from within. 

 

Serfdom Reform  

From the middle of the 17th century, the Habsburgs reduced taxation and labor services (robot) in 

order to safeguard the social order, the long-term viability of agriculture, and thereby the stability 

of tax revenue; an initial robot decree for the Bohemian lands was approved in 1657 (Ingrao 2000: 

94). Another decree, issued for Bohemia in 1680 following a violent peasant revolt, was renewed 

in 1713 and extended to Moravia. Thereafter, a range of decrees followed in these and the 

remaining regions, until 1782 when the new conditions were also enacted for Carniola. In many 

cases, these decrees were triggered by peasant upheavals (Dickson 1987/vol.1: 119-120, 124-126; 

Rosdolsky 1992: 2-4; Bruckmüller 2001: 203, 206; Ingrao 2000: 187). 

In the late 18th century, reforms were taken much further. The main aim of these reforms 

was to redirect peasant surplus from landlords to the state as a way to increase the state’s military 

and financial position in the international arena. Another key target was to increase agricultural 

productivity, for both fiscal and general economic reasons. While the latter aspect is an undeniable 

influence of cameralism, other aspects of agricultural reform, in particular tax reform, were also 

informed by the ideas of physiocracy (Rozdolski 1961: 16, 91, 107-108). 

Galicia was made part of this reformist process in the 1770s: In 1775, feudal consumption 

and production privilege was reduced, and additional, so-called “auxiliary,” labor services were 

restricted (Rosdolsky 1992: 69-70). Serfdom reforms were particularly far-reaching in the 1780s, 

during the Josephinist reform period, when the robot decree of 1782 increased the personal 

freedom of serfs, who were now granted free marriage and the freedom to choose an occupation, 

while in 1781 labor services had been cut to three days per week for so-called “full peasants” 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

337 

(Vollbauern). At the same time, stricter monitoring by state officials was introduced (Bruckmüller 

2001: 205; Rosdolsky 1992: 112, 126-127, 138). 

In the years that followed, reforms continued to redefine personal and property relations 

between peasants and estate owners: Additional duties in kind and labor services were abolished 

(1784, 1786), and the serfs’ position concerning the disposal of the land they rented was improved 

(1785, 1787, 1789). In addition, labor services and taxes were compulsorily monetized in 1789, 

which brings to the fore the state’s own interest in the triangle formed by peasants, landlords and 

the state itself. However, the agricultural tax reform enacted in 1789/90 in order to redirect some 

of the landlords’ profits into the state’s coffers, failed immediately due to the opposition of estate 

owners (Bruckmüller 2001: 206-207; Rozdolski 1961). 

In contrast with Bohemia and Austria, in Galicia orientalist etiquettes were behind both the 

state’s attempts to transform the labor regime based on forced labor into a system based on 

monetized labor, and the landlords’ resistance to the reform. During the 1770s and 1780s, 

bureaucrats labeled Galician serfs “slaves,” and claimed that they were exploited by “tyrannical” 

and “despotic” landlords and estate managers; the peasants were “stupid,” “fatuous” and 

“barbarians,” and had a tendency to “oafishness” and “drunkenness.” This orientalist vocabulary 

derived not only from cameralist categories, which classified the productive potential of the 

population, but also followed cameralist ideas. The reduction of oppressive labor services and 

taxes (both in kind and money) was seen as a fundamental step toward the improvement of the 

peasant economy, the result of which was expected to be more labor input and decreasing alcohol 

consumption (Kratter 1786/vol.1: 89, 158, 165, 170-173; vol.2: 133, 185; Rosdolsky 1992: 18, 25, 

32).  

In most cases, therefore, orientalist vocabulary supported cameralist reform agendas; the 

character of peasants was deemed to be amenable to correction, if the right legal reforms were 

introduced. However, the same language could be easily turned around and used for a conservative, 

essentialist agenda. Landlords, for example, set out quite different arguments. In 1773, Prince 

Betański wrote a report that stated that “the Polish peasant is by nature lazy and a malicious drunk,” 

and that obligatory labor services was the only way to make him work (Rozdolski 1962/vol.2: 45). 

