The Habsburg Empire: A New History

by Pieter M. Judson

Overview

A EuropeNow Editor’s Pick
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

“Pieter M. Judson’s book informs and stimulates. If his account of Habsburg achievements, especially in the 18th century, is rather starry-eyed, it is a welcome corrective to the black legend usually presented. Lucid, elegant, full of surprising and illuminating details, it can be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in modern European history.”
—Tim Blanning, Wall Street Journal

“This is an engaging reappraisal of the empire whose legacy, a century after its collapse in 1918, still resonates across the nation-states that replaced it in central Europe. Judson rejects conventional depictions of the Habsburg empire as a hopelessly dysfunctional assemblage of squabbling nationalities and stresses its achievements in law, administration, science and the arts.”
—Tony Barber, Financial Times

“Spectacularly revisionist… Judson argues that…the empire was a force for progress and modernity… This is a bold and refreshing book… Judson does much to destroy the picture of an ossified regime and state.”
—A. W. Purdue, Times Higher Education

“Judson’s reflections on nations, states and institutions are of broader interest, not least in the current debate on the future of the European Union after Brexit.”
—Annabelle Chapman, Prospect

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674969322
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/25/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	592
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Pieter M. Judson is Professor of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Note on Names and Places List of Maps and Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1. The Accidental Empire Chapter 2. Servants and Citizens, Empire and Fatherland, 1780–1815 Chapter 3. An Empire of Contradictions, 1815–1848 Chapter 4. Whose Empire? The Revolutions of 1848–1849 Chapter 5. Mid-Century Modern: The Emergence of a Liberal Empire Chapter 6. Culture Wars and Wars for Culture Chapter 7. Everyday Empire, Our Empire, 1880–1914 Chapter 8. War and Radical State-Building, 1914–1925 Epilogue: The New Empires Notes Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

Strongly revisionist and effortlessly wide-ranging, Judson’s book offers a strikingly original interpretation of Austria-Hungary as an empire rather than a collection of hostile national groups. This powerful insight should change how we think about European history.

Robert Nemes

Crisply written and nuanced…With invigorating precision, [Judson] analyses how the state was built up by various forces working simultaneously from above and below. His view is not blurred by the unhelpful nostalgia with which so many accounts are suffused.

Literary Review - Adam Zamoyski

Indispensable to any serious library.

Daily Telegraph - Simon Heffer

A masterpiece of historical rethinking by one of the great Habsburg historians of our age. Judson reminds us of how little we have fully grasped the subtleties and complexities of Habsburg history.

Larry Wolff

Judson forever banishes images of the Habsburg Empire as a decrepit and declining anachronism. This is the history we have been waiting for since the empire disappeared from Europe’s map.

Tara Zahra

Judson’s reflections on nations, states and institutions are of broader interest, not least in the current debate on the future of the European Union after Brexit. Refreshingly, his book also challenges lasting presumptions about differences between Europe east and west, backward and developed, ethnic and civic. His narrative may be one of many possible readings of Habsburg history, as he himself says—yet it is one that is both nuanced and compelling.

Prospect - Annabelle Chapman

The Habsburg Empire is Judson’s attempt at a grand, unified history of Austria-Hungary for our times…Habsburg history is not the same after this book.

London Review of Books - Natasha Wheatley

This is an engaging reappraisal of the empire whose legacy, a century after its collapse in 1918, still resonates across the nation-states that replaced it in central Europe. Judson rejects conventional depictions of the Habsburg empire as a hopelessly dysfunctional assemblage of squabbling nationalities and stresses its achievements in law, administration, science and the arts.

Financial Times - Tony Barber

Spectacularly revisionist…Judson argues that…the empire was a force for progress and modernity…This is a bold and refreshing book…Judson does much to destroy the picture of an ossified regime and state.

Times Higher Education - A. W. Purdue

Pieter M. Judson’s book informs and stimulates. If his account of Habsburg achievements, especially in the 18th century, is rather starry-eyed, it is a welcome corrective to the black legend usually presented. Lucid, elegant, full of surprising and illuminating details, it can be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in modern European history.

Wall Street Journal - Tim Blanning

"[A] subtly argued work of deep scholarship . . . A nuanced scholarly reappraisal of a significant European empire." ---Kirkus

From the Publisher

2016-01-27
A fresh look at this sprawling empire that rejects its previous characterization as "backward" and asserts an overall administrative enlightenment the citizenry found engaging. At the heart of this subtly argued work of deep scholarship, Judson (19th and 20th Century History/European Univ. Institute; Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, 2007, etc.) provides a careful examination of the imperial institutions, administrative policies, and cultural practices that reached far and wide into the vast Hapsburg Empire. As he moves chronologically, the author argues that from the "accidental" reign of Maria Theresa in the 17th century onward, the empire that had steadily grown in size with some brilliant dynastic marriages since the 15th century became a "model of common imperial citizenship," which emancipated the peasants and considerably extended education and literacy. Maria Theresa inaugurated a strong centralized authority, extending from Transylvania in the east to Innsbruck in the west, from Prague to Trieste, with a rooted sense that individuals had "common legal rights and obligations anchored in their unmediated relationship to a central state." The subsequent reigns of her sons, Joseph II and Leopold II, and nephew Francis—the last Holy Roman Emperor until its dissolution in 1804, when he became Francis I, Emperor of Austria—consolidated and furthered her reforms. On the one hand, Judson argues, the empire of "enlightened despots" represented a full-fledged rule of law, with a burgeoning bureaucracy; on the other hand, it was anxious about its people's increasingly social and political activism, especially in Hungary. The industriousness and civic-mindedness in the citizenry ("engagement in public life") propelled society when the central authority broke down. Morover, where previous historians have characterized Chancellor Klemens Metternich's rule as a police state, Judson sees an emerging liberalism. The empire's need to navigate concepts of nationhood based on diverse languages did not sink the empire after World War I so much as the corrosive effects of wartime misery, famine, and harsh military treatment. A nuanced scholarly reappraisal of a significant European empire.

Kirkus Reviews