ALISON FLEIG FRANK. Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 343. $49.95

Three currents in Habsburg historiography come together in this book by Alison Fleig Frank. One, dating to the 1970s and 1980s, is the revisionist trend in the monarchy's economic history, which makes the case that Austria-Hungary was nowhere near as backward or unmodern as had been thought. Another is the literature specifically devoted to the crownland of Galicia, which began to develop intensively in North America in the 1980s. And the third, touched off by István Deák's study of the Habsburg officer corps in 1990, is a focus on questions that go beyond nationalism, long the overriding concern in studies of the monarchy from 1848 until its collapse in 1918. Although this book is situated on the confluence of these currents, it complicates each of them. Frank shows, for example, that the Austrian law on land mineral rights for the oil industry was economically superior to that of most other countries, belying “the image of Austria's economy as unabashedly statist and inhospitable to new ventures” (p. 54). But after tracing the ups and downs of Galicia's oil industry, which once held third place in world production, she eschews the narrative of progress of the revisionist economic historians, concluding that “in the oil fields of Galicia we see no progression from the characteristically ‘traditional’ to the stereotypically industrial modern. There is no progression, only movement” (p. 254). Before Frank's book, almost all of the North American publications on Galicia concentrated on issues of nationalism, both Ukrainian and Polish. She demonstrates that one can write an interesting book that looks at something else: a particular industry whose pioneers were a Prussian Pole and an expatriate Canadian as well as small Jewish investors, whose major investors in the end were French and even American, whose skilled workforce was Polish, and whose unskilled workforce was Ukrainian and Jewish. But although her study is poised to move beyond nationalism, in the end it cannot. The last chapter describes the military and diplomatic confrontation between Poles and Ukrainians for control of the oil fields after the collapse of the empire. It also shows that odd kinds of national conflict accompanied the development of the industry: Austrians against foreigners, Galicians against Viennese centralism, and gentile workers against Jewish workers.

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