Up until recently, Europes 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 Eisenstadts 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.
1: Modernizing Europes Imperial Monarchies: Germany, Austria-Hungary,
and Russia in the Nineteenth Century .- Part I Reorientation and
Restructuring of Imperial Monarchies.- 2: Prussias road to Iron and blood:
Wilhelm I and the nationalisation of the Hohenzollern monarchy.- 3: Sacrifice
and sovereignty: reform and the meaning of monarchy in the late German
confederation.- 4: Between Reform and Reaction: The Great Reforms, Siberian
Regionalism, and the Limits of Modernisation in Russia.- 5: Modernising
Germanys most unmodern monarch: Grand Duke Carl Alexander of
Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1818-1901) and the art of dynastic survival.- Part II
Politicizing Imperial Monarchies, Fostering the State.- 6: State
Transformation as Dialogue between Centre and Periphery: Non-State Actors and
Everyday Administration in Lower Austria, 17901848 .- 7: The Struggle for
the Public Good: Local Government, Civic Commitment, and Municipal
Modernisation in Late Imperial Russia.- 8: The military dimension of
modernising the Habsburg Monarchy in the 1850s.- 9: The Formation of Modern
Policy-Making: A Case Study on the Chaussee Policies in Prussia, c.
1786-1850s.- 10: The Modernity of the Unmodern? The German Emperor in the
Constitution of the Kaiserreich.- Part III Creating and Communicating the
Imperial Monarchys Image.- 11: Between Modernity and Persistence the
Austrian Practices of Enoblement as a Symbol of the Administrative and
Societal Transformation in the Late Habsburg Monarchy.- 12: Continuity and
Modernity? The Cult of Franz Joseph in the Bohemian Crownlands.- 13: Modern,
constitutional, and multinational: images of the Habsburg monarchy in
Austrian schools, 1867-1914.- 14: The Emperors Hungarian Gambit: How Franz
Joseph Transformed from Tyrant to King.- Part IV Conclusion.- 15: Modernizing
the Unmodern State: Concluding Thoughts.
Heidi Hein-Kircher is Director of the Martin Opitz Library (Herne) and Professor for German History and Culture in Eastern Europe at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh is Assistant Professor of Political History at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
