Geography featured prominently in the economic history of industrialization. Myriad studies examined both the spread of modern industry across and its location determinants within countries. Historians often considered Austria-Hungary a ‘half-periphery’: the Czech lands and the Austrian provinces belonging to Europe’s industrial core while the rest of the empire achieved little convergence before 1914. We use detailed statistics from occupational and business censuses in the early 1900s to construct accurate measures for both the level of industrialization and its spatial concentration. By differentiating employment in craft and factory industry, we show that modern manufacturing remained a very small sector of the Habsburg economy. We map industry location in 50 regions across 13 branches of manufacturing. Spatial concentration differed dramatically between industries. We find strong concentration and regional specialization in factory industry. Industrial employment diffused across the empire due to the survival of large craft industries, not the industrial revolution. In spatially concentrated industries, location determinants reflected local endowments and path dependency but not market access.