Book review of William D. Godsey's The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State, 1650–1820 (original) (raw)
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Commentary: Making and Remaking the Habsburg Monarchy
Austrian History Yearbook, 2009
Thereis something in a historian that loves wreckage. I am confident that scientists will one day identify a gene on our chromosomes that predisposes us to destruction. As a young graduate student, I listened in rapt attention as Lawrence Stone mesmerized our seminar describing the one opportunity he had in wartime to “sack a house.” Most of us, however, sublimate these illicit desires, and the urge to destroy only becomes evident in our scholarship. Following Gibbon and Huizinga, we relish the study of decay and decline. Humor aside, R. J. W. Evans was well aware of this instinct as he began The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy with a simple but profound observation, “Many historians, in a dozen languages, have sought to explain why the Habsburg Monarchy declined and fell; none has ever seriously investigated the causes of its rise.”
Opera historica 19, no. 2, 151-90, 2018
This essay examines the consequences of the wars of Leopold I. Whereas the diffusion of the “fiscal-military state” thesis transformed our understanding of central institutions over the past three decades, most studies focusing on early modern state development employ top-down perspectives. By contrast, I am interested in the interlinkages of war and taxation on the regional and local levels in one of the monarchy’s core lands, Bohemia, and how they relate to the ongoing processes of centralisation. Based on the premise that individual actions and structural developments entail differing consequences for central institutions and the geographically more remote areas, this essay argues that state integration in the centre was accompanied by decreasing of cohesion on and control over the lower administrative levels. The Eggenberg possessions around Krumau serve as the basis for an in-depth case study, out of which emerges that the establishment of the Habsburgs’ fiscal-financial-military regime led to added, not reduced institutional complexity due to the composite nature of traditional patrimonial domination, or Herrschaft.