The demise of the Habsburg Empire was not written in stone. Nor was its replacement through a system of nation-states a natural outcome of Darwin's laws of evolution. The new system was historically contingent; and politicians, journalists, historians, and other opinion- and policymakers were essential in this development. It was the result of a long debate over the foundations of sovereignty and identity, which culminated in World War I and the destruction of the European order as it was known before. But this was not an exclusively inner-European process. Players from the United States were essential in this game. Reaching this conclusion, Nicole Phelps tells a fascinating story of U.S.-Habsburg relations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Understandably, Phelps does not focus primarily on the traditional diplomatic relations and the Große Politik. Given the small areas of interrelation between the two states, the meager contacts on the level of high politics, and Washington's traditional reluctance to get involved in the European power game, this would have justified only a short essay and not a thoroughly researched monograph. Instead, the author focuses on the work of a still rather neglected group of officials, the members of the consular corps. Considered inferior to the “real” diplomats, the consuls were the true players in the field. They dealt with the everyday problems of their constituents in a foreign country, and their work reflected the ideological changes and differences in the concepts of race and identity, citizenship, and nationality.

Phelps is at her best when she relates the changes in ideology and high politics to the actions of the consuls in the field and their results. While the American representatives in the Habsburg lands dealt primarily with a small number of returnees and the legal problems caused by their dual identity as Austrian or Hungarian subjects and their newly acquired U.S. citizenship, the problems faced by the representatives of Austria (and after 1867 of Austria-Hungary) in the United States were far more complex. Not only were the sheer numbers of people they represented much higher; they also had to deal with a dual set of problems. There was the increasingly difficult aspect of national and racial identity. American consuls in Vienna, Prague, or Budapest dealt with former Austrian or Hungarian citizens who had become Americans. Their supposedly different national identities as Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and so on were of no concern to the authorities involved. This was not so easy for the representatives of the Dual Monarchy in the United States. Here, the concept of race as an identifying and differentiating factor was applied and accepted in the state and federal bureaucracies, and contradicted the concept of citizenship. But these ideological aspects were not the only problems they faced. While their American counterparts in Austria and Hungary dealt with a modern and more or less centralized state with an established bureaucratic structure and a clear hierarchy, this was not the case in the United States, where the federal institutions were weak and had only limited influence on the state and local authorities. The president in Washington was not the prime minister of the United States, and the State Department had little interest and power to influence state governments and their institutions. Therefore, the European model of diplomatic and consular life only worked to a limited extent.

Although Phelps's book is an excellent study of international history, it still has its minor flaws. The reader of an academic monograph should expect a bibliography as a source of reference for further reading. In this book, one has to excerpt this information rather strenuously from the footnotes. Aside from this technical aspect, the reviewer, having a strong interest in biography, would have liked to learn more about the personal backgrounds of the players involved. Who were the consuls, both the professionals and their honorary colleagues? For example, John Reymershoffer, long-time honorary consul (meaning he received an honorarium for his services but not a fixed salary) in Galveston, was the grandson of a Czech member of the Austrian parliament of 1848 who emigrated to Texas in the 1850s, whereas his colleague in San Francisco, Francis (František) Korbel, was a pioneer in the Californian wine industry. Both Czechs or Czech-Americans in the “modern” nationalistic concept of race, they served the Austro-Hungarian government loyally with all its implications.

Nonetheless, the book is a prime example of an innovative study in international history, one that, it is hoped, sets the stage for more original, archival-based research in the field of Austria's and Austria-Hungary's foreign relations.