This interpretation was occasionally shared by high-ranking Habsburg officials in Galicia. In a 

report dated to July 1773, Governor Anton Count Pergen claimed that Galician peasants tended 

“by nature to maliciousness, fraud and laziness” and led a “life that is more brutish than human” 

(Rozdolski 1962/vol.2: 56). While the Galician administration maintained an ambiguous stance 

towards the Josephinist agricultural reforms, a succession of bad harvests in 1785 and 1787 

delivered the pretext to openly question the reforms locally as they were causally linked to the 

reduction of labor services and feudal dues (Rychlikowa 1988: 110; Rychlikowa 1967: 45). Yet, 

occasionally officials detected a more worrying—for the landlords and the state—reaction from 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

338 

the peasants. In 1787, the District Governor (Kreishauptmann) of Zamość in eastern Galicia, wrote 

a letter to the provincial governor in L’viv informing that peasants were “recalcitrant” and 

unwilling to carry out the still-binding labor services. This official blamed this behavior on 

peasants’ “inborn and deeply rooted idleness” (Rozdolski 1962/vol.2: 235). The discursive shift 

between cameralist reformism and conservative orientalization ascended up the administrative 

ladder, reaching the provincial governor’s office in L’viv. Councilor Ernest Traugott Kortum, a 

supporter of reform, stated that the peasants were “Galician helots” whose “civilizing” had totally 

failed: “Like the wild man in the Southern Sea stared at the European ship, the Galician peasant 

stared at the present that his benign monarch had made him. […] Faineance, drunkenness and 

subservience to the Jew were his substitutes for elevated works” (Kortum 1790: 109). Here, 

peasants are portrayed as not capable of perceiving social change, a discourse that was embodied 

in a colonial analogy, while the narrative links this to a partially ethnicized vision of the Galician 

rural economy.  

The essentialist reading of the characteristics of peasants was reinforced in the following 

years and decades, as previously noted in my discussion about the discourse that surrounded the 

nature of the workforce. In this sense, Bredetzky, while looking at fields in bloom near 

Krzeszowice, noted: “Here, nature explodes and rewards the little efforts (because the Pole shies 

away from big efforts) thousandfold” (Bredetzky 1809/2: 79). After the failure of the Josephinist 

tax reform had brought agricultural reforms to a standstill, the conservative orientalist perspectives 

on the peasantry prevailed and provided important support for the maintenance of the strict 

Galician and Hungarian serfdom regimes. Thus, an orientalist point of view on the characteristics 

of peasants ultimately shaped the state’s perspective on property relations and conditioned the 

survival of an agricultural regime characterized by low productivity, slow growth, and broad social 

inequalities. 

In contrast to trade and industrial policy, when it came to agriculture the interests of the 

center and peripheries were more mixed, and the state did not act merely as a representative of 

core zones, increasing or maintaining their competitive advantages over the Eastern peripheries in 

their role as consumer markets. The state actively pursued a policy that aimed to upgrade some 

territories and eliminate their typically peripheral, serfdom-based labor regimes, replacing them 

with wage-based systems such as those which operated in core areas. This was undeniably linked 

to a desire to redirect profits from the estate owners’ coffers to the state’s and, to a limited extent 

also the peasants’ pockets. In this case, the orientalization of landlords was linked to fiscal reforms. 

In the agricultural peripheries, estate owners managed to impose their anthropological 

interpretation over the discourse of social and institutional reform. The main reasons for this were 

the failure of reform to yield the desired short-term results to the detriment of the Josephinist 

agricultural tax reform project, and the French Revolution, which dealt a fatal blow to the 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

339 

Josephinist reform project in 1789/90. Thus, legal regulation of agricultural labor regimes in the 

Habsburg periphery remained untouched until 1848. During this period, however, certain changes 

occurred in core areas, because from 1798 landlords and peasants could strike private contracts 

that transformed services in labor and kind into dues payable in cash. 

