Johnson, Alison Frank - Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia

In a brilliantly conceived work, Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Galician oil industry. She portrays this often overlooked oil boom’s transformation of the environment, and its reorientation of religious and social divisions that had defined a previously agrarian population, as surprising alliances among traditional foes sprang up among workers and entrepreneurs, at the workplace, and in the pubs and brothels of new oil towns. Read more...

Alison Frank Johnson Professor of History   Alison Frank Johnson’s teaching and research focus on transnational approaches  to the history of central and eastern Europe. She teaches courses on  the global history of commodities and European environmental history as  well as courses on the Habsburg Empire and its successor states in the  nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (2005), was awarded the Barbara  Jelavich 2006 book prize, the Austrian Cultural Forum 2006 Book Prize,  and the Polish Studies Association 2006 Orbis Book Prize.    Read more...