Combating the Hydra: Violence and Resistance in the Habsburg Empire, 1500–1900 by Stephan Steiner (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Combating the Hydra: Violence and Resistance in the Habsburg Empire, 1500–1900 by Stephan Steiner
• Samuel Kessler

Stephan Steiner, Combating the Hydra: Violence and Resistance in the Habsburg Empire, 1500–1900. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2023. 253 pp.

Violence is ubiquitous. It takes many forms and is a central part of historical narrative—consider the number of books focused on great wars, battles, generals, conquerors, and empire builders. Every victory or national accomplishment is predicated on violence. And not only on violence in the abstract, but violence as a series of deeply intimate actions between one individual and another, repeated time and again, be it simultaneously (say by many men against many men all at once, as on a field of battle) or in series (say by one man day after day toward one new person after another, as by an executioner or a vice officer). Violence is such a deep part of human society that it can be both all-consuming and totally invisible, the premise of nearly every novel or TV show yet likewise entirely absent from the narratives of our own lives, something that we say—if we are lucky—happens to someone else, somewhere else.

In Combating the Hydra: Violence and Resistance in the Habsburg Empire, 1500–1900, Stephan Steiner uses the language and theories of the history of violence to illuminate a vast new field of inquiry in Habsburg Studies. Steiner's passion lies in early modernity, a period, he points out, that scholars of violence have long identified as a key moment in the evolution of state-sponsored violence, creating forms of coercive state power that we usually identify as uniquely modern (such as forced deportations and scientifically grounded population management). As Steiner puts it, "Wherever … state violence occurred in the early modern period, the relationship between ruler and subject, which had always been tense, emerged in its most unvarnished [End Page 99] form. Never were subjects more subjected and sovereigns more sovereign than in outbursts of state violence" (xv).

In this book, Steiner's focus is generally on the Empire's periphery, which, though not as far flung as the borderlands of the British or Spanish empires, nonetheless continues to occupy (no doubt because of its often obscure dialects and ethnic compositions) a more or less overshadowed space in the mainstream history of the Habsburg Europe. (How many university students in Vienna today—let alone in Berlin, Paris, or New York—could identify the location of a place as historically consequential as the Banat, the focus of chapter 2? Or supply a single fact about Gypsy slavery in the monasteries of Bukovina, the focus of chapter 10?) This is, therefore, not a book about Habsburg court politics (though court politics inevitably influences everything in a monarchical system), but rather about the human beings and their communities who ended up shoved around, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, murdered, or in other ways brutalized by the blunt end of the very long stick of Habsburg state power in the centuries that shade from early modernity into modernity.

Combating the Hydra is composed of a series of interconnected essays that, as Steiner describes them, "share a common interest: to understand different forms of state violence in the Habsburg empire and explore the conditions, possibilities, and limits of resistance" (xvi). The book itself is organized into four parts, the first three being a collection of historical essays and the fourth the transcript of a conversation between Steiner and the eminent Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. No essay is particularly long, and each includes enough general background and relevant signposting to make it easily assignable to an undergraduate audience, but each is also grounded in new archival materials and thus reveals something previously unknown in the history of Habsburg state violence. As a reader knowledgeable in the general history but without special expertise in the specific individual repercussions of legal power, I found myself stunned and intrigued time and again at the diversity of events and sources that Steiner uncovers.

Part 1 focuses on deportations and the use of forced labor in Habsburg lands. While all readers will be familiar with the largest mass deportation events of early...