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The history of the Habsburg Monarchy and Austria in the early modern period continues to capture the interest of many scholars. This collection of essays by twenty leading authorities from the United States, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands focuses on the interplay between the Habsburg government and a multiplicity of social aspects. As a whole, State and Society in Early Modern Austria reexamines and sometimes debunks old views about the Habsburg Monarchy and provides insight into the state of current historical thinking on the early modern state. Moreover, this broad focus will help the reader understand the complex cultural heritage of the turbulent nationalities of East Central Europe. Specific essays examine the ruling elite's attempts to establish cultural hegemony through its control over religious minorities, government patronage, and both literary and visual media. Other essays examine the interplay between economic and social policy; the tension between free enterprise and the Habsburg regime's attempts to meet the immediate needs of the masses of indigent; and the monarchy's interaction with German states and the Balkans. The volume is divided into five sections: Religion and the Counter-Reformation, Government and Culture during the Baroque, Government and Economy, Government and the People during the Aufklarung, and Foreign Policy.
The Habsburg Monarchy ruled over approximately one-third of Europe for almost 150 years. Previous books on the Habsburg Empire emphasize its slow decline in the face of the growth of neighboring nation-states. John Deak, instead, argues that the state was not in eternal decline, but actively sought not only to adapt, but also to modernize and build. Deak has spent years mastering the structure and practices of the Austrian public administration and has immersed himself in the minutiae of its codes, reforms, political maneuverings, and culture. He demonstrates how an early modern empire made up of disparate lands connected solely by the feudal ties of a ruling family was transformed into a relatively unitary, modern, semi-centralized bureaucratic continental empire. This process was only derailed by the state of emergency that accompanied the First World War. Consequently, Deak provides the reader with a new appreciation for the evolving architecture of one of Europe's Great Powers in the long nineteenth century.
The Habsburg Monarchy has received much historiographical attention since 1945. Yet the military aspects of Austria’s emergence as a European great power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have remained obscure. This book shows that force of arms and the instruments of the early modern state were just as important as its marriage policy in creating and holding together the Habsburg Monarchy. Drawing on an impressive up-to-date bibliography as well as on original archival research, this survey is the first to put Vienna’s military back at the centre stage of early modern Austrian history.
A major new textbook examining the nature of the state and the monarchy in early modern France.
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Maps -- List of Tables -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Glossary -- Introduction: The belated great power -- Modest Origins - the Habsburg Monarchy During the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century -- 1. The domestic foundations -- The question of terminology -- The territorial and administrative configuration of the Habsburg Monarchy -- Limited absolutism: the provincial Estates -- Economy -- Finances -- 2. The primacy of power politics -- The instruments of foreign policy -- From domestic to foreign policy: the Habsburgs and the Reich after 1648 -- Geopolitical challenges and responses -- 3. Home defence -- Feudal levy and peasant militia in the Austro-Bohemian lands -- Hungary -- The Military Border (Militärgrenze) -- The contribution of the Reich -- 4. The standing army -- Origins and growth -- The High Command -- The officer corps -- Military administration -- Artillery -- Technical branches -- The guards -- Weaponry -- Military industries -- Uniforms -- Quarters and provisions -- Soldiers' families and the baggage train -- Military justice -- Religion -- Medical service and disabled soldiers -- Tactics, strategy and the primacy of logistics -- Austria's 'age of heroes' 1683-1733 -- 5. The Turkish War 1683-1699 -- The Kuruc rebellion -- The siege of Vienna -- The Habsburg counter-offensive -- 6. The Nine Years War 1689-1697 -- The 'reunions' -- The French invasion of Germany -- From stalemate to peace -- 7. The War of the Spanish Succession 1701-1714 -- The Spanish inheritance -- The Italian peninsula -- Germany -- The Spanish Netherlands -- Spain -- The peace treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden 1713-1714 -- The Rákóczy rebellion 1703-1711 -- 8. Renewed expansion -- The Turkish War of 1716-1718 -- Trade expansion.
This book provides a radical new interpretation of the aims of the lesser German princes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the example of the duchy of Württemberg. Arguing that the princes' political ambitions were fundamental in shaping the internal development of their territories, the author sheds new light on the political importance of the notorious German 'soldier trade' and its role in international diplomacy. The wider social and political impact of these policies is also investigated in a comparative framework, while traditional interpretations of the dramatic struggle between duke and estates are challenged in a reassessment of the role of early modern representative institutions in German state development. The relationship of these internal political struggles to the different elements of the Holy Roman Empire is revealed, opening up new perspectives on the role of the German states within the imperial structure and revealing the empire as a flawed but functioning political system.
