This project connects the economic history of the late 19th and early 20th century with the recent trend of looking at Austria-Hungary as an imperial/colonial actor in relation to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Unconventionally but productively using the dissolution of the monarchy as its conceptual starting point, which offers insights into the less visible practices and meanings of the empire before 1918, it aims at revealing 1) how Austro-Hungarian imperialism reached Southeast Europe and integrated it into its economic sphere, 2) the place of this economic space between the European and global ones, and 3) how its post-WWI transformation from more direct forms of asset ownership to indirect ones created a laboratory of financialization of capitalism. The continuity of Austro-Hungarian businesses in the face of economic nationalist policies after 1918 highlights the importance of their previous practices of local embedding for the persistence of this space after the political structure that supported business expansion disappeared. This reinterpretation of Austro-Hungarian presence contributes to the understanding of the embedding of economic activity through interactions, how these interactions created structural features for the economy, and how the legal and political changes after 1918 did not change the interactional embeddedness, while the reconfiguration of structures still changed the face of capitalism to a more financialized one.

Gábor Egry is a historian, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, currently István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and director-general of the Institute of Political History, Budapest. His research interests are nationalism, everyday ethnicity, politics of identity, politics of memory, economic history in modern East Central Europe. He held fellowships at Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, New Europe College, Bucharest, he was a Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar at Stanford University and Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI, Florence. Author of five volumes in Hungarian and several articles. among others in European Review of History, Slavic Review, Hungarian Historical Review, Südost-Forschungen. His last monograph Etnicitás, identitás, politika. Magyar kisebbségek naconalizmus és regionalizmus között Romániában és Csehszlovákiában 1918-1944 [Ethnicity, identity, politics. Hungarian Minorities between nationalism and regionalism in Romania and Czechoslovakia 1918-1944]) received an Honorable Mention from the Felczak-Wereszyczki Prize of the Polish Historical Association, and he received the Mark Pittaway Article Prize of the Hungarian Studies Association in 2018. Between 2018 and 2023 he was the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Nepostrans – Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe.

Hosted by the Institute for European Studies and cosponsored by the History department.