Komel, Svit [University of Ljubljana]

“Surveys and transformation of property in the Habsburg Empire”

Abstract:

This paper investigates the particular form of governmental and scientific practice developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, called “the survey.” The common object of such surveys was to produce systematic accounts of local phenomena, practices and practical knowledge, like proprietary boundaries, customary rights, qualities of animals and lands, air pressure, and regional measurement units. These surveys were often, but not exclusively, directed by states and employed a mixture of experts, civil servants, military personnel, as well as local informants. This paper demonstrates how such surveys could be used as an effective technique of changing local social relations, habits and daily life by considering the influence of the Franciscan cadastral survey (cca. 1817-1843) on the ‘land relief’ or Grundentlastung (1848-1853) – the reform which abolished feudal land tenure in the Habsburg Empire and introduced a unitary and exclusive form of land property. Examining the work of cadastral surveyors illustrates how they prepared the ground for the later reform of property relations by mapping peasants’ knowledge of local land features, proprietary and municipal boundaries, agricultural routines and staple products.” Of particular focus is how cadastral surveyors divided and compartmentalized the landscape into parcels – geometrically demarcated and cartographically represented pieces of land surface. The parcel soon became the only form in which land could figure as an object of property rights, which facilitated the enactment of a unitary and exclusive notion of land property. This also favored the abolition of timber, pasture, and other communal land rights because resources could generally no longer constitute an independent object of property. Consequently, peasant rights were mostly redefined as easements, while ownership of forests and pastures was attributed exclusively to former manorial lords. This case shows how Habsburg administrators relied on a particular manner of producing knowledge about the local to materially transform both the environment and the social relations in which people reproduced their life

Citation:

This outstanding presentation offers a profoundly original conceptualization of the survey as a distinctive form of power and knowledge production in the Habsburg Empire. Rather than treating the Franciscan cadaster as a purely technical enterprise, it understands the survey as a practice of translation within a highly asymmetric setting, where local practices, property rights, and ways of knowledge are inventoried, classified, and, ultimately, changed. The presentation shows with exceptional analytical precision how surveyors relied on the collaboration of local actors to produce standardized representations making local realities legible to the central authorities. The discussion of parcellation is particularly compelling, showing how the cadaster’s seemingly neutral classification practices dissolved older forms of customary ownership and imposed a new, surface-based conception of property that would fundamentally reorder rural life. By revealing the survey as an ongoing negotiation between expert instructions, situated judgments, and regional understandings, the work significantly enriches our comprehension of how modern knowledge regimes are built, from top-down and bottom-up, with long-ranging consequences few understood at the time (or today).