Historians and the State in the Habsburg Lands

The historiography of the State in Habsburg Central Europe is a difficult and elusive subject. Those who have written about it have belonged to diverse and often divergent national traditions, while the composite polity ruled over by the Habsburgs remained very hard to handle conceptually. This paper introduces the three main territorial elements within that historiography, Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, which correspond to the three main constitutional elements within the Monarchy. At the same time it seeks to identify common themes by examining in turn the three main stages of reflection on the evolution and contemporary structure of the Monarchy : a dynastic era before the 1860s, a liberal age, and the neo-conservative decades after 1918. At all points historians' interpretations of earlier periods of Statebuilding in the area were closely interwoven rather with current political concerns than with philosophical or theoretical issues.Evans Robert J. W. Historians and the State in the Habsburg Lands. In: Visions sur le développement des États européens. Théories et historiographies de l'État moderne. Actes du colloque de Rome (18-31 mars 1990) Rome : École Française de Rome, 1993. pp. 203-218. (Publications de l'École française de Rome, 171