“Wheatley’s deeply original and important book alters the way we understand the history of European states, sovereignty, and legal thought. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History By focusing on statehood rather than nationhood, Wheatley finally gives the Habsburg state its deeper importance in modern European and global history.”-Pieter M. “In this superb book, Natasha Wheatley investigates aspects of sovereignty that are rarely if ever touched upon: the beginnings and ends of states. This powerful and exceptionally erudite book opens an altogether fresh view on the formation of the present global order and also makes very good reading.”-Martti Koskenniemi, fellow of the British Academy and professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki “Wheatley invites us to rethink the way political history should be written by taking seriously the legal language in which different protagonists dress their political claims. Wheatley explores how the Central European experience opens a unique perspective on a pivotal legal fiction-the supposed juridical immortality of states.Ī sweeping work of intellectual history, The Life and Death of States offers a penetrating and original analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and time, illustrating how the many deaths and precarious lives of the region’s states expose the tension between the law’s need for continuity and history’s volatility. Habsburg lands then became a laboratory for postimperial sovereignty and a new international order, and the results would echo through global debates about decolonization for decades to come. Natasha Wheatley shows how a new sort of experimentation began when the First World War brought the Habsburg Empire crashing down: the making of new states. The Life and Death of States traces the history of sovereignty over one hundred tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire. 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 1848 revolutions sparked decades of heady constitutional experimentation that pushed the very concept of “the state” to its limits. Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty.

Pieter m judson the habsburg empire