The strikes of May 1906 : empire, bureaucracy, and the nature of late Habsburg rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

In May 1906, the Habsburg occupied territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced an unprecedented level of labour unrest. From the forests near Zavidovići to the tobacco fields of Ljubuški, civil society actors as well as civil servants at different levels of the administrative hierarchy expected bureaucrats to intervene and to help settle the disputes. Scholarship examining the Habsburg Monarchy’s occupation and later annexation of the Ottoman vilayet of Bosnia and Herzegovina has long argued that Austro-Hungarian governance in the territory is best understood as absolutist and colonial. Such interpretations, however, tend to treat the central bureaucracy and the civil servants who staffed it as a uniform and coherent body, paying little attention to the ways in which administration was practiced on the ground. This thesis examines how late Habsburg rule functioned in Bosnia and Herzegovina by analysing the various ways administrators managed the strikes of May 1906 in order to understand the character of Austro-Hungarian administrative practice. Building on the approaches of new imperial history, I take as my starting point the idea that Habsburg administrators turned to context specific strategies when it came to governance and especially to managing social conflict. Through a close reading of the events of May 1906, I show that bureaucrats, but also women workers, private industrialists, military officers, and politicians actively discussed and advocated for their own visions of rule based on how they believed Habsburg civil servants should behave in a given context. Distinguishing between administrators working at various levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy, I demonstrate that civil servants often pursued different concerns during the strikes and that at times, their divergent interests led to disagreements and debate. Indeed, even in cases where actors used the same concept to support their version of rule, they often interpreted these ideas in different ways. In this moment, imperial rule was diverse and in many ways open-ended and could not be fully explained by the absolutist and colonial approaches.