Scenes of deep national division, competition, and conflict dominate standard historical narratives about the Austro-Hungarian monarchy during the late nineteenth century and most of its successor states in the 1920s and 1930s. Nationalist political movements flourished in this multicultural environment as capitalist agricultural and industrial development encouraged popular social ambitions and resentments over inequalities, while the advance of modern civil society and constitutional government provided public space for political movements. After the 1860s, political parties committed to nationalist interests increasingly dominated middle-class politics, and by 1900 national loyalties created growing fissures even in the ostensibly international Social Democratic movement. Some of the most intense nationalist social and political competition developed in the Crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia between Czech and German national interests. The Bohemian capital, Prague, became the stage for repeated mass nationalist demonstrations and rioting in the 1890s and after 1900 (see Figure 1).

Rabinbach has made a valuable contribution to the study of the Jewish migration within the Habsburg monarchy, the most noteworthy phenomenon of which was the wholesale mass movement of Galician Jews to Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century. The author, relying mainly on contemporary statistical records for source material, ably documents the increase in Jewish inhabitants in Vienna from one to ten percent of the total population during this period.

An Enthusiastic Group of Romanians gathered in Sibiu at the 1905 annualassembly of Astra, the largest Romanian cultural association in Transylvania, to celebrate their nation and their future. Moved by the gathering and the festivities, the editor of the association's paper, Transilvania, expressed a hope he and thousands of his compatriots shared: “Never before has this people been in a more favorable position as a superiorethnic element, as an important factor of civilization, and as a gifted nation with vitality, character, and great talents that guarantee it a bright future and a distinguished place among the peoples of eastern Europe.”1 Like many prominent Romanians of his time, the editor firmlybelieved that his nation would enjoy equal status with other European national groups in the near future. Equal standing had been a central goal of theRomanian intellectuals and clergy who founded the Transylvanian Associationfor Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People, or Astra, in 1861. Since the eighteenth century, Romanian elites in Transylvania had worked to obtain recognition for their national community so that they couldparticipate fully in the political life of the region. Two centuries later Astra members still hoped they were on the verge of forming a Romanian nation that could achieve the right to control its own destiny.

The destruction of the Habsburg monarchy forced the Austrian Germans to make a wholly unforeseen and, with few exceptions, a heretofore unthinkable decision about their destiny. The rump Austria of 1919 was too weak to command the allegiance of all its citizens. Many Austrians, despairing of mastering the economic and political problems in Vienna, searched for an easier solution: the realization of the forbidden but still anticipated unification with their conationals in the German Republic. For it seemed in retrospect that only their Habsburg loyalties had separated them from the main channel of the Germanic stream. Often Austrian civic virtues seemed to them to have been bought at some rummage sale of political ideas—the symbols of imperial order, the loyalties of political Catholicism, a collection of Francis Joseph's virtues—hardly the raw material from which to build patriotism in postwar Austria.

Austrian historians owe Richard Rudolph, Nachum Gross, and David Good a great intellectual debt for their repeated attempts to apply quantitative methods to the study of intricate economic developments in the last century of the Habsburg monarchy. In his present paper, Rudolph gives us a résumé of the results thus far attained by the trio of scholars and broadens the scope of his own research somewhat by extending the period of investigation to include what Franklin Mendels has called the phase of “proto-industrialization.”

The War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), one of the major international conflicts of the eighteenth century, sought to resolve the greatest diplomatic issue of the day: the partition of the Spanish empire. This essay focuses on the Austrian emperor Leopold I's diplomatic efforts in the courts of the Maritime Powers to obtain the Spanish inheritance during the first years of that conflict. The early years of the war (between 1701 and 1705) were a formative period in the development of Habsburg foreign policy. The problems that plagued the Maritime Powers after Leopold's death in 1705, such as the disputes over the deployment of troops, the differences of opinion over precisely how the Spanish empire should be divided and the policy to be followed in dealing with the Hungarian rebels and the elector of Bavaria, and the questions that arose over the alliances with Portugal and Savoy were all either existing or anticipated during the latter years of his reign.

Not many works have been published during the past decade that deal with Austrian history or with that of the states which once formed an integral part of the Habsburg empire.

To Liberate Me from the detestable yoke of foreignness,… I implore you to change my surname,” Umberto Terchig begged Italian authorities in Venezia Giulia, Italy's new northeastern border territory incorporated in the wake of the Habsburg collapse. In Venezia Giulia, comprised of several of the provinces of the former Austrian Adriatic littoral, some 1,000 individuals in the population of approximately 350,000 requested surname changes over the period from the end of World War I in 1918 to the Fascist takeover in 1922. Most petitioners hailed from Trieste and the city's immediate surroundings. Their level of education and relative sophistication varied. Nonetheless, these individuals shared a particular “nationality consciousness” that led them to choose name change as a means to establish national belonging in Italy. Former Habsburg subjects, like Umberto Terchig, living throughout the successor states sought to rearticulate ethnic and national identities to reflect personal affinities and ambitions consistent with institutional arrangements and associations in emerging state frameworks.

For hungarian society, as for most of East-Central Europe, the socalled Jewish question has been, and continues to be, an obsessive, seemingly insoluble dilemma that cries out for definition, discussion, commentary, and analysis. The notion persists, in both professional and general opinion, that if only a true historical understanding of the question were possible, a solution would also be within reach. The assumption is almost axiomatic that the Jewish question, with its attendant passions, prejudices, and contradictions, must be the expression of some prior set of causes that holds the key to its deciphering.

IN DECEMBER 1883, Habsburg political and military leaders met in crisis session to discuss the situation in Serbia. Serious rioting threatened to. topple the friendly government of Prince Milan Obrenović, which two and a half years earlier had concluded a secret agreement in Vienna that made the country a dependency of the Habsburg Monarchy. The Serbian war ministry had rushed troops from the large Belgrade garrison to the troubled areas and had placed the two battalions that remained in the capital on a war footing in an attempt to ensure continued calm. Alarmed by these drastic measures, an Austro-Hungarian crown council, although not obligated to do so under existing treaties with Belgrade, authorized the commitment of Habsburg military forces should unrest escalate to revolution in Serbia.

I am often asked, by students, colleagues, and friends, why and how I came to devote my professional life to the study of Central and Southeastern European history and current events and, in the process, how I came to spend thirty years living in the area. I have two stock answers, both of them true.