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4 - Military Colonialism and Economic Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Bogdan G. Popescu
Affiliation:
John Cabot University, Rome
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Summary

Much has been written on the history of the Habsburg Military Frontier; much less on its legacies. Chapter 4 presents evidence for the key institutional properties of military colonialism. The two striking socioeconomic insights that emerge from the data reported in the censuses of Imperial Hungary are that land equality and communal property rights remained much more prevalent in the borderlands even decades after the abrogation of the military colony. The absence of large consolidated land holdings and of a landless rural working class, held back the modernization of agriculture and the growth of farm productivity, as well as the spread of manufacturing. Similarly, historical and modern data on access to public goods suggest that the asymmetry between regions formerly under civilian and military administrations persisted over time to the present day. We cannot attribute these results to (1) temporal intermediary treatment factors that could have affected the treatment and the control group differentially, (2) structural treatment factors that could have influenced the treatment group simply by being located in a border area, and (3) alternative mechanisms by which military colonialism affected the way the state behaved in the former military colony.

Type
Chapter
Information
Imperial Borderlands
Institutions and Legacies of the Habsburg Military Frontier
, pp. 100 - 137
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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