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Wittstock, Olaf. Philanthrop und Kunstunternehmer. Der Hildesheimer Domherr Johann Friedrich Moritz von Brabeck (1742-1814). Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014.376 pp. 59.00 [euro] (hardcover). This study was originally a doctoral thesis [...]

This splendid study effectively rewrites the history of Habsburg-Ottoman, Habsburg-Hungarian, and Ottoman-Hungarian relations at a crucial time. It was this uprising, characterized by mass mutinies and the dissolution of the Habsburg military in Upper Hungary, that "ushered in more than four decades of active resistance and revolt in the Hungarian lands of the Habsburg monarchy" (102). Most of Ahmed Köprülü's grand vizierate fell between the Ottoman-Habsburg war of 1663/4 and the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, events that historians have usually seen as evidence of progressive Turkish decline. [Extracted from the article]

Until not so very long ago, the national conflicts in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy prompted historians to focus on nationality as the crucial marker of self-understanding among its populations. The high tide of modern nation-states after 1918 made national borders, national mindsets, and national power structures the framework for ever-greater historical interest in the lineages of national genealogy. In recent decades, scholars have questioned the assumption that modern nations were primordial or natural, even as such entities remain a prime object of attention in a world where nation-states and identity politics help define research agendas and nationalism continues to be a potent force. The lines of inquiry have taken a number of directions. First, historians have linked the pervasiveness of nation and national identity to specific historical circumstances. Perhaps most famously, the political scientist Benedict Anderson's insight regarding “imagined communities” pointed up the contingency of modern nations. It was increasingly accepted that they are artificial constructs of relatively recent date and firmly rooted in time and place. The neat boundaries that seemed to define them, as on old ethnographic maps, faded as their elusive, conditional, and shifting contours were recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]