|
View the HABSBURG Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in HABSBURG's October 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in HABSBURG's October 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the HABSBURG home page.
Subject: Query on Franz Josef Land
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:41:22 -0400
From: Stephen Walsh <sawalsh@fas.harvard.edu>
Dear colleagues,
I'm a PhD student putting together a dissertation proposal about
Austrian Polar
Exploration. The centerpiece of my research is the First
Austro-Hungarian Polar
Expedition, led by Carl Weyprecht and Julius Payer, which was trapped in
the ice
of the Barents Sea for two and a half years (1872-1874). During this
period the
expedition discovered a barren archipelago of islands north of Siberia which
they christened Kaiser Franz Joseph Land, a name the islands still bear
to this
day (minus the Kaiser part).
I've been trying to find primary sources that discuss the legal status
of Franz
Josef Land. What I know so far is that Austria did not annex the islands
? in
his published account of the Expedition, for example, Julius Payer quite
demonstratively renounces any acquisitive intent or implication in the
expedition's discovery of Franz Josef Land. Whether or not an acquisitive
intent in fact lurked within Payer's heart, the islands still seem to
have been
considered no man's land, or ?terra nullius? a legal concept that was being
formulated in the nineteenth century in order to deal with the idea of
uninhabited, ostensibly ?empty? geographic space. I am fairly certain this
status of no man's land applied to Franz Joseph Land until 1926-9, when the
Soviet Union annexed the archipelago (prompting noticeable uproar in the
Austrian Republic and suggesting that relationships with ?terra nullius?
need
not be imaginatively distant). I would like to investigate how, between 1874
and 1918, Austrian legal authorities conceptualized Franz Josef Land and the
Empire's relationship with these islands. Thus far, however, primary sources
have not been terribly abundant aside from the published works of Payer and
Weyprecht and some articles in the Neue Freie Presse and the Reichspost. If
anyone has advice about where else I might best look, it would be greatly
appreciated!
Thanks,
Stephen Walsh
--
Stephen Walsh
PhD Candidate in History
Harvard University
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies
27 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
+ 1 617 495 2556
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|