NCGS Workshop and Seminar #6 (Virtual)

The Sociology of Empire: German and Habsburg Theories of Multinational Statehood, 1848-1914

Speaker: Thomas Prendergast (Graduate Student, Duke, Department of History)

Over the past twenty years, historians have dramatically reevaluated the Habsburg Monarchy. Whereas scholars once characterized the Monarchy as a “prison of nations,” they now emphasize the effectiveness of its institutions and its subjects’ loyalty to the dynasty and indifference to nationalist propaganda. And yet, despite its stability and “modernity,” Habsburg Austria came to be categorized in the decades before 1914 as an “empire,” an archaic polity fundamentally different from Western European “nation-states.” This lecture will examine how and why Central European jurists attempted to define the Habsburg Monarchy as an “empire” and the Habsburg effort to undermine this definition through a new and globally influential sociological critique of the state. I will show that German nationalist legal scholars used “empire” to distinguish the Monarchy from other similarly composite European states and that Austrian sociologists recognized the analytical inadequacy of this category more than a century before the “imperial turn.

Moderation: Chad Bryant (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History; UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, and Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies