Embers of Empire arrives as a timely salvo in the ongoing historiographical cannonade to knock down the edifice of “1918”—that barrier year of dichotomous befores-and-afters in European history. Acknowledging that recent decades of revisionist scholarship have given the late Habsburg Monarchy a cleaner bill of health than was long assumed, the editors pose this as their central question: If indeed the empire was not simply doomed to fall by nationalism’s hand, did its “structures and the habitus linked to them last even beyond the collapse of the ancien régime in 1918” (2)? This is not in itself an original question, but the volume’s twelve chapters represent a novel set of approaches to find a more durable answer. Most laudably, they are committed to a search for concrete imperial legacies, reflected in fresh evidence. They set aside literature and intellectual history, in which a handful of writers have played an outsized...

You do not currently have access to this content.