 

Conclusion 

Within world-systemic configurations, the construction of images and stereotypes is an important 

discursive tool for the legitimization of the world order. In the 16th and 17th centuries, ecclesiastical 

doctrines played a dominant role in imposing regional hierarchies and in justifying the unequal 

distribution of resources. After the Peace of Westphalia, the focus gradually shifted toward secular 

models. In the 18th century, this role was adopted by enlightened concepts based on taxonomical 

orders divided into clear categories, which were located between the extreme meta-categories of 

“civilization” and “barbarism,” even before the French Revolution hatched the liberal concept of 

equality. While post-1789 notions of class, race and gender limited this imperative of equality in 

practice, already the pre-1789 developmental perspectives were heavily determined by orientalist 

narratives. Orientalist interpretations were justifying unequal access to civil rights, social 

participation and wealth, long before the emergence of racist ideologies. The responsibility for 

development was thereby dumped on subaltern societies alone, while economic programs 

formulated in core areas often served their own interests, rather than those of the regions which 

should have been receiving assistance. 

Economic growth in the Habsburg Monarchy during the 18th century led to more acute 

regional imbalances and an increasingly solid center/periphery structure. Cameralist economic 

policies, including custom, trade, industrial and infrastructural measures, were instrumental in this 

development but created a chasm between theory and practice, which was closed by the application 

of orientalist narratives. These were based in the aforementioned regional hierarchies, which in 

turn rested on the enlightened taxonomy of human development that ranged between “barbarism” 

and “civilization.” Different images, including analogies between Eastern European peripheries 

and colonies stand out as markers in mental maps of the center/periphery divide.These maps were 

the basic geocultural device for the allocation of resources and the design of institutional 

arrangements, which invariably favored the development of core areas to the detriment of 

peripheral regions, as reflected in customs policy. Customs and industrial policy clearly 

demonstrate that the state acted in order to secure the Bohemian and Austrian regions a competitive 

edge over the Eastern peripheries in export and import markets, although the state also supported 

a certain amount of proto-industries in a part of the periphery as long as it did not question the 

core’s hegemony. This underlines that the Habsburg internal orientalism created space for 

civilizing missions that did transfer resources to peripheral regions, although they remained within 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

340 

the core/periphery-structure and did not challenge the division of labor but rather reaffirmed the 

existing arrangement. 

 Agricultural policy was much more complex and strove toward increasing productivity, 

owing to the need to increase the state’s revenue and military potential for geopolitical ends. 

Galicia is a good example in which agrarian reforms based on orientalist discourses were from the 

beginning partially at odds with the peripheralization of the province brought about by Habsburg 

rule after its annexation in 1772. As the agrarian reforms in the Josephinist period demonstrate, 

however, this process was directed against the interests of peripheral elites, who aspired to preserve 

their region’s status in order to maintain their social model of development, which is indicative of 

the entangled relationship between centers and peripheries, between dominants and subalterns. 

Regarding agriculture it was the political center that should reap important benefits from the 

transformation of the periphery’s economy which explains the severe resistance against the 

Josephinist tax reform and its ultimate failure. From a long-term perspective, it has been stressed 

that geopolitical competition could trigger changes in a region’s position in the international 

division of labor. At the same time, it becomes clear that it was impossible to transform only one 

element of the whole economic profile of a region, for example serfdom and forced labor, without 

addressing the whole socio-economic and political structure. The Josephinist reforms showed that 

legal reform has a limited ability to spur socio-economic changes. 

