American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy

In 1783, the Peace of Paris famously concluded the American Revolution. However, the Revolution could have come to an end through the Peace of Vienna a year earlier had diplomats from the Habsburg realms--the largest continental European power--succeeded in their attempts to convene a Congress of Vienna in 1782. Bringing together materials from American, Austrian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, and Italian archives, Jonathan Singerton reconstructs the full sweep of relations between the nascent United States and one of the oldest European monarchies during and after the American Revolution.

The first account to analyze the impact of the American Revolution in the Habsburg lands in full, this book highlights how the American call to liberty was answered in the remotest parts of central and Eastern Europe. By delineating the earliest social and economic exchanges between the Habsburg monarchy and the United States after 1776, Singerton offers a broad reexamination of the American Revolution and its international reverberations and presents the Habsburg monarchy as a global power in the late eighteenth century.