Architecture and Rule: Conception of the State and Military Presence in the Habsburg Province Galicia-Lodomeria, 1849-1859

After the Revolution of 1848/49 a new ruling elite under the young emperor Francis Joseph I introduced a process of accelerated state-building in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The military played an essential role in these activities, leading to the construction of military buildings across the empire. Using the case of military buildings in Galicia, this thesis examines the functioning of new (and old) modes of rule and its negotiation vis-à-vis non-state actors. By re-constructing several building projects from the initial proposal, throughout the planning and construction phase, to the completed buildings and their perception by contemporaries, the internal mechanisms of the military bureaucratic apparatus are analysed in depth on the basis of historical sources from archives in Vienna (Austria), Lviv (Ukraine), Warsaw and Kracow (both Poland). Comparing projects in Krakow and Lviv with their individual problems shows the limitations of the “neo-Absolutist” rule of the Habsburg emperor and deepens our understanding of the functioning of bureaucratic organisations in the formative phase of the central European state.