  Modernization has to be understood as a much broader social transformation, and the 

cameralist division of labor was soon confronted with its own internal contradictions. In the end, 

however, as Michael Hochedlinger (2009) has argued, the main drive of the Josephinist reforms 

was the fiscal pressure associated with the imperial geopolitical aims, which essentially boils down 

the problem to the need to build a strong army. Hochedlinger’s reading of Dickson (1987) seems 

somewhat imprecise, and this leads him to ignore a whole range of other factors that also had an 

impact on social and economic policies, not least the most ambitious goals of the state’s economic 

and social policy such as industrial, trade and agricultural reform measures. At any rate, in order 

to maintain or increase their income by pushing their rents up, members of the aristocracy also 

joined this process of transformation. The modernizing strategies implemented in Bohemia and 

Austria contrast sharply from the conservative practices based on large estates that prevailed in 

Galicia and most of the Hungarian provinces, which underlines the different patterns followed in 

the internal peripheries and the core areas. Also, merchants and bourgeois proto-industrial 

entrepreneurs played a decisive role, as did the international financial networks on which the 

Habsburg Empire’s ability to wage war depended so much. In the end, imperial geopolitics and 

business networks were neatly intertwined and cannot be separated from one another as 

explanatory factors of the social and economic reforms introduced by the enlightened Habsburg 

rulers. Still, the internal cameralist division of labor played as crucial a role in this process as 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

341 

external links; Habsburg core areas, Bohemia and Austria, upgraded their economic structures. 

The claims for an egalitarian and balanced economic development, evoked by the cameral 

sciences, were unviable in practice, and had to be cancelled by bringing into play orientalist 

practices. These shifted the focus from egalitarianism to the necessary persistence of inequalities 

unless the population involved met the prerequisites that this modernization process demanded. 

 

About the Author 

Klemens Kaps, Ph.D.studied history in Vienna and Barcelona and received a Ph.D. from Vienna 

University in 2011. He worked as a post-doc researcher at Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, 

and is currently employed as post-doc scholar at Vienna University, Department of Social and 

Economic History. His research interests focus on spatial disparities in Habsburg Central Europe 

between the late 18th and early 20th century, the social and economic history of the Habsburg 

Monarchy in that period as well as the use of cultural images and stereotypes for developmental 

discourses and merchant networks in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in the 18th century. 

Currently he is conducting a research project on merchant networks between Habsburg Central 

Europe and Global Markets in Spain between the Spanish War of Succession and the Congress of 

Vienna. His book Ungleiche Entwicklung in Zentraleuropa. Galizien zwischen überregionaler 

Verflechtung und imperialer Politik (Vienna, 2015) deals with economic development of the 

Habsburg province of Galicia in the long nineteenth century regarding interregional connections 

and imperial politics. 

 

Disclosure Statement 

Any conflicts of interest are reported in the acknowledgments section of the article’s text. 

Otherwise, authors have indicated that they have no conflict of interests upon submission of their 

article to the journal. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

342 

 

References 

Adamczyk, Dariusz. 2001. Zur Stellung Polens im modernen Weltsystem der frühen Neuzeit 

(Schriftenreihe Studien zur Geschichtsforschung der Neuzeit, Band 21). Hamburg: 

Kovač. 

Andre, Christian Karl. 1813. Neueste geographisch-statistische Beschreibung des Kaiserthums 

Österreich. Weimar: Verlag des Geographischen Instituts. 

[Anonymous. 1780]. Die gröbsten Lügen des 18ten Jahrhunderts. Der Orang-Outan* in Europa 

oder der Pohle, nach seiner wahren Beschaffenheit; eine methodische Schrift, welche im 

Jahr 1779 einen Preis in der Naturgeschichte davon getragen hat. 

Bacon, Ewa Katherine. 1975. Austrian economic Policy in Galicia, 1772-1790. Chicago: 

Dissertation University of Chicago. 

Balázs, Éva H. 1997. Hungary and the Habsburgs. An Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism. 

Budapest: Central European University Press. 

Beer, Adolf. 1894. ”Studien zur Geschichte der österreichischen Volkswirtschaft unter Maria 

Theresia. I: Die österreichische Industriepolitik“, Archiv für Österreichische Geschichte 

81: 1-133. 

______. 1899. ”Die österreichische Handelspolitik unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II.“ Archiv 

für Österreichische Geschichte 86: 1-204. 

