Wages, Whips and Prayers: Configurations of Convict Labour and Confinement in the Prison Workhouse of Early Modern Vienna

This thesis examines punitive practices and convict labour in the prison workhouse of Vienna in the 17th and 18th century. In contrast to prevailing historiographical narratives that often reduce prison workhouses to mere predecessors of “modern” prisons, this study emphasises the complex interplay of coercion, punishment and labour within these institutions. It focuses on two aspects: the categorisations and interpretative patterns labelling people as “delinquents” and the spatial dynamics shaping the punitive practices within the prison workhouse and connecting it to other sites.
Inspired by recent discussions about convict labour, this thesis challenges linear narratives of penal modernity, arguing for a broader understanding of punishment as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. It highlights the inherent contradictions and conflicts embedded within punitive reform and situates the prison workhouse of Vienna in the broader punitive landscape of the Habsburg monarchy. Methodologically, the thesis relies on the micro-spatial approach, integrating microhistory and spatial history to examine the connections between punitive practices and labour coercion across different sites. Based on archival material and printed sources, the thesis first traces how the prison workhouse was embedded into early modern discourses on poverty and (proto-)criminality and investigates the role of the institution in relation to other forms of punishment and poor relief. Focusing on the period from 1760 to 1783, the dynamics of coercion, punishment and labour in the prison workhouse itself are investigated from a microhistorical perspective. The focus of this analysis lies on convicts’ trajectories, the spatial order and segregation within the institution, labour organisation and modes of coercion, and the constant tension between the profitable deployment of convict labour on one hand, and strategies of prisoners’ confinement and immobilisation on the other. The thesis argues that the prison workhouse was not defined by a single dominating “logic” and was instead shaped by competing functions and goals that could conflict or complement each other and were instrumentalised by different actors for varying objectives.