The Habsburg postal system and the making of Central Europe

The Habsburg postal system was, at its height, one of the most sophisticated communications networks in the world. It connected Vienna to Brussels, to Palermo, to Lwów, to Trieste — a web of relay stations, post roads and courier routes that made possible the administration of an empire whose territories, at their greatest extent, encompassed more than fifty million people speaking a dozen languages.

It was also, in ways that historians are only beginning to appreciate, one of the primary mechanisms through which the idea of Central Europe was created.

To send a letter from Prague to Zagreb in 1780 was not merely a practical act. It was an act that presupposed, and in some small way constituted, a shared space. The letter passed through relay stations, was handled by postmasters who operated under the same regulations, was subject to the same (considerable) risk of inspection by imperial authorities, and arrived — eventually, usually — bearing the same imperial postal stamp. The infrastructure implied a polity.

This is what Benedict Anderson meant when he wrote about print capitalism and the imagined community, though he was writing primarily about newspapers. What the postal system did was older and in some ways more fundamental: it created the physical possibility of sustained communication across distance, and in doing so created the social reality of a shared space.

I am not arguing that the postal system made the Habsburg Empire. Empires are made by armies, by marriages, by fortunate accidents of inheritance. But I am arguing that it maintained the empire — that the routine, unremarkable, daily movement of letters and parcels and government dispatches across vast distances did more to hold together a diverse polity than any number of ideological pronouncements about dynastic unity.