Bernard, Paul P. ”1968-69. Joseph II and the Jews: The Origins of the Toleration Patent of 

1782“. Austrian History Yearbook 4-5: 101-119. 

Boatcă, Manuela. Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism. Farnham / Burlington: Ashgate, 

2015. 

Bredetzky, Samuel. 1809. Reisebemerkungen über Ungern und Galizien. 2 vols. Wien: Doll. 

Bredetzky, Samuel. 1812. Historisch-statistischer Beytrag zum deutschen Kolonialwesen in 

Europa, nebst einer kurzen Beschreibung der deutschen Ansiedlungen in Galizien in 

alphabetischer Ordnung. Brünn: Joseph Georg Traßler. 

Bruckmüller, Ernst. 2001. Sozialgeschichte Österreichs, Wien/München (2nd edition): 

Oldenbourg. 

Carey, Daniel and Festa, Lynn. 2009.  ”Introduction. Some Answers to the question: ‘What is 

postcolonial enlightenment?’” Pp.1-33 in Postcolonial Enlightenment, edited by Daniel 

Carey and Lynn Festa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2005. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical 

Difference. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

343 

Dhogson, Robert A. 1993. “The Modern World-System: A Critique of its inner dynamic”. Pp.26-

41 in The early Modern World-System in geographical perspective, edited by Hans-

Jürgen Nitz. Stuttgart: Steiner: 26-41. 

Dirks, Nicholas B., Eley, Geoff and Ortner, Sherry B. 1994. “Introduction”. Pp.3-45 in 

Culture/Power/History. A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, edited by Nicholas B. 

Dirks, Geoff Eloy and Sherry B. Ortner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Faber, Eva. 1995. Litorale Austriaco. Das österreichische und kroatische Küstenland. 

Trondheim/Graz: Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv/Universitetet i Trondheim. 

Forte, Maximilian C. 1998. ”Globalization and World-Systems Analysis. Towards New 

Paradigms of a Geo-Historical Social Anthropology (A Research Review).” Review 

Fernand Braudel Center XXI, 1: 29-99. 

Freudenberger, Herman. 1977. The Industrialization of a Central European City. Brno and the 

Fine Woolen Industry in the 18th Century. Edington/Wilshire: Pasold Research Fund 

LTD. 

Freudenberger, Herman. 2003. Lost Momentum. Austrian Economic Development 1750s-1830s 

(Studien zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte und Wirtschaftspolitik  vol.8, edited by Herbert Matis 

and Roman Sandgruber). Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau. 

Glassl, Horst. 1975. Das Österreichische Einrichtungswerk in Galizien, 1772-1790. Wiesbaden: 

Harrassowitz. 

Good, David F. 1984. The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750-1914. Berkeley, Los 

Angeles, London: University of California Press. 

Grossmann, Henryk. 1914. Österreichs Handelspolitik mit Bezug auf Galizien in der 

Reformperiode 1772-1790. Studien zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsgeschichte, 

Vol. X, edited by Karl Grünberg. Wien: Konegen. 

Hacquet, Belsasar. 1794. Hacquets neueste physikalisch-politische Reisen in den Jahren 1791, 

92 und 93 durch die Dacischen und Sarmatischen oder Nördlichen Karpathen, Dritter 

Theil. Nürnberg: Verlag der Raspischen Buchhandlung. 

HHStA (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv), KA (Kabinettsarchiv), Nachlass Baldacci, Karton 3, IV. 

Kommerzialgegenstände. 

Häusler, Wolfgang. 1979. Das galizische Judentum in der Habsburgermonarchie im Lichte der 

zeitgenössischen Publizistik und Reiseliteratur von 1772-1848. Wien: Verlag für 

Geschichte und Politik. 

Hassinger, Herbert. 1964. “Der Außenhandel der Habsburgermonarchie in der zweiten Hälfte des 

18. Jahrhunderts“. Pp.61-98 in Die wirtschaftliche Situation in Deutschland und 

Österreich an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert, edited by F. Lütge. Stuttgart: 

Fischer. 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

344 

Hobsbawm, Eric. 2002. The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. London: Abacus. 

