This book was published in 2018, exactly one hundred years after the demise of the Habsburg monarchy. This fact seems significant. Steven Beller has written a brisk, accessible survey that ranges from the French Revolution to the First World War. Throughout, he expertly unravels the monarchy's complexities and delights in the paradoxes and ironies of its history. The book's first pages thus introduce the reader to the “confusions and indeterminacies” (4) Beller faced when he tried to name the subject of this book. In the end, he followed the lead of Charles Ingrao, whose earlier book in this series—The Habsburg Monarchy, 1615–1815 (Cambridge, 2000, 2nd ed.)—forms a companion volume of sorts. But the deeper roots and longer survival of the Habsburg monarchy interest Beller far less than its collapse and disappearance from the map. No question drives the narrative more powerfully than the puzzle of why the monarchy came to an end in 1918.

Following the introduction, seven chapters follow the monarchy through its final century. They mostly pause at familiar landmarks: 1815, 1835, 1867, 1897, and so on. Every chapter discusses foreign and military affairs, rulers and ministers, political changes and crises, and (more briefly) social and economic developments. Five chapters also have sections titled “squaring the circle”—one of Beller's favorite metaphors—devoted to what he considers to be particularly intractable problems: Austria's role in Germany, Hungary's place in the monarchy, Czechs and Germans in Bohemia, and most everything to do with Bosnia. Beller peppers his narrative with sharp insights, snap judgments, and helpful comparisons with more recent events: the policies of Emperor Karl (r. 1916–18), we read, had “Gorbachevnian results for the Monarchy” (263). Beller also maps out other, happier paths Habsburg history might have taken, had, for example, Emperor Francis and Metternich been less repressive (36) or Crown Prince Rudolph been given more power by his father (184). The unrealized Kremsier constitution of 1851 likewise stands as “another of those tragically missed chances” and the “basis of a workable solution, had it been tried” (84). The Habsburgs and their servants, we learn, missed a great deal of chances.

This is a story consistently told from the center. Beller is clearly at home in the Hofburg, Vienna, and German-speaking Austria, all subjects of his earlier books. This perspective has many advantages. It puts us in the seat of power and helps us understand the achievements and limitations of those at the top. Beller usefully reminds readers of the centrality of the “German question” to Habsburg leaders for much of the nineteenth century. But the focus on the center also produces some odd effects, including a strong preference for German city names and untranslated German phrases, such as Kabinettsweg (55) and Der Verschwender (49), the title of one of Ferdinand Raimund's plays. It also consigns much of the monarchy to the “periphery.” Although Beller mentions the monarchy's “polycentricity” in his account of 1848 (68), the book early on sets up an enduring opposition between the center (Vienna, German-speaking Austria) and the “increasingly nationalistic peripheries” (54), which encompass everything else. Hungary is perhaps the best example of the latter. He detects, already in the 1830s, “an increasingly repressive Magyar nationalism” (46), and by 1900 this has given way to “militant nationalism” and “Magyar chauvinism” (168), which are in his view Hungary's defining (if not sole) features. Beller is especially critical of the 1867 settlement for conceding too much to Hungarian elites; he approvingly cites Louis Eisenmann's verdict that 1867 gave “equal rights, two thirds expenditure for Austria, three quarters influence for Hungary” (126). Once empowered, Hungary's leaders obstructed measures that might have saved the monarchy: federalization, military spending, and greater rights for South Slavs. Perhaps exacting a small revenge, he misspells some of their places (what should be Mohács) and people (Dezső Bánffy and Béla Kun, an odd pairing).

It should come as no surprise that Beller's book is especially strong and expansive on the Habsburg dynasty. Early chapters offer conventional portraits of the Emperors Francis (r. 1792–1835) and Ferdinand (r. 1835–48), with the former as suspicious and cautious, the latter as informal and incompetent. With the accession of Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916), however, The Habsburg Monarchy hits its stride. Beller has written widely on Francis Joseph, and he places him at the center of this narrative. Fittingly, Francis Joseph appears on the cover of the book, standing on a balcony on Schönbrunn Palace and gazing at a bright yellow military airship. While one might be tempted to empathize with the simply dressed, solitary ruler and share his wonder at the conquest of the skies, Beller wants us to understand the incongruity of the scene. Sweeping aside clichés of Francis Joseph as an avuncular, deskbound, broadminded, old gentleman, Beller depicts him here as a powerful and active ruler: on his first appearance, he is “dashing, virile, and quite well-educated, and well-trained young man in total control of government” (87). Even after the failure of neo-absolutism in the 1850s, Francis Joseph retained wide, unchecked powers and never made an admission “to the concept of popular sovereignty” (129). His influence in foreign affairs was no less decisive, and Beller underlines his role—and, crucially, antiquated ideas about honor—in pushing Austria-Hungary to war in 1914. Even as the Habsburg monarchy modernized and produced marvels like this military airship, then, its ruler never fully grasped or accepted the political ideologies and arrangements that modernity helped foster. The result was the monarchy's self-destruction in the First World War.

