Nineteenth-century Tyrol was marked by intense intraregional and transregional mobility, driven by changing economic and productive contexts, precarious labour relations and means of subsistence, fragile “safety nets” for those in the most unstable circumstances, and the consequent impoverishment of broad swaths of the population. Among the many mobile persons were individuals particularly exposed to police surveillance and targeted by specific laws and ordinances: lacking a fixed abode or stable means of support, shut out of the productive system, unemployed or engaged in precarious and occasional work, they were identified by the Tyrolean authorities as “vagrants,” Dörcher, or Arbeitsscheue (work-shy). While vagrancy, for centuries, had been subject to control, repressive, and “containment” measures, the closing decades of the nineteenth century marked a shift, with several countries across Europe and beyond deploying increasingly tentacular repressive measures designed to keep the phenomenon in check (forced transportations, border rejections, extraditions, confinement in workhouses), while reframing the specialised, political, and public discourse surrounding it.

The repression of vagrancy is the legal context within which it is proper to also situate the contemporary treatment of the so-called nomadic gypsies. Provisions explicitly targeting the expulsion of “gypsies” were certainly not new, either in Austria or in early modern Europe; yet it was from the 1880s onward that, across Europe and almost in synchrony, a specific concern emerged with the so-called gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage), one that increasingly took on the contours of a genuine political and diplomatic problem on an international scale. This research project therefore sets out to investigate this phenomenon by setting Tyrol in its transregional, Austrian, and more broadly European context and exploring it in its main aspects—normative and legal, communicative and lexical, diplomatic and institutional, social and micro-historical.