The Habsburg Empire: A New History

Pieter Judson gives us something we have desperately needed: a new history of the Habsburg Empire. At least in the English-speaking world, general knowledge of the Habsburg Empire has been reliant on older studies, studies which have adhered to a few narrative tropes of Habsburg despotism, economic backwardness, national renaissance, and the idea that the monarchy was a prison of the peoples from which the peoples were able to eventually break free. One of the few histories of the Habsburg Empire that is still in print is A. J. P. Taylor’s 1948 volume which viewed the monarchy as a medieval holdover, a monstrosity unfit to survive in the modern era.1 C. A. Macartney began his magnum opus, published in the late 1960s, with the death of Joseph II. At that point, the Habsburg Empire entered a long, steady decline that culminated in the suicide committed in the First World War.2 Other volumes followed, offering a deeper experience for tourists, for people who want to learn a little more about the names that grace the statutes from Vienna to Trieste. But they also have convinced generations of students and scholars that the Habsburg Empire was always behind the times and generally not worth studying. This has been the case even as Europe underwent a massive integration project which now has brought almost all the former territories of the empire under one European roof. For years, then, the general histories of the monarchy have been dominated by these old stories, written either directly after the fall of the monarchy or, more likely, during the Cold War. The Iron Curtain cut off the former lands of the Habsburg Empire from each other, but the cold war histories lumped the Habsburg Empire into the prehistory of the East and therefore used the monarchy to explain how the East became backward and undemocratic. We know now that the discourses which split Europe between a progressive west and a backward east have themselves a long history, one that stretches into the mind of the Enlightenment.3 But there has been no general history of the monarchy that faces up to the old narratives of doom and gloom, long decline, or as Gary Cohen pithily labelled it, ‘Absolutism and Anarchy’.4 Judson has recently laid down the editorship of the Austrian History Yearbook after ten years at the helm. The result of his service to the academic community is a volume that deftly synthesizes new work and research on the monarchy and is able then to offer a fundamentally new and revised interpretation of Habsburg history. Judson’s book aims to disrupt and destroy those narratives of absolutism and anarchy that have characterized the Habsburg Empire for so long, while also offering a work of historical reorientation that actually integrates this great land empire more into a wider history of Europe. This book is therefore not a textbook and not a general history — though it can be read that way. Judson’s ‘new history’ defies genres as it deftly moves between narrative and analytical sections