Outsourcing an Empire? Habsburg Colonialism and Discourses of Difference in 18th-Century Hungary

In Central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, the term ‘Peuplierung’ meant simply settlement, population or colonization; in the Habsburg lands, the term Impopulation was used synonymously. No clear, defined, programme of settlement and colonization existed for within Germany, no more than did for territories outside the empire; rather there was a tendency to see an increase in population as something to be actively encouraged. It was for reasons of state, economy and political philosophy that writers in Central Europe came to address the issue of Peuplierung.

This paper will assess the writings of political economists and state theoreticians, offering an analysis of Habsburg views of immigration and emigration in the contexts of emerging second-wave colonialism and imperialism, within continental Europe. Was Habsburg colonial ambition in the eighteenth century ‘outsourced’, effectively, resulting in a contemporary academic reflection on Habsburg-supported colonialism which was only set in practice in the nineteenth century?

The paper will conclude with a consideration of late-Enlightenment scholar August Ludwig Schlözer, who spent years composing the three grand volumes of the Kritische Sammlungen zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbürgen, published in Göttingen between 1795 and 1797. I will suggest that, while writing about the Transylvanian Saxons, Schlözer created a Habsburg colonial narrative of central Europe inspired by North American colonial history and European extra-continental expansion.