Lecture format: on site
Room: 2R-EG-07 (lecture hall of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2,  Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.

This seminar will explore how military leadership in the Habsburg Empire increasingly turned their attention to the legal and administrative regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the years before the First World War.

The military had a distinct role in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the Habsburg Empire took over the two territories from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. The territories had been awarded to the Dual Monarchy by the Treaty of Berlin but only came into Habsburg lands through a sustained military campaign. After 30 years of "administration and occupation," Emperor Franz Joseph declared the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and promised the territories a constitutional system. Alongside pledges of elections and representation, Habsburg military leadership actively conceptualized new laws under a state of emergency and prepared for wartime needs. Given the military's preeminent leadership role in the provinces, and importantly, the local territorial commander's simultaneous position as head of the civilian government, Bosnia and Herzegovina proved to be a crucial blueprint for the Habsburg military at war.

John Deak is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His first book, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford University Press, 2015), was awarded the Karl-von-Vogelsang State Prize for Social Science History in 2018. His recent work on the First World War has been published in the Journal of Modern History and (with Jonathan Gumz) in the American Historical Review and Contemporary Austrian Studies.

The event will be recorded and uploaded to RECET's YouTube channel.