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The chapter explores the policies of the ‘successor‐states’ that emerged on the ruins of the three empires. Its major argument is that the attempts to rule the multiplicity of people, who differed in political experience ethnicity, and culture proved extremely difficult. The aggression of the two powers — Germany and Soviet Russia — destroyed the peace‐settlement altogether

Early British rule in India was built on Indian foundations. In Bengal the British were able to build on the foundations of a well-established state and a flourishing economy. Above all, the new East India Company rulers could tap Bengal's wealth through a system of taxation collected from the countryside. The essential task of early British administration was to enforce taxation. This enabled the Company to maintain a large army in Bengal, both to protect their interests there and to safeguard their other major Indian settlements, Madras and Bombay, which had only limited resources of taxation and were drawn into largely unsuccessful conflicts with strong neighbouring Indian states. British aspirations to empire in India in the later eighteenth century depended on Bengal.

Agricultural and commercial decline in one area was often matched by expansion of cultivation and trade in another. This chapter identifies the areas of growth and decline in agriculture and commerce by reference not only to political circumstances but also to ecology and climate. It explains that some naturally well-endowed territories were able to come through the worst political troubles in a state of high cultivation and relative prosperity, but in some areas human endeavour or conflict could do little to alter their performance within the existing limits of technology. It cites strong evidence for economic growth and social change in the more stable core areas of the successor states. Under the disturbed surface of the politics was forming a new pattern of stability. Agricultural production, trade and revenue provided the framework on which new empires could be reared.

This chapter provides a chronological overview of peacemaking after the Great War according to a constructivist interpretation of the “agent-structure problem.” Agents are simply the characters of the story; structures, that which determines the plot. Peacemaking began with the armistices of 1918, as recognizably realist states sought a new realist structure for security. However, Wilsonianism provided a radically new discursive structure which the allies and Germans accepted at the time of the armistice. Accepting Wilsonianism as the ideological foundation of the peace had real consequences, whatever the intentions of the statesmen who had done so. Wilsonianism legitimized the successor state, a new ethno-national agent that would seek to unify ethnic and national boundaries. Great Powers guided by Wilsonianism had created an identity they could not control. Successor states would do much to demarcate the authority of the conference in Europe and in the domains of the defeated empires.

This chapter examines the Holy See’s critical response to the Versailles Peace Settlement of 1919 and to the subsequent territorial rearrangement of Europe. It also analyses in detail Benedict and Gasparri’s relations with the powers in the post-war world, especially Britain, France, Germany and Italy, the USA and the USSR, and the so-called ‘successor states’. In this chapter the Vatican’s first responses to the persecution of the Church in Mexico and Russia are described. It then focuses on Benedict’s role as head of the Church, particularly his promulgation of the Code of Canon Law and continuation of the reform of the Roman curia. Especially interesting are the initiatives which he took in relation to the Eastern churches, both those in communion with Rome and those not, and his landmark encyclical on the missions, Maximum Illud. It concludes with an assessment of Benedict’s place in the history of the papacy.

This chapter explains how national histories, ‘intended to explain at length the legitimacy of a present secular power’, certainly abounded in Western Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. However, neither that eventual ubiquity, nor the mirage of genealogical continuity from the barbarian successor states in Western Europe to the modern nation states of Western Europe, should distort one's view of the immediate post-Roman centuries. There was a continuous tradition of universal histories (often in chronicle format) witnessing a perception of the past as springing from the beginning of the world, including all human time, painted on a worldwide canvas, and embracing one's own history. But the perception of the past as the story of a single, barbarian led, post-Roman state was a rarity.

