Imperial Borderlands. By Bogdan G.Popescu, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 332 pp. $110.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9781009365215
本书研究哈布斯堡帝国军事殖民地（今克罗地亚等地）的制度遗产，发现相比平民区，前军事殖民地基础设施更差、贫困风险更高，但土地不平等更低，且社会信任模式不同。
The Habsburg Empire covered parts of Central and Southeastern Europe, including Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, from the 1300s until its implosion in 1918. Existing research has argued that it was more conducive to economic and political development than the neighboring Ottoman Empire, which comprised today's Turkey and parts of the Middle East until 1914 but also most of Southeastern Europe until the early 1800s. For about three centuries between the 1500s and the 1800s, much of today's Croatia was Habsburg while much of today's Bosnia was Ottoman, constituting the western part of the border between the two empires. Much less well-known is the inner border of the Habsburg Empire: the border that separated the “regular” imperial lands from a set of military colonies that the Habsburg monarchy created in much of today's Croatia (1500s–1881s) and, for a briefer period, further East in Hungary and Romania. These military colonies functioned as a defense buffer to prevent, or at least slow down Ottoman attacks. That inner border is the focus of Popescu's excellent and carefully researched book. Life in the military colony, in the “imperial borderlands,” was an enticing option for some serfs. In exchange for being “farmer-soldiers,” peasants gained freedom from serfdom and the ability to cultivate their land. For the Habsburg monarchy, “peasant-soldiers were an economic[al] solution” (p. 12) to a military problem—to defend the empire from Ottoman attacks. Thus, there existed civilian townships where subjects could buy and sell land and migrate within the empire alongside military colonies where subjects, indeed subject to army rule, could not alienate their land or exit the military colony. The punishment for the latter was death, not just for the escapee but for all his family. In short, two very different sets of political institutions operated in this Habsburg region: one civilian (north of the border) and the other military (south of the border) for about 300 years until the Habsburgs disbanded the military colonies in 1881. Popescu collects a very impressive trove of historical data from archival and secondary sources and combines it with 20th-century and contemporary data to examine the consequences of these two institutional arrangements for public goods provision, development, and various attitudes and social norms. Popescu finds that compared to “always-civilian” towns, infrastructure and public goods are scarcer in towns that were formerly part of the military colony (e.g., lower road density, lower access to water and sewage), both historically and even in the late 20th century. He also finds suggestive evidence that former military colonies developed less, as proxied by having more people at risk of poverty. Finally, he shows that communal land tenure in the military colonies led to lower land inequality until communal property rights were abolished following World War I (p. 128). The sources of these differences seem twofold: institutional and cultural. The monarchy created military colonies and maintained them until the 1800s, so the institutional channel is straightforward. The cultural channel is less obvious but more interesting. Even today, Popescu finds that those living in the former military colonies trust their family members more but their non-family members less (again, compared to people on the civilian side of the historical border). These differences would have likely been larger in the 1500s–1800s. Some social and cultural norms, notably trust, help explain the main findings. It is plausible, for example, that fear of Ottoman attacks and the death penalty for escapees and their families helped create stronger family and clan bonds in the military colonies than in the civilian areas. Paraphrasing Popescu, who engages Putnam, this may foster bonding social capital but hinder bridging social capital, which is necessary for broader political development. What are the broader lessons learned from this thorough examination of the Habsburg military colonies? The author considers the conditions under which imperial extractive institutions are more pernicious. That is the case, he argues, the lower the public investment, the more property and land can be expropriated by the state, and the more violence the state exerts on its subjects. The framework is intuitive and organizes a wide literature while embedding the book's findings within it. The Croatian military colony of the Habsburg Empire was a case of low investments, communal land rights that the state could expropriate under certain circumstances, and some violence and threats thereof. This was not a very hopeful case, and that is indeed what the empirical results show. The empirical results rely on the assumption that the territory just south of the inner border was comparable to the territory just north of the inner border prior to the institution of military colonialism. The validity of using this inner border of the Habsburg Empire as a natural experiment depends on that. Popescu collected much data to find that the two territories were comparable along various geographic dimensions. But he also finds that rivers delimit part of the border. Because rivers are locational fundamentals, we would ideally like to ascertain covariate balance over an array of social, economic, and political variables right before the monarchy instituted military colonies in the 1500s. That is indeed a tall order in historical political economy. As a substitute, the author might have delved deeper into the logic behind “treatment assignment”—if any—given his very extensive reading on the political history of the Habsburg Empire, and especially of its imperial borderlands. Relatedly, the author could have elucidated boundary changes over time more clearly for scholars with an interest in imperial borders but little knowledge of Central and Southeastern European history, such as this reviewer. The outer border (the border between the two empires) certainly changed during those 300 years, including in the Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Empire in 1683 and the Napoleonic Occupation (p. 90). Various maps early in the book suggest that the size and shape of the military colony, and perhaps the inner border, changed as a result. Having said that, Popescu eliminates towns attacked at some point by the Ottomans from his empirical analysis to increase the comparability of municipalities on either side of the inner border. The book concludes by zooming out. Military colonies were not a Habsburg invention and date back to Roman times, if not earlier. In recent history, Popescu shows that Russia used Cossacks to establish various military colonies in imperial borderlands and that the French deployed Habsburg-style military colonies as they conquered Algeria in the 1800s (Chapter 7). This is an extremely ambitious book that will be widely read and of interest to scholars of political and economic history, imperialism and colonialism, borderlands, institutions, and civil-military relations. The author has nothing to report.