Beller also devotes ample space to foreign policy. This allows him to examine not just familiar events, such as the Congress of Vienna and the Bosnian annexation crisis, but also lesser-known moments, including the Greek revolt of 1821 (which revealed the limits of Austria's power) and the Plombières Agreement of 1858 (in which Napoleon III and Camillo di Cavour set a trap for Austria). Although he credits Austria with a miraculous recovery in 1814 following the disastrous wars with Napoleon, its diplomatic success and influence barely lasted two decades. As Beller nicely puts it, Metternich may have been the “coachman of Europe,” but this epithet lost its value as “the wonder of the steam-powered railway engine was spreading from Britain to the Continent” (33). What follows is one diplomatic and military disaster after another: defeat to the French and Piedmontese in 1859, defeat again at the hands of the Prussians in 1866, the “problematic” alliance with Italy in 1882, the “diplomatic malpractice” (231) committed by Aehrenthal and others in 1908, and the calamitous outcome (for Austria) of the Balkans wars of 1912–13. By 1914, Beller writes, “the Monarchy saw itself in a desperate position” (238), with its aspirations in the Balkans blocked and other European states increasingly treating it as a second-rate power.

In this telling, the self-destruction and demise of the Habsburg monarchy was overdetermined. By the early twentieth century, former sources of strength—the dynasty, domestic politics, and foreign affairs—only revealed the state's glaring weaknesses. Political life had devolved into an everlasting crisis; in Austria this meant an “era of post-parliamentary, quasi-absolutist government” (194), while in Hungary the government remained “intensely, chauvinistically, nationalist” (197). Irredentism and antisemitism spread, and the administration sank into crisis. Under these conditions, it was impossible to raise military spending to levels needed to back the monarchy's diplomatic ambitions, and Francis Joseph's refusal to relinquish control of the army held back needed reforms. Even economic and cultural life, often seen as two areas in which the monarchy made remarkable strides, offered little hope; railroads and schools, Beller argues, did nothing to dull the sharp edge of national conflict (if anything, they worsened it), and the brilliance and creativity of cultural life only drew attention to the stupidity and dysfunction at the top. Beller is careful not to foreclose possibilities—the “paths not taken” (273) that tantalizingly appear again and again—yet it is difficult, after reading this book, to believe that the monarchy, with “its anachronistic structures and styles” (286), could long have survived in the modern era.

Beller displays a marked ambivalence to what he calls “revisionist” scholarship. He allows that “revisionists” have produced valuable, stimulating work (some of which is listed in the bibliography), but also suggests that they have lost sight of how the monarchy really functioned and, in their sepia-toned portraits of a lost world, betray “a wistful regret for a purer, more ordered Central Europe” (17). (Full disclosure: I am one of these regret-filled “revisionists.”) He rarely offers unconditional endorsements of current historians; a mention of the historian of science Deborah Coen and her study of the Exner family is the exception that proves the rule (216). More often, Beller presents the “revisionist” approach and then qualifies or questions it. His patience wears thin as the war approaches: “There remain serious problems with the revisionist ‘rosy scenario’ of the pre-1914 Monarchy,” he writes, after discussing cultural life around 1900 (221). At the end of the same chapter, he underscores that “that ‘everyday empire’ was not the only one involved in the Habsburg Monarchy. It was still an empire, a monarchy” (240). Attentive readers will recognize the reference to a pivotal chapter (“Everyday Empire, Our Empire, 1880–1914”) in Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2016). They may wonder why Beller did not mention Judson by name, just as earlier references to Hungary's “lawful revolution” (73), a phrase popularized by István Deák, or Bohemia's “kidnapped souls” (171), a term from Tara Zahra, also go unacknowledged. But the larger argument here is with Judson, as he admits in the bibliography (288).

Beller is right that much recent historiography has not paid as much attention to foreign policy and the dynasty as it might, and that we cannot lose sight of the illiberal elements coursing through the monarchy around 1900. In this sense his work complements some of the “revisionist” literature he finds lacking. But Beller has his own, often unacknowledged, blind spots. On the second page, he explains that by “monarchy” he means “the whole political, social, economic and cultural nexus of a vast territory and populace in the middle of the European continent.” Much of the book, however, pays scant attention to the wider mass of the population. The forces of industrialization, urbanization, emigration, and commerce receive only cursory treatment; schools and universities are interesting largely as battlegrounds for nationalists. The section on culture around 1900 is both informed and informative, but its inclusion also calls attention to the absence of any treatment of literature, drama, science, and other fields in other chapters (except, again, as fuel for nationalist fires). Similarly, popular religiosity, culture, and folkways are not discussed. Indeed, peasants and workers are virtually invisible here. We learn three times that in 1848 much of the peasantry was illiterate (62, 71, 74); how this—and the countryside as a whole—changed in the years and decades that followed is not explored or explained. Similarly, women barely make an appearance (even Sissi receives only a few lines), notwithstanding important recent work on the history of women, gender, and sexuality in the Habsburg monarchy.

Ultimately, Beller parts ways with the “revisionists” not just on the viability of the monarchy, but in his definition of whose actions matter most and of what historical subjects are worth writing about. It is ironic (to borrow one of Beller's favorite phrases) that a book appearing in a series titled “new approaches to European history” offers such a traditional methodology and conception of history. For him, political activity and power do not meaningfully extend beyond the court, ministries, and parliament (178), whereas “revisionists” have found both in factories, streets, cabarets, churches, and village squares. By viewing the monarchy from multiple vantage points and not just from the center, “revisionists” have uncovered new sources of tension and conflict, as well as different forms of creativity and coexistence.

At the end of his introduction, Beller argues strongly for the continued relevance of the monarchy. The chapter on the final prewar decades in particular makes that case that its artists, philosophers, and scientists left a lasting imprint on modern culture, and the conclusion lays out the monarchy's legacies, positive and negative. Beller's ideas in these sections are fresh and insistent. But so much of this book charts a more familiar and less inspired course: that of relentless decline, punctuated by periodic disasters and missed opportunities. Readers may draw lessons from his account of inflexible rulers, haughty aristocrats, and blundering diplomats. But they may not be the ones that Beller had hoped for.