In writing the book, Judson clearly benefitted from his own ground-breaking contribution to the concepts of nationalist activism and indifference to nationalism in the Austrian Monarchy (most notably in his Guardians of the Nation ), as well as from his former position as editor of the Austrian History Yearbook. Finally, he asserts that the resultant “nation states” that succeeded the empire were actually “little empires” that often adapted Habsburg strategies and legal systems, and were hardly a triumph of democracy and national self-determination as their apologists would have us believe (388). Judson directly disputes the argument that linguistic and religious diversity prefigured conflict or division, while endorsing the argument that the First World War was “not the proverbial straw that broke a failing empire's back,” an accelerant to an already “inevitable collapse,” but rather the root cause itself, reminding us that other states also failed to meet the challenges of the war (387). But to my knowledge, no book has made this case for the empire as a whole as eloquently and consistently, and no other text makes so clear the relationship between imperial practices and institutions in creating the conditions in which particular instances of nationalism could arise. In making this argument, Judson reifies the dominant perspective among professional historians of the last decade, as advanced in various monographs on aspects of central and east European history, that nationalism should be seen as situational and less ubiquitous than formerly thought.

The text explores the mutually constitutive ways that imperial policies and nationalist politics shaped and enabled each other, generally giving credit to the empire-as part of its effort to make loyal citizens by empowering them against local elites and alternate power sources, such as the church-for creating the context in which language and culture could become markers for nationalist activists to deploy in battles for power. Pieter Judson's new history of the Habsburg Empire offers a masterful synthesis of the newest and most persuasive scholarship in the field, while advancing its own consistent thesis that attention to the empire itself, its institutions and administrative practices, upends the traditional story of it as an anachronistic “prison of the peoples,” riven by ethnolinguistic division and doomed to fail.

Pieter m judson the habsburg empire