Hochedlinger, Michael and Tantner, Anton (eds.) 2005. „…der größte Teil der Untertanen lebt 

elendig und mühselig“. Die Berichte des Hofkriegsrates zur sozialen und wirtschaftlichen 

Lage der Habsburgermonarchie 1770-1771 (Mitteilungen des Österreichischen 

Staatsarchivs, Sonderband 8), Innsbruck/Wien: Studienverlag. 

Hochedlinger, Michael. 2009. “The Habsburg Monarchy: From ‘Fiscal-Military State’ to 

‘Militarization’”. Pp.55-94 in: The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe. 

Essays in honour of P.G.M. Dickson, edited by Christopher Storrs. Farnham: Ashgate. 

Kalmar, Ivan Davidson and Penslar, Derek J. 2005. “Orientalism and the Jews: An introduction”. 

Pp.xiii-xl in Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. 

Penslar. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. 

Kaps, Klemens. 2008. “Gescheitertes Aufholen in Zentraleuropa. Der Abstieg der 

Habsburgermonarchie zu einem semiperipheren Wirtschaftsraum im Spiegel ihrer 

Außenhandelsstruktur 1791-1880“. Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 9/1: 103-122. 

______.  2009. “Produktywność na peryferii? Rozwój rolnictwa w Galicji w latach 1772-1795”. 

Pp.281-302 in Folwark – Wieś – Latyfundium. Gospodarstwo wiejskie w Rzeczypospolitej 

w XVI-XVIII wieku, Jadwiga Muszyńska, Szymon Kazusek and Jacek Pielas. Kielce: 

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Humanistyczno-Przyrodniczego Jana Kochanowskiego. 

______. 2015. Ungleiche Entwicklung in Zentraleuropa. Galizien zwischen überregionaler 

Arbeitsteilung und imperialer Politik (1772-1914) (Sozial- und Wirtschaftshistorische 

Studien, vol.37, eds. Carsten Burhop et al). Wien: Böhlau. 

Kann, Robert. 1974. A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526-1918. Berkeley, Los Angeles, 

London: University of California Press. 

Karniel, Josef. 1981. “Zur Auswirkung der Toleranzpatente für die Juden in der 

Habsburgermonarchie im josephinischen Jahrzehnt.“ Pp.203-220 in Im Lichte der 

Toleranz. Aufsätze zur Toleranzgesetzgebung des 18. Jahrhunderts in den Reichen 

Josephs II., ihren Voraussetzungen und ihren Folgen. Eine Festschrift (= Studien und 

Texte zur Kirchengeschichte und Geschichte. Zweite Reihe, Bd. VIII), edited by Peter F. 

Barton. Wien: Insitut für Protestantische Kirchengeschichte. 

Klíma, Arnost. 1959-60. “English Merchant Capital in Bohemia in the 18th century.” Economic 

History Review, 2nd series 12: 34-48. 

Komlosy, Andrea. 2003. Grenze und ungleiche regionale Entwicklung. Binnenmarkt und 

Migration in der Habsburgermonarchie. Wien: Promedia. 

______.  2010. “Austria and Czechoslovakia: the Habsburg Monarchy and the Successor States.” 

Pp.43-73 in The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650-2000, edited 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

345 

by Herma Lex Van Voss, Els Kuperus-Hiemstra and Elise Meerkerk Van Nederveen. 

Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. 

Kortum, Traugott Ernest. 1790. Magna Charta von Galicien, oder Untersuchung der 

Beschwerden des Galicischen Adels Pohlnischer Nation über die österreichische 

Regierung. Jassy. 

Kratter, Franz. 1786. Briefe über den itzigen Zustand von Galizien. Ein Beitrag zur Staatistik und 

Menschenkenntnis. 2 vols. Leipzig: Wucherer. 

Kriedte, Peter. 1983. Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists. Europe and the World 

Economy, 1500-1800. Leamington Spa, Warwickshire: Berg Publishers Ltd. 

