Maybe seeing his family becoming the occasional object of gentle mockery was a kindness, because when people had taken the time to think about the Habsburg Empire seriously, their thoughts had been liable to be hostile. A decent-seeming fellow, in his long and remarkable career he had opposed both communists and fascists and ended up serving as a Member of European Parliament. Its lessons remain no less important today.The real last of his line, the Archduke Otto von Habsburg, died not long thereafter in 2011, at the age of 98. The empire s creative solutions to governing its many lands and peoples as well as the intractable problems it could not solve left an enduring imprint on its successor states in Central Europe. Nationalists developed distinctive ideas about cultural difference in the context of imperial institutions, yet all of them claimed the Habsburg state as their empire. A rising standard of living throughout the empire deepened the legitimacy of Habsburg rule, as citizens learned to use the empire s administrative machinery to their local advantage. By supporting new schools, law courts, and railroads, along with scientific and artistic advances, the Habsburg monarchs sought to anchor their authority in the cultures and economies of Central Europe. Rejecting fragmented histories of nations in the making, this bold revision surveys the shared institutions that bridged difference and distance to bring stability and meaning to the far-flung empire.

Judson examines their motives and explains just how wrong these rearguard critics were. In the decades before and after its dissolution, some observers belittled the Habsburg Empire as a dysfunctional patchwork of hostile ethnic groups and an anachronistic imperial relic. Across divides of language, religion, region, and history, ordinary women and men felt a common attachment to their empire, while bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, and academics devised inventive solutions to the challenges of governing Europe s second largest state. In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans. Judson € 39.99 This item is currently not in stock at our suppliers. The Habsburg Empire: A New History Pieter M.

Pieter m judson the habsburg empire