In the landscape of European historiography, the Habsburg monarchy remains in the shadows cast by France and Prussia. From the time of the eighteenth-century Cameralists, Austria has been faulted for advancing only fitfully along the high road to centralization and modernity. To quote a respected work on military history, “Austria was a structurally immature, almost backward state where corporate privilege and provincial particularism were important well into the eighteenth century, and seriously restricted the sovereign's freedom of action” (Michael Hochedlinger, Austria's Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1683–1797 [London, 2003], 7).

Yet evidence has been accumulating that “particularism” worked better than might be expected, notably in the financial sphere. P. G. M. Dickson (Finance and Government under Maria Theresa, 1740–1780, 2 vols. [New York, 1987]) demonstrated that the reforms of Maria Theresa's reign enhanced rather than diminished the role of the Estates in state finance. A volume edited by Peter Rauscher, Kriegsführung und Staatsfinanzen. Die Habsburger Monarchie und das Heilige Römische Reich vom Dreiussigjährigen Krieg bis zum Ende des habsburgischen Kaisertums (Münster, 2010), highlights the management of taxation and state debt by the Austrian Estates, with essays on Bohemia, Moravia, and Steiermark. What has been lacking is a long-term study of how provincial institutions worked, and how they fitted in to the larger picture. William Godsey's Sinews of Power provides a thorough and persuasive response to this need.

In the annual “Contribution” voted by the Estates, Lower Austria's quota was the highest among six Austrian provinces but significantly lower than the quotas for Bohemia and Silesia. The prelates, first among the four curia, were led by the abbots of flourishing Counter Reformation monasteries. The magnates of the second estate (Herrenstand) grew in number during this period, while the knights (Ritterstand) declined. Vienna and other towns making up the fourth curia rarely accounted for more than 10 percent of the sums voted. A hearth tax on nonexempt buildings made up more than half of the Contribution; there were also taxes on dominical fees of bound peasants and bound cotters. All taxes voted by the Estates were collected by Estates officials, headed by an Oberinnehmer. An elected Landmarschall presided over the annual Landtag, and business between meetings was handled by a six-member Vetretenkollegium.

Sinews of Habsburg Power follows the involvement of the Lower Austria's Estates in military affairs; briefly put, it describes a development that “transformed the states from a (potential) military force themselves into an essentially civilian support structure for a standing army” (152). Rather more attention is given to the Estates as a provider of credit for the monarchy. European states fought their wars on borrowed money; taxes were collected slowly and served more and more as sureties for loans that could be raised quickly—provided that the issuing body maintained its creditworthiness. This was where provincial Estates, in the Austrian lands and elsewhere on the Continent, played their most vital and least known role. With this important book, Lower Austria becomes a model for understanding why the Estates continued to have an essential role in the Austrian system, notwithstanding the pious hopes of Enlightened bureaucrats.

As of 1572, the Estates of Lower Austria carried a debt of nearly 6,000,000 gulden—roughly four times what István Kenderes has estimated for total state income in 1569. The monarchy's demands, and Lower Austria's debt, would only grow. Interest on the bonds, ranging from 3 percent to 6 percent, was paid by the Obereinnehemer, from revenues that he controlled. During the Thirty Years’ War, Ferdinand II authorized the Estates to levy excise taxes on drinks to support new issues. In 1689, the Landtag agreed to a large loan to Leopold I, in return of his confirmation of the excises for a further twenty-five years. This low-interest, long-term credit allowed the government to roll over high-interest, short-term loans. In 1709, for example, five Austrian and three Bohemian provinces agreed to raise nine million gulden in loans to amortize the government's short-term debt. By 1719 Lower Austria was paying three million a year for debt service, equivalent to a far larger capital debt. There were direct loans to the crown, but private creditors held most of Lower Austria's debt. Godsey emphasizes the intermediary function of the Estates; it was their status as a privileged corporate body that sustained the trust of investors. Prominent among them were the noble lords, sometimes owing to forced purchases in time of crisis but, more and more, as wise stewards of their wealth. Lower Austria's elite thus served the monarchy, even while diversifying their portfolios.

By Maria Theresa's reign, most of the annual Contribution was being used to service earlier loans raised by the Estates. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf von Haugwitz forced the provinces to accept a doubling of their annual obligation, thus freeing up revenue for the government. Yet new loans were no less needed than before. In 1756, when Maria Theresa was desperate for money to “save the monarchy,” she turned to Lower Austria for a loan of two million gulden. Joseph II, eager to combat the pretentions of the estate, hoped to begin by combining all of them into one body; his advisers persuaded him this was not possible because each province managed its own share of the state debt. Still, by about 1800, with the provinces heavily indebted, the government was developing other means of satisfying its credit needs.

The “fiscal-military state” of the title refers to a current discussion of state development in which it is commonly presumed that administrative centralization was the indispensable precondition for effective government. Godsey notes in passing a long-term comparison that might call this assumption into doubt: while the seemingly ramshackle Habsburg monarchy continued paying its creditors, the French monarchy eventually collapsed under the weight of debt. If anyone were to challenge more directly the assumption that centralization was the only path to modernity, that brave soul might well take William Godsey's book as a starting point.