1918
Category=JHM
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
Czechoslovakia
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Food shortage
Post-Habsburg transition
Yugoslavia
Product details
- ISBN 9789633869185
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: Central European University Press
- Publication City/Country: HU
- Product Form: Hardback
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The aggravating food shortage was the central internal crisis in Habsburg Austria during the First World War and posed a major challenge to the consolidation of the successor states. Nourishing Victory offers a fresh comparative perspective on food and the collapse and rebuilding of political legitimacy from the regional vantage point of the Bohemian Lands and Slovenia before and after 1918. Zooming in on multiple levels of society, the book explores how politicians, local officials, and grassroots protagonists navigated collapsing supply systems, relied on black markets, and sought to make sense of the chaos around them. Since this was a crisis of international proportions, the book also examines foreign food aid and the contradictions it entailed. At the same time, to emphasize the local dynamics of food supply and political legitimacy, it explores how food became a political weapon in struggles over contested borderlands such as Teschen Silesia and Prekmurje.
Rok Stergar is Professor in Modern History at the University of Ljubljana and a historian of the Habsburg Empire, the First World War, and of nationalism. He is the author of two books and numerous articles on nationalisms in the Habsburg Empire, the First World War, and post-imperial transitions. Václav Smidrkal is a researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and an assistant professor at Charles University in Prague. His research focuses on post-war transitions, war veterans, and military propaganda in twentieth-century Central Europe.