Lepucki, Henryk. 1938. Działalność kolonizacyjna Marii Teresy i Józefa II w Galicji, 1772-

1790. Lwów: Skł. gł. Kasa im. J. Mianowskiego. 

Liebel-Weckowitz, Helen. 1979. “Modernisierungsmotive in der Freihandelspolitik Maria 

Theresias“. Pp.153-158 in Maria Theresia und ihre Zeit. Eine Darstellung der Epoche 

1740-1780 aus Anlaß der 200. Wiederkehr des Todestages der Kaiserin, edited by Walter 

Koschatzky. Wien, Salzburg: Residenz-Verlag. 

Maner, Hans-Christian. 2007. Galizien. Eine Grenzregion im Kalkül der Donaumonarchie im 18. 

und 19. Jahrhundert. München: IKGS-Verlag. 

Merkantiltabelle 1783. Wien: Haus- Hof, und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), Kabinettsarchiv (KA), 

Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift vol.118: fol.321-377. 

Merkantiltabelle 1784. Wien: Haus- Hof, und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), Kabinettsarchiv (KA), 

Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift vol.118: fol.523-590. 

Middell, Matthias. 1994. “Editorial”, Comparativ. Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte 

und vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung 4/5: 9-12. 

Nolte, Hans-Heinrich. 1993. Die eine Welt. Abriß der Geschichte des internationalen Systems. 

Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag (2nd edition). 

______.  2001. ”Innere Peripherien. Das Konzept in der Forschung“. Pp.7-31 in Innere 

Peripherien in Ost und West, edited by Hans-Heinrich Nolte and Klaas Bähre. Stuttgart: 

Steiner: 7-31. 

______. 2002. ”Die Debatte um das Weltsystem“. Working Paper, available at: 

http://www.vgws.org/Texte/Weltsystemkonzept.html  

Orłowski, Hubert. 1996. Polnische Wirtschaft. Zum deutschen Polendiskurs der Neuzeit (Studien 

der Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa an der Universität Dortmund, vol.21, edited by 

Johannes Hoffmann), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA), Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv (FHK), Neue Hofkammer 

(NHK), Kommerz, Akten Ungarn, Nr.1556-1575. 

http://www.vgws.org/Texte/Weltsystemkonzept.html


 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

346 

Otruba, Gustav. 1981. “Die Wirtschaftspolitik Maria Theresias und Josephs II.” Pp.77-103 in 

Von der Glückseligkeit des Staates: Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in Österreich im 

Zeitalter des aufgeklärten Absolutismus, edited by Herbert Matis. Berlin: Duncker & 

Humblot. 

Pieper, Renate. 2012. “Financing an empire: the Austrian composite monarchy, 1650-1848”. 

Pp.164-190 in The Rise of Fiscal States. A Global History, 1500-1914, edited by 

Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, Patrick O’Brien and Francisco Comín Comín. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press. 

Pohl, Hans. 1963. Die Beziehungen Hamburgs zu Spanien und dem spanischen Amerika in der 

Zeit von 1740 bis 1806 (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beiheft 

45). Wiesbaden: Steiner. 

Rosdolsky, Roman. 1992. Untertan und Staat in Galizien. Die Reformen unter Maria Theresia 

und Joseph II. Mainz: von Zabern. 

______.1961. Die große Agrar- und Steuerreform Josephs II. Ein Kapitel zur österreichischen 

Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. 

______. 1962. Stosunki poddańczy w dawnej Galicji. 2 volumes. Warszawa: Państwowe 

Wydawnictwo Naukowe. 

Rychlikowa, Irena. 1967. Produkcja zbożowa wielkiej własności w Małopolsce w latach 1764-

1805. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. 

______. 1988. “Galicyjski odłam narodu szlacheckiego 1772-1815”. Kwartalnik Historyczny 

95/2: 83-119. 

Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. 

