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Narrated by Michael Page
Pieter M. JudsonUnabridged — 18 hours, 9 minutes
Narrated by Michael Page
Pieter M. JudsonUnabridged — 18 hours, 9 minutes
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indispensable to any serious library.
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.
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.
"[A] subtly argued work of deep scholarship . . . A nuanced scholarly reappraisal of a significant European empire." ---Kirkus
"[A] subtly argued work of deep scholarship . . . A nuanced scholarly reappraisal of a significant European empire." —Kirkus
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.
| BN ID: | 2940170442850 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 01/25/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
