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.

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.

Viewed from the perspective of thousands of years, political history reveals a pattern of continuous alternation between decay and re-formation. Thus, after the fall of the Roman empire, the first political entity that emerged in the West was the Carolingian empire, which, through the coronation of the emperor in 800, assumed the form of a revived western Roman empire. Although it soon became limited to the part of the old empire inhabited by the “German nation,” it continued to exist, at least in outward form, under the name of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806. As early as 1804, though, Francis II had adopted the title of emperor of Austria for his position as ruler of the “hereditary Austrian lands.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

In 1848–49 Austria could have introduced reforms which conceivably might have insured her continued existence for many generations and possibly might have finally made a true state out of the Habsburg domains. … [In] the course of the two [subsequent] generations until 1918 there never appeared an equally promising opportunity for the empire to carry out reform without risking its disintegration. This is not to say that Austria should not have taken this risk, which was smaller at the time of the compromise in 1867 than it was in 1905 and smaller in 1905 at the height of the Hungarian crisis than it was in 1917, when Engels' ominous prediction finally came true that with the victory of the Russian Revolution Austria would disintegrate.

The expositions staged by Hungarian liberals in the nineteenth century—the modest Pest industrial fairs of the 1840s; the agricultural hibitions of the counterrevolutionary 1850s; the Pest agricultural exhibition in 1865; the three provincial industrial exhibitions of the 1870s in Kecskemét, Szeged, and Székesfehérvár; the successful national exhibition in Budapest in 1885; and the lavish Millennium Exhibition of 1896—conformed to the wider European and American pattern of expositions. Between 1876 and 1916 some one hundred million Americans attended expositions; over 20 percent of the U.S. population attended Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876. Over forty-eight million people passed through the turnstiles of the Paris Exposition of 1900. The three million who attended the 1896 Hungarian Millennium Exhibition were well aware that they were participating in a distinct rite of industrial civilization. Although the Hungarian numbers were far smaller, it is wrong to assume that the Hungarian nationl fairs were copycat undertakings.