Within the Habsburg Empire of the late nineteenth century, nature became a central focus of political, economic, and scientific attention. A source of valuable natural resources and a platform for consolidating wider, territorial rule, its management and control was subsumed into a broader system of imperial governance. In this exacting analysis of the correlation between the environment and power, Habsburg Natures explores how the natural world fundamentally shaped the political and economic landscape within the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1850 to 1918. Ranging from forestry and coal-mining to river politics and natural disasters, this volume spotlights how deeply intertwined the histories of environmentalism and empire are.

This article examines the evolution of an industrialized and capital-driven timber extraction in Bosnia and Herzegovina under Habsburg governance from 1878–1914 and its social and ecological effects on the region. It emphasizes the role of both imperial policy-making and local socio-ecological factors that determined the advancement of the timber frontier in the region. The first part on early Habsburg governance illustrates how logging operations were determined by state-devised regulations of property relations and state-induced facilities that eventually resulted in industrialized extraction by means of foreign private companies. The second part on late Habsburg governance shows how forests successively acquired a political dimension. In conflicts with the local population, the Habsburg authorities prioritized social stability over the companies’ interests, whereas the Bosnian government tried to secure economic self-determination of the region by advocating for the takeover of industrial logging by domestic enterprises.