Date of Award
Spring 5-6-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Jared Poley
Second Advisor
Greg Moore
Third Advisor
J. T. Way
Abstract
In 1878, Austria-Hungary crossed the Sava River into what was then the Ottoman Bosnia Vilayet. Its mandate in the Treaty of Berlin was to bring peace and security to the war-weary population. Yet, despite the self-declared noble intentions of the empire, the first four years of the occupation proved to be a struggle. Only after Emperor Franz Joseph appointed a relatively unknown Hungarian bureaucrat as Austria-Hungary’s Joint Finance Minister and administrator of the Bosnian occupation in 1882 did the tide seem to turn. For the next twenty years, Béni Kállay (1839-1903) governed Bosnia with a strong hand and the eye of a master publicist. If the absence of conflict was the only metric of success, then the Kállay era was a triumph. By the end of the nineteenth century, Kállay’s achievements were being recognized by his contemporaries in France, Great Britain, even the United States, as a model of colonialism. Kállay’s colonial governance represents an important moment in the history of European colonialism. I argue that Kállay was a modern innovator of colonial governance. Yet his overall governing ideology, what can be referred to as Kállayism, was not itself innovative. Rather, Kállay’s innovation was his ability to piece together a hodgepodge of different, often contradictory ideas popular among nineteenth-century Central European intellectuals. It was precisely this eclecticism that made Kállayism unique for its time and why, even today, the Kállay era in Bosnia is difficult to categorize. This project explores the intellectual history of Kállayism by mapping the diverse influences on Kállay’s political, philosophical, historical, and economic thought.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/36859897
Recommended Citation
Morley, Matthew Blake, "Imperial Modern: An Intellectual History of Béni Kállay’s Governing Strategy in Habsburg Bosnia." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2024.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/36859897
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