Empire in the Cottage: Welfare Capitalism and Workers’ Housing Policy in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1880–1914

Abstract

This study focuses on welfare capitalism and workers’ housing policy in the Habsburg Empire on the eve of the Great War. It deals with the concessions for buildings containing healthy and affordable workers’ flats. The study argues that the existing research on welfare capitalism concentrated mostly on the entrepreneurs and industrialists as key actors in the building of workers’ flats. As the concessions for the building of workers’ houses suggest, the imperial authorities also maintained welfare capitalism and played a certain role in supporting the construction of workers’ housing. Through the concessions, authorities tried to regulate the company construction and to intervene into places of the everyday. They sought to enforce an appropriate lifestyle and to separate spaces for people of workers’ background, male and female workers, single workers, and workers’ families.