Svit Komel wird für seine Dissertationsschrift „Rule and measure. A history of juridical practices in the age of surveys“, abgeschlossen an der Universität Ljubljana, ausgezeichnet.
Svit Komel’s rewarded dissertation examines the abolition and regulation of “land burdens” (1853–1895), a reform which abolished collective rights that rural communes in the Habsburg monarchy had enjoyed in forests, pastures, and other uncultivated lands. By dispossessing peasants and concentrating land ownership, this reform permanently transformed economic and legal relations in the Habsburg countryside. Komel argues that the abolition of communal land rights was characteristic of a more broadly present manner of studying and governing local relations and customs which he calls the survey. The defining feature of surveys, as they began to develop in the 18th and 19th centuries, was the ambition to comprehensively examine trivial material conditions, everyday practices, and commonplace phenomena—such as measurement units, land productivity, or living and working conditions—both as objects of emerging scientific disciplines and political reform. The abolition of communal land rights was premised on the work of commissioners who were sent to every locality of the monarchy to catalogue and define established uses of forests and pastures.
Since surveyors were tasked with recategorizing and reinterpreting notions, expressions, and ways of life foreign to them, they inevitably relied on the knowledge of the local inhabitants—particularly the peasants. Every hearing or boundary inspection that the surveyors convened to question the inhabitants about land rights could thus be used by both manorial and peasant representatives as an opportunity to assert their claims and interpretations of their rights. With every case, in which the surveyors either had to accept or reject these objections to decide whether something counted as an “easement”, “ownership”, “domestic need”, or “normal yield”, they inevitably also redefined these concepts themselves. Drawing on a wealth of archived disputes, Komel demonstrates how peasants’ knowledge functioned not only as an object of inquiry but also, invariably, as a source of resistance, highlighting their influential role in the survey and the transition from manorialism to capitalism in the Habsburg monarchy.
Svit Komel teaches legal history at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Since 2025 he holds a PhD in legal history from the same institution, having previously completed his legal studies and an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine in Cambridge. His research has focused particularly on cadastral surveys, the Grundentlastung or the abolition of manorialism, and the reform of communal forest and pasture rights in the Habsburg monarchy. He has also dealt with the establishment of the metric system in France, William Petty’s survey of Ireland during the Cromwellian occupation, and conducted a study of the work conditions and practical knowledge at the Ljubljana District Court Condominium Department based on interviews with the employees.
