Modernizing Europe’s Imperial Monarchies. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in the Nineteenth Century
Über das Buch
Up until recently, Europe’s three imperial monarchies – the German, Austrian, and Russian Empires – were seen as moribund political entities, unable to accommodate the forces of political, social, economic, and cultural modernization, and as a result collapsed collectively during or shortly after the First World War. More recently, scholars have underlined the viability of these polities, including as frameworks for democratic experiments and fixed points for (supra)national identification, notwithstanding the suppression of minorities and colonial undertakings of these empires.
This book takes a different approach: it demonstrates that these three imperial monarchies were capable of and willing to initiate and steer the modernization of their institutions and polities. Rather than understanding modernization as a linear and teleological process, this contributed volume draws instead on Samuel Eisenstadt’s notion of ‘multiple modernities’ to demonstrate how these empires sought to modernize on their own terms.
By drawing on this concept, it becomes possible to challenge notions of inevitable decline and instead demonstrate how these imperial monarchies sought to forge modernization on their own terms in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Modernizing Europe’s Imperial Monarchies:
Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia in the Nineteenth Century
Heidi Hein-Kircher, Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh (Pages 1-24)
Prussia’s Road to ‘Iron and Blood’: Wilhelm I and the Nationalization of the Hohenzollern Monarchy
Jan Markert (Pages 27-52)
Sacrifice and Sovereignty: Reform and the Meaning of Monarchy in the Late German Confederation
Michael Weaver (Pages 53-77)
Between Reform and Reaction: The Great Reforms, Siberian Regionalism, and the Limits of Modernization in Russia
Anthony W. Johnson (Pages 79-98)
Modernizing Germany’s Most Unmodern Monarch: Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1818–1901) and the Art of Dynastic Survival
David Korsuize (Pages 99-122)
State Transformation as Dialogue Between Center and Periphery: Non-State Actors and Everyday Administration in Lower Austria, 1790–1848
Stephan Sander-Faes (Pages 125-153)
The Struggle for the Public Good: Local Government, Civic Commitment, and Municipal Modernization in Late Imperial Russia
Kirsten Bönker (Pages 155-177)
The Military Dimension of Modernizing the Habsburg Monarchy in the 1850s
Frank Rochow (Pages 179-203)
The Formation of Modern Policy-Making: A Case Study on the Chaussee Policies in Prussia, c. 1786–1850s
Felix Gräfenberg (Pages 205-228)
The Modernity of the Unmodern? The German Emperor in the Constitution of the Kaiserreich
Frans Willem Lantink (Pages 229-253)
Between Modernity and Persistence—The Austrian Practices of Ennoblement as a Symbol of the Administrative and Societal Transformation in the Late Habsburg Monarchy
Marion Dotter (Pages 257-280)
Continuity and Modernity? The Cult of Franz Joseph in the Bohemian Crownlands
Marco Jaimes (Pages 281-302)
Modern, Constitutional, and Multinational: Images of the Habsburg Monarchy in Austrian Schools, 1867–1914
Scott O. Moore (Pages 303-323)
The Emperor’s Hungarian Gambit: How Franz Joseph Transformed from Tyrant to King
Tamás Székely (Pages 325-335)
Modernizing the Unmodern State: Concluding Thoughts
Jana Osterkamp (Pages 339-354)