______.  2003. Orientalism – Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books. 

Sandgruber, Roman. 1982. Die Anfänge der Konsumgesellschaft. Konsumgüterverbrauch, 

Lebensstandard und Alltagskultur in Österreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Wien: 

Verlag für Geschichte und Politik. 

Sandl, Marcus. 1999. Ökonomie des Raumes. Der kameralwissenschaftliche Entwurf der 

Staatswirtschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Köln, Weimar: Böhlau. 

Schröder, Wolfgang M. 2005. “Mission impossible? Begriff, Modelle und Begründungen der 

‚civilizing mission’ aus philosophischer Sicht“. Pp.13-32 in Zivilisierungsmissionen. 

Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Boris Barth. Konstanz: 

UVK Verlags-Gesellschaft: 13-32. 

Struck, Bernhard. 2004. “Von Sachsen nach Polen und Frankreich. Die Erfindung „Osteuropas“ 

im Spiegel deutscher Reiseberichte um 1800“. Comparativ. Zeitschrift für 

Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 3: 125-143. 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

347 

Thomas, Colin. 1999. “The Anatomy of a Colonization Frontier: The Banat of Temešvar”. 

Austrian History Yearbook XXX: 3-22. 

Todorova, Marija Nikolaeva. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Traunpaur, Heinrich Alphons. 1787. Dreyssig Briefe über Galizien oder – Beobachtungen eines 

unpartheyischen Mannes, der sich mehr als nur ein paar Monate in diesem Königreiche 

umgesehen hat. Wien, Leipzig. 

Turner, Bryan S. 1994. Orientalism, postmodernism and globalism. London, New York: 

Routledge. 

______.  2000. “Outline of a theory of Orientalism”. Pp.1-31 in Orientalism: Early Sources, 

Volume 1: Readings in Orientalism, edited by Bryan S. Turner. London, New York: 

Routledge, 1-31. 

Vári, András. 2003. “The Functions of Ethnic Stereotypes in Austria and Hungary in the Early 

Nineteenth Century.” Pp 39-55 in: Creating the Other. Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism 

in Habsburg Central Europe, edited by Nancy Wingfield. New York: Berghahn Books. 

Vocelka, Karl. 2001. Glanz und Untergang der höfischen Welt. Repräsentation, Reform und 

Reaktion im Habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat. Österreichische Geschichte von 1699-1815. 

Wien: Ueberreuter. 

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System I. Capitalist Agriculture and the 

Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York, San 

Francisco, London: Academic Press. 

______. 1980. The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the 

European World-Economy, 1600-1750. New York: New Academic Press. 

______. 1992. Geopolitics and geoculture. Essays on the changing world-system. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press. 

______. 2011. The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914. 

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2011. 

Weber, David J. (2005). Barbaros: Los españoles y sus salvajes en la era de la ilustración. 

Barcelona: Crítica. 

Weber, Klaus and Schulte-Beerbühl, Margrit. 2011. “From Westphalia to the Caribbean: 

Networks of German Textile Merchants in the Eighteenth Century”. Pp.53-98 in 

Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660-1914, edited by Andreas 

Gestrich and Margrit Schulte-Beerbühl. London: German Historical Institute 

______. 1995. Inventing Eastern Europe. The map of civilization on the mind of the 

Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 

______. 2004. “Inventing Galicia: Messianic Josephinism and the Recasting of Partitioned 

Poland”, Slavic Review 63/4 (Winter): 818-840. 



 

Journal of World-System Research   |   Vol. 22  Issue 2   |   Orientalism and the Geoculture  

 

jwsr.org   |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2016.619 

348 

______. 2007. “Introduction”. Pp. 3-32 in: The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, edited by 

Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 3-32. 

Zinzendorf, Karl Graf. 1773. ”Patriotische Gedanken über den freyen Getreide-Handel bey 

Gelegenheit einer an die Staats Wirthschafts Deputation erlaßenen allerhöchsten 

Resolution den 7ten Januar 1773“. Wien: Haus- Hof, und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), 

Kabinettsarchiv (KA), Nachlass Zinzendorf, Handschrift vol. 28, fol.1–7.