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Lost Momentum: Austrian Economic Development, 1750s-1830s. By Herman Freudenberger. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2003. 301 pp. Bibliography, notes, index. Paper, euro45. ISBN 3-205-77061-7.
Herman Freudenberger is the unquestionable doyen of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austrian-Bohemian economic history. One cannot understand the economic development and problems of the Habsburg Empire without reading his works. Lost Momentum is the product of fifty years of research in all the significant archives, and it represents the accumulation of a tremendous amount of knowledge, both theoretical and factual. Freudenberger, indeed, encompasses his topic and is, as always, extremely strong on details. Here he searches for an answer to a central question: why, after a very promising start toward economic modernization around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did Austria-Bohemia lose momentum from the 1830s on, rendering it unable to match the economic vitality of its western European and, most of all, its German counterparts by World War I? This book, as Freudenberger states at the beginning, is not a comparative study. However, it takes a comparative approach in attempting to answer the question.
Freudenberger analyzes three main facets of the Austrian-Bohemian economic performance: the agricultural background of industrialization; the part played by the state; and the role of various kinds and types of entrepreneurs.
In a relatively short chapter on agriculture, he concludes that "the Bohemian, Moravian and Austrian villages had many built-in characteristics that were hostile to change" (p. 43). Although production of grain more than doubled...