"This fine collection on competing political loyalties in the late Habsburg Monarchy is framed by clear research questions.The dynasty faced formidable competitors in its own crownlands, cities and villages. [This volume] presents this competition in vibrant and varied case studies. From it readers will take a sampling of some of the best recent scholarship on the Habsburg Monarchy." - Slavonic and East European Review "Any future discussion on the last years of the Habsburg Monarchy's political history should build on this collection's significant achievements whether the point of departure is the monarchy's ultimate failure or a decidedly a-teleological perspective...It is not a book that only critiques the old; but it also points to the possibility of something new, and arguably more exciting." - H-Net Reviews "[The] rich case studies and vivid vignettes...[offer] the first coherent attempt in examining the efforts to generate dynastic-oriented patriotism and the responses to these efforts.[T]his book contains many seeds for a more nuanced and sophisticated discussion of the late monarchy. It is not a book that only critiques the old; but it also points to the possibility of something new, and arguably more exciting." - Habsburg "There is a welcome intellectual coherence and high scholarship to this latest volume in Berghahn's series on Austrian and Habsburg Studies." - German History The overwhelming majority of historical work on the late Habsburg Monarchy has focused primarily on national movements and ethnic conflicts, with the result that too little attention has been devoted to the state and ruling dynasty. This volume is the first of its kind to concentrate on attempts by the imperial government to generate a dynastic-oriented state patriotism in the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. It examines those forces in state and society which tended toward the promotion of state unity and loyalty towards the ruling house. These essays, all original contributions and written by an international group of historians, provide a critical examination of the phenomenon of "dynastic patriotism" and offer a richly nuanced treatment of the multinational empire in its final phase.
The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000 soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts. Raising forces of such magnitude constituted a central task of Habsburg government, one that ultimately required the cooperation of society and its elites. The monarchy's composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Lower Austrian Estates -- a leading representative body and privileged corps -- formed a vital, if changing, element underlying Habsburg international success and resilience. With its capital at Vienna, the archduchy below the river Enns (the historic designation of Lower Austria) was geographically, politically, and financially a key Habsburg possession. Fiscal-military exigency induced the Estates to take part in new and evolving arrangements of power that served the purposes of government; in turn the Estates were able in previously little-understood ways and within narrowing boundaries to preserve vital interests in a changing world. The Estates survived because they were necessary, not only thanks to their increasing financial potency, but also because they offered a politically viable way of exacting ever-larger quantities of money, men, and other resources from local society. These circumstances would persist as ruling became more regularized, formalized, and homogenized, and as the very understanding of the Estates as a social and political phenomenon was evolving.
Why was early modern Europe the starting point of the economic expansion which led to the Industrial Revolution? What was the state’s role in this momentous transformation? A History of States and Economic Policies in Early Modern Europe takes a comparative approach to answer these questions, demonstrating that wars, public finance and state intervention in the economy were the key elements underlying European economic dynamics of the era. Structured in two parts, the book begins by examining the central issues of the state–economy relationship, including military revolution, the fiscal state and public finance, mercantilism, the formation of commercial empires and the economic war between Britain and France in the 1700s. The second part presents a detailed comparison between the different economic policies of the most important European states, looking at their unique demographic, economic, military and institutional contexts. Taken as a whole, this work provides a valuable analysis of early modern economic history and a picture of Europe’s global position on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This book will be useful to students and researchers of economic history, early modern history and European history.
The Austrian Empire was not a colonial power in the sense that fellow actors like 19th-century England and France were. It nevertheless oversaw a multinational federation where the capital of Vienna was unmistakably linked with its eastern periphery in a quasi-colonial arrangement that inevitably shaped the cultural and intellectual life of the Habsburg Empire. This was particularly evident in the era’s colonial utopian writing, and Tropics of Vienna blends literary criticism, cultural theory, and historical analysis to illuminate this curious genre. By analyzing the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, and other representative Austrian writers, it reveals a shared longing for alternative social and spatial configurations beyond the concept of the “nation-state” prevalent at the time.