The wealth of literature published in the last twenty-five years on economic growth, economic development, and comparative economic history contains little information about Austria-Hungary. Fortunately, this situation shows signs of improving as the few recent articles and monographs on the subject are beginning to be utilized in the more general literature. Although the general lack of attention to Austria-Hungary clearly indicates that serious analytical work on the economic history of the area is still in a very early stage, the relatively few studies published on the subject have already changed the views of scholars on economic developments in the Habsburg lands.

Austrian historians owe Richard Rudolph, Nachum Gross, and David Good a great intellectual debt for their repeated attempts to apply quantitative methods to the study of intricate economic developments in the last century of the Habsburg monarchy. In his present paper, Rudolph gives us a résumé of the results thus far attained by the trio of scholars and broadens the scope of his own research somewhat by extending the period of investigation to include what Franklin Mendels has called the phase of “proto-industrialization.”

As Richard L. Rudolph correctly observes at the beginning of his article, Austrian economic history has not been adequately examined in international, comparative studies of the problems of economic growth. Undoubtedly this is attributable both to the traditional orientation of Austrian historians toward national and regional studies and to the interest of so many historians in various aspects of the preindustrial age. Macroeconomic approaches have, therefore, been deemphasized, even though they have led to significant new conclusions in regard to the nature of preindustrial economy and society, partly because of the difficulty in applying this methodology to an analysis of the increasingly complex affairs of a modern industrial society.

In their discussion of my modest contribution on the character of Austrian industrialization, my esteemed colleagues Eduard März and Herbert Matis have raised a number of questions regarding the “new economic history,” the nature of historical inquiry, epistemology, and the value of my conclusions. In addition, they have both, and Prof. März in particular, raised a number of suggestive hypotheses—if I may be forgiven the use of the word—in regard to the character of Austrian economic development. Needless to say, in this brief reply I cannot discuss all the points touched upon in their discussion. However, I would like to deal with those which strike me as the most significant.

Between 1857 and 1900 the Jewish population of Vienna grew from 6,000 to more than 146,000 as a result of the mass migration of Jews from the eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian empire to the capital. The largest source of the migration was Galicia, with a vast Jewish population that increased from 448,973 in 1857 to 811,183 at the turn of the century. In 1857 alone, at the outset of the migrations, some 2,000 persons left Galicia, marking the first gradual decline in the high proportion of Jews living in the part of the empire which lay within the eastern European pale of Jewish settlement. Arriving at an estimated rate of 20,000 to 30,000 per decade, these Galician Jews flowed into Vienna's second district, Leopoldstadt, and produced a shift both in the ethnic demography of the city and in that of the empire. Expansion of the Jewish population of Vienna from 1.3 percent of the population in 1857 to 12 percent by 1890 profoundly influenced the social, cultural, and political life of the Austrian capital.

In recent years there has been a deplorable lack of interest in Austria in the historical role of the Jews in Central Europe. Given the general trends towards internationalization of the social sciences and the interdisciplinary method of analysis, this neglect is most distressing. Presumably this lack of scholarly interest is related to the fact that since World War II the Central European Jews no longer constitute a distinct ethnic and religious group. Apart from studies made in university institutes for Jewish studies and in occasional publications which have mainly treated various aspects of “the holocaust,” most studies have approached Jewish history only collaterally by focusing on anti-Semitism.

Rabinbach has made a valuable contribution to the study of the Jewish migration within the Habsburg monarchy, the most noteworthy phenomenon of which was the wholesale mass movement of Galician Jews to Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century. The author, relying mainly on contemporary statistical records for source material, ably documents the increase in Jewish inhabitants in Vienna from one to ten percent of the total population during this period.

Quantitative essays in economic history do not need dazzling equations and arcane terminology to make a contribution. Often the greatest service to the profession is performed by the careful scholar who collects, works up, and presents useful economic data in a simple and straightforward way. Simplicity can be deceptive, however, and often the most painstaking scholar will fail to see important implications in the data he uses and manipulates.

In consolidating his hold over the Austrian, Hungarian, and Bohemian territories which he acquired between 1521 and 1526, Ferdinand I (1521–1564) enjoyed one especially notable success: the suppression in 1547 of a Bohemian uprising during Emperor Charles V's (1519–1556) campaign against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany. Relying on the promise of the Schmalkaldian leader Elector John Frederick of Saxony to protect them, the Bohemian estates formed a league in 1547 which challenged, among other things, Ferdinand's rights to summon the diet, to have his son crowned during his lifetime, and to oversee the administration of his treasury.

At nine o'clock in the evening of March 13, 1848, Prince Clemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich resigned as imperial chancellor. With the “coachman” in absentia, Central Europe's peoples struggled to gain more freedom in that remarkable revolutionary movement of 1848. The Habsburg monarchy, although teetering on the verge of dissolution, survived the mid-century's most tumultuous year. Despite weakness at the helm of government, improvement of dynastic fortunes had gathered momentum by mid-summer as the imperial army under Prince Alfred Ferdinand zu Windischgrätz, Count Joseph Wenzel Radetzky, and Count Josip Jelačić od Bužima advanced irregularly but steadily on the peripheries of the realm. By autumn provision of a coherent Habsburg policy to be applied throughout the far-flung empire became mandatory. To provide a strong man to enforce the policies, Field Marshal Windischgrätz recommended for minister-president his forty-eight-year-old brother-in-law, Prince Felix Ludwig zu Schwarzenberg, an individual who possessed both the confidence of the army and considerable diplomatic experience.

By abolishing feudalism, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 helped to create the economic preconditions and the legal-political framework necessary for capitalistic development. This made it possible for Hungary to adapt her economy to the market possibilities offered by the Industrial Revolution in western and central Europe and to share in the agrarian boom of the period between 1850 and 1873. The previously existing division of labor between western and eastern Europe and between the western and eastern parts of the Habsburg monarchy continued on a scale larger than before, with the significant difference, however, that this practice now speeded up rather than retarded the development of preconditions for capitalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century the preconditions for capitalism had come into existence in the Cisleithanian provinces at considerable expense to the Hungarian economy.