Governing Communal Land Rights and Peasant Resistance: The Redemption and Regulation of "Easements" in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1853–1914

The paper analyzes the survey as a particular form of governmental and scientific practice, which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Examples of surveys include campaigns for the unification of measurement units, cadastral surveys, compilations of customary law, inquiries on trade, geological surveys, etc. The common object of these surveys was to produce systematic accounts of local phenomena, practices and practical knowledge, like proprietary boundaries and customary rights, qualities of animals and lands, regional measurement units. They were ordinarily directed by the state and employed a mixture of experts, civil servants, military personnel, as well as local informants. The paper demonstrates how such surveys could be used by the state as an effective technique for reforming local social relations by considering the redemption and regulation of easements – a reform of land property in the Habsburg Empire that was designed to survey and abolish the customary property rights of peasant communities on forests, pastures and other commonly exploited lands. Reflecting earlier attempts at limiting peasant customary rights, the reformers aimed to classify them as easements – a burden on lands owned exclusively by a third party, usually a manorial lord or the prince. However, the members of the Interior Ministry designing the reform redefined the term easement as any right contrary to ‘national economic interest’. The presentation will analyze how this category of easements was construed and how national economic interest became synonymous with the formation of large estates under the influence of contemporary political economy and forestry science. This raison d’état will then be contrasted with the view of the peasants, exhibited in different forms of resistance like protests, petitions and appeals. These modes of resistance evince an alternative understanding of customary rights as common property and indicate the extensive expropriation that resulted from their regulation and abolition.