Without any Revolution and Riots: The Quiet Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, 1918
Presented by Professor Alexander Watson, Professor of History, Goldsmiths, University of London.
The end of the First World War was a transformative moment for East-Central Europe. The historiography is dominated by the fraught peace deliberations to build a brave new world and the ethnic rivalry and ideological conflict within and between the newly forming nation-states in 1919-23. This talk focuses on the earlier, neglected instant of Habsburg imperial collapse in October 1918. It asks why, in a period usually defined by its violence and chaos, the revolutions that spread across the empire were so strangely bloodless, rapid and orderly. The talk explores the complex reasons for this swift transition of power and what it reveals about the potential for a more harmonious post-war world.
This lecture is part of the 1918 and the New Europe lecture series.
See the full series here
Cost: Free (but registration is required)