54 / 2021
Miha Zobec

Book review - Annemarie Steidl, On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire: West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press, 2021, 344 pp.



Simplistic notions of understanding human mobility have long burdened migration studies. Often, such notions relied on categorizations imported from state apparatuses. As a result, migration scholars have treated human movements in a binary and exclusive fashion, dividing between seasonal and permanent, legal and illegal, and most notably between internal and international migration. Building on recent scholarship that has challenged these shortcomings, in her most recent book, Annemarie Steidl draws on the area of the Habsburg Empire to demonstrate the complex and multifaceted character of migrations. Steidl, a distinguished migration scholar and professor at the Department of Social and Economic History at the University of Vienna, has chiefly applied quantitative analysis to explain migration history in her numerous publications.