The Habsburg Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth of the Modern Centralized State

Abstract

Abstract This chapter, about the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth century, falls towards the end of the volume’s chronological span-and rightly so. For it does not deal with the origins, further development, or final consolidation of the European states in the course of the entire medieval and the early modern periods. Instead, it takes the reader up to the middle and the second half of the eighteenth century, into the ageof(Enlightened) absolutism, Enlightenment, and natural law.