Jana Osterkamp sets out ambitiously to write a history of the federal system in the Habsburg Empire in the nineteenth century, to bridge the gap between the traditional premodern and the disillusioned postmodern time. Her study is based on the classical theory of the state. After an introduction in necessary conceptualizations, such as the concept of federation, Osterkamp starts her comprehensive historical study with the so-called Völkermanifest (People’s Manifesto) which was released by Emperor Karl I on October 16, 1918. The author conceptualizes the publication of this manifest in the last days of the empire within a series of attempts to protect the Habsburg Lands from collapse after a failed war with many casualties. The manifest emphasizes concepts that had been important for the political discourse and the political practice of the empire in its last decades, such as the federation of a state with different nationalities, the reconstruction of Habsburg dualism, the personal autonomy of the Emperor, or the federation of the crownlands.

Osterkamp's book does not always follow a strict chronological order, however her analytical approach mostly does. In her words, telling the story of federal developments of the Habsburg Empire from its end, helps us understand that until the very last days of its existence, federalism was one of the main political guiding principles to establish a unified identity and culture among its plurality. The disintegration of the Habsburg Empire caused a federal paradox. While the German-speaking crownlands, which mostly supported a central state, are now the federal Republic of Austria, the more federalist lands and communities of the Habsburg territories established new states after World War I.

Her next chapter, on plurality of governance during the Vormärz era, presents an overview of territorialization, spaces of empire, and affiliations of its many inhabitants. The section on administrative federalism until 1867 covers a broad chronological range, as initiatives and policies to administratively cover an empire with many nationalities, religiously and confessionally diverse inhabitants, as well as its large variety of languages, already started in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In contrast, the next chapters, on administrative efforts to create a federal state of nationalities, multiethnic federalism, as well as the Galician Petition, focus predominantly on the revolutionary years of 1848–1849. Based on new sources—petitions pro and contra a proclamation of the Galician crownland into a Polish western and a Ukrainian eastern part—Osterkamp promises very detailed insights into practices of everyday life in Galician villages. The author devotes the sixth chapter of her book to the quite short-lived constitutional experiments of 1849 and 1860–1861 and their rapid failures in 1851 and 1865. She explains these experiments as attempts at restructuring the federalism of the historic crownlands.

Following the constitution of 1867, Osterkamp intensively discusses the construction of the Dual Monarchy, as its classification was a big challenge for Austrian constitutional law. Was the Dual Monarchy a loose confederation or a federal state? The author uses the concept of a multilevel federation and, instead of stressing the differences between Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, argues for a multilevel system and emphasizes a federal point of view with regard to the distribution of powers. The chapter titled “Handeln wie Staaten” (“To Act Like States”) deals with the administrative activities of the crownlands in the education sector, in agricultural policy, and in social policies. In fulfilling these administrative tasks, the crownlands introduced a modern administrative state at the regional level at different speeds, according to their different economic outputs. Osterkamp presents the start of a cooperative financial equalization and convincingly demonstrates that the system of financial equalization between federal and state levels in modern-day Austria is based on this cooperation in the late Habsburg Empire.

Osterkamp's study covers about one hundred years of Habsburg administrative history, based on a broad and solid variety of documents, such as various contemporary debates in the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments and in the media, or treaties of constitutional law from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some chapters present hitherto mostly neglected archival collections, for example in the subchapter on the Galician Petition controversy of 1848–1849. In the last chapters, the author rounds out her analysis with considerations of reforming the Habsburg Empire in the last years before and during World War I, and reconstructs the Thronwechselprogramm (the change of throne) of 1914, which was promoted by the followers of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Emperor Karl's deliberations on reform followed in the footsteps of his predecessor and uncle, however it was much too late to propitiate the various nations with their nationalist discourses by means of a new federal system.

In the introduction, Jana Osterkamp argues for the need for an administrative history of the Habsburg Empire as a modern living federation (gelebte Föderation). However, what the attentive reader ultimately misses are gendered aspects of the administrative system. The book's cover shows an impressive lithograph, which portraits the Habsburg federation as a barque with Emperor Franz Joseph as the only man on board and many women surrounding him as allegories of the crownlands (Barke mit der Austria, Kaiser Franz Joseph I. und den Allegorien der Kronländer by August Strixner, 1849). While Osterkamp devotes a subchapter to the iconography of the Habsburg federation, an explanation of why young women in traditional costumes represented the crownlands is missing. The reader is also puzzled by a subchapter on everyday social life (“Alltägliches Zusammenleben”) in Galician villages that presents an analysis of the signatories of the Galician Petition. The author characterizes male petitioners by language, occupation, religion, denomination, and social status, while women who signed the petition are hardly mentioned at all: “Auch viele Frauen waren unter den Petenten” (167).

With her profound and broad study, Jana Osterkamp demonstrates the conditions and development dynamics of the federal system in the Habsburg Empire before its dissolution and gives new insights into the multilevel stories of administrative and political history. From the perspective of modern-day Austria, the federalism of the constitution of 1920 has its roots in administrative structures of the Habsburg Empire.