BURKNOW · The Knowing State: Bureaucracy, Surveillance, and the Production of Knowledge in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914

This project investigates how bureaucratic knowledge practices functioned in the Habsburg monarchy from 1867 to 1914. Using case studies from the monarchy’s three constituent parts—the province of Styria (Austria), the kingdom of Croatia–Slavonia (Hungary), and the occupied and later annexed territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina—it analyses how civil servants carried out surveillance of local society and how they communicated their findings within the structures of the state administration. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of surveillance, utilising the outlook of surveillance studies that frames surveillance practices as a broader social process defined by the collection, categorization, and ordering of information about human beings and their surroundings. Bringing together the approaches of new imperial history and the history of knowledge, I take as my starting point the idea that Habsburg civil servants mobilized context-specific knowledge practices and were expected to adhere to the rules of the state administrative hierarchy, which provided a way to organize the social and material world of the monarchy. I examine the different practices and sources bureaucrats at the lowest administrative offices of the central state used to gather information about local society, how they and their superiors interpreted and refashioned this data to circulate it through the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state as well as the degree to which these practices constituted a state knowledge order. By focusing on bureaucratic routines and practices, the project demonstrates that Habsburg rulers relied not only on individual projects to meet specific knowledge needs, but that knowledge practices were inherent in the state’s bureaucratic apparatus. Knowledge production was a core function of the state. This has important implications for how we understand the ways states exert power.