The economic rise of the Hapsburg Empire, 1750-1914.

The Economic Rise of the Hapsburg Empire, 1750-1914.

By David F. Good. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. xvi

309 pp. $32.00.)

One of the commonplaces among scholars of European history has been the view that the overall process of modernization led to the destruction of the Continent's three most fragile empires by the end of World War I. In all three cases--Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire--it is generally believed that economic stagnation and political retardation contributed to the endogenous systemic decay that led to the collapse of these regimes. Nowhere did this collapse occur with a greater finality than in the Hapsburg Monarchy, whose …