Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty.
The 1848 revolutions sparked decades of heady constitutional experimentation that pushed the very concept of “the state” to its limits.
This intricate multinational polity became a hothouse for public law and legal philosophy and spawned ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state today.
“The Life and Death of States” traces the history of sovereignty over 100 tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire.
