Geschichte der österreichischen Gewerbepolitik von 1740 bis 1860. Erster Band: 1740 bis 1798

Karl Pribram’s first volume is a historical monograph on Austrian Gewerbepolitik from Maria Theresa’s accession in 1740 to 1798. It reconstructs policy through decrees, memoranda, privileges, guild disputes, factory regulation, police administration, and market measures. Its method is cumulative: individual rules are not treated as isolated curiosities, but as evidence for a changing administrative system.

Nur als Steinchen bei einer mosaikartigen Zusammenstellung des Bildes der österreichischen Gewerbepolitik waren diese unzähligen Einzelbestimmungen verwertbar.

English translation: These countless individual provisions were usable only as small stones in a mosaic-like composition of the picture of Austrian trade policy.

The central argument is that Austrian industrial policy emerged from dynastic and fiscal necessity, then moved uneasily between protection, police regulation, and liberalizing reform. The loss of Silesia made industrial development a matter of state survival, not merely commercial ambition.

Wollte Österreich nicht dauernd in wirtschaftlicher Abhängigkeit von Preußen bleiben, so mußte es einen Ersatz für die Industrie Schlesiens in den übrigen Erblanden schaffen.

English translation: If Austria did not wish to remain permanently in economic dependence on Prussia, it had to create a substitute for the industry of Silesia in the remaining hereditary lands.

Pribram presents Maria Theresa’s reign as the formative period of this policy. The state sought to encourage manufactures, attract skills, substitute domestic production for imports, and discipline trade. Yet it did not pursue unrestricted competition. A key distinction runs between larger manufactures promoted for commercial and fiscal purposes and the locally necessary “Polizeigewerbe,” whose regulation aimed at social order.

Oberster Grundsatz für die Behandlung dieser, der sogenannten Polizeigewerbe, war es daher, das Gleichgewicht zwischen dem lokalen Bedarf und der lokalen Produktion herzustellen, die Gewerbetreibenden dabei in ihrem Nahrungsstande zu sichern.

English translation: The supreme principle for the treatment of these, the so-called police trades, was therefore to establish the balance between local demand and local production, while thereby securing the tradesmen in their means of subsistence.

This idea of “Gleichgewicht” explains why Austrian policy could combine factory promotion with guild protection. The state wanted growth, but feared disorder, impoverishment of small masters, uncontrolled migration, and instability in local provision. Around 1770, however, administrative experience and reformist memoranda began to loosen this structure. The volume’s middle sections trace the emergence of freer ideas concerning labor, production, and internal commerce.

Joseph II’s reign is the dramatic center of the book. Pribram does not reduce Josephinism to laissez-faire. Its liberal aspect lay in attacking corporate restraints, widening access to labor and materials, and weakening monopolistic privileges; its absolutist aspect lay in imposing this reorganization from above. Guild reform, factory concessions, apprenticeships, merchant intermediation, and real Gewerbeberechtigungen all show the same tension between market opening and bureaucratic command.

The later chapters follow the partial defeat of this reform program. Resistance, fiscal pressure, and political crisis forced concessions, but Pribram stresses that retreat did not mean conviction.

Des Kaisers Wille war gebrochen; überzeugt war er nicht.

English translation: The Emperor's will was broken; he was not convinced.

After Joseph II, the 1790s brought a harsher atmosphere. War, revolutionary fear, police suspicion, and fiscal expedients narrowed the scope for constructive Gewerbepolitik. Industrial development became entangled with surveillance and security priorities, and Pribram’s judgment is severe.

Von einer Gewerbepolitik, die sich in der eben geschilderten Weise den Wünschen einer engherzigen Sicherheitspolizei unterordnete, konnte eine wirkliche Förderung des Gewerbewesens nicht erwartet werden.

English translation: From a trade policy which, in the manner just described, subordinated itself to the wishes of a narrow-minded security police, a real promotion of the trades could not be expected.

The volume’s lasting value lies in showing Austrian modernization before 1800 as neither simple backwardness nor straightforward liberal progress. Pribram depicts an absolutist state trying to manufacture economic development while still fearing the social consequences of mobility, competition, and market dependence. Gewerbepolitik becomes, in his account, a field where military loss, fiscal state-building, social discipline, guild survival, and proto-liberal reform continually intersect.