Gábor Egry

This project combines economic history with an examination of Austria-Hungary as an imperial/colonial actor in relation to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Taking as its starting point the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, which offers insights into the less visible practices and meanings of the empire before 1918, the project aims at revealing: 1) how Austro-Hungarian imperialism integrated South-Eastern Europe into its economic sphere; 2) the situation of this economic space between European and global ones; 3) how its post-WWI transformation from more direct forms of asset ownership to indirect ones created a laboratory for the financialization of capitalism. The persistence of economic space in the face of post-1918 economic nationalism highlights the importance of the practices of local embedding instead of imperialist politics in Austria-Hungary’s survival and success before 1918. The story of Austro-Hungarian informal imperialism contributes to the understanding the role of embedding for the economy, a reevaluation of imperialism and capitalism and the sources of its reconfigurations after the heydays of the first liberal globalization.