This chapter discusses the final phase of the decline of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century. It argues that this decline was manifested in Awadh and Punjab in a kind of political transformation, in the emergence and configuration of the elements of the new subadari. The Mughal centre had transformed from a stabilizing force to a destabilizing arena with the weakening of imperial authority, administration and wrangling at the court. However, as the beginnings of the new subadari are to be seen more in the context of the history of the region, the developments in and around Awadh and the Punjab provide explanation for its stability or weakness in these provinces. The alliances forged, between the Mughal state and the nobles on the one hand and the old zamindars and local elements had always been uneasy. Now with the weakening of the Mughal power, the provincial governors tried to strike alliances with the local elements. Now with the weakening of the Mughal power, the provincial governors tried to strike alliances with the local elements. While the alliance with the local elements was successful in Awadh, it failed in Punjab primarily because of the growing consolidation of the Sikh movement, which considered the Mughal system as such to be tyrannical. The genesis for the emergence of ‘the successor state’ was present in both provinces, but in the Punjab it ended in chaos while Awadh saw a stable, dynastic rule.

This chapter analyses the military mobilization and expansion, as well as the social and political disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the era of the Great War (1912–1920, thus including the formation of the Successor States). The chapter will open with a discussion of the Balkan Wars and their psychological effects on the Habsburg Empire’s mobilization for war. Although one of the driving forces for war in 1914, the Habsburg Empire was ill prepared for the requirements of a modern industrial conflict. The lack of adequate military and infrastructural preparations, however, was not the only factor that limited the ability of the Habsburg Empire to cope with the challenges of total war. More crucial perhaps was the process of “disintegrative mobilization”: the empire’s destabilization from within as a result of lacking political legitimacy and complex interethnic relations that were thrown off balance over the course of the war.

This chapter is a regional study of the emerging “successor state” of Arcot in southern India, drawing upon the Persian chronicling tradition and the records of the Dutch East India Company. The early eighteenth century in northern Tamil saw at that time a rise of a new type of state, the autonomous nizāmat, or what the British were apt to call the “nawabi” state, operating under the carapace of Mughal sovereignty. This state emerged as a sort of condominium of a Deccani (Nawayat) elite and Persianized Hindu communities such as the Khatris. This chapter attempts to sketch the main lines of development in the Arcot nizāmat, under Da'ud Khan Panni, and then the founder of the Nawayat “dynasty”, Muhammad Sa'id, or Sa'adatullah Khan.

Our modern passport system emerged after the Great War. It superseded the tight control of individual mobility during wartime, but did not come close to prewar conditions of open borders. The League of Nations had to play an ambivalent role. It was commissioned by the governments to manage the abolition of passports, but obstructed in its implementation. In the end, the League had to settle with an agreement on international standards for issuing passports and visas and for controlling travel documents at the border. The discussions at the conferences highlight the difficulties of coming to terms with the social, political, and economic legacy of the war. One of the legacies was the mistrust towards nationals and foreigners; its impact was strongly felt in Central Europe, where the successor states of the Habsburg monarchy established a strict border regime within a highly integrated region with free movement of people, goods, and capital.

This introduction explores the entangled history of the Habsburg successor states and the new international order of 1919. It argues that Central Europe formed a key laboratory for tools and practices of supranational governance, thereby reframing a historiography long focused on national histories. It presents four new frameworks for analysing the interplay of nationalization and internationalization. The first concerns legacies of empire, and suggests new directions for studies of the afterlives of Habsburg rule. The second focuses on the benefits of a regional approach that moves beyond the framework of individual states. The third involves an integrated history of the interwar order in Europe that encompasses different fields of international activity and coordination. And the fourth reexamines the history of sovereignty, supranational governance, and European integration.

While political elites and new governments continue to assert the distinctiveness of the Yugoslav successor states and the nonconnection with a shared Yugoslav past, the art created in the region in the last two decades seems to frequently make, assume, and even emphasize these connections. This chapter offers a brief sample catalog of such works and the ways in which they enact the above connections, including references to Yugoslav-era works (of the other independent states) in post-Yugoslav literary and cinematic production, and the common interstate connections in post-Yugoslav cinema production. The chapter also points to one feature discernible in select contemporary literature and cinema that could be identified as an aspect rooted in the region’s connection with its Yugoslav past. Finally, the author mentions some of the most literal instances of bringing back, retrieving, and reactivating the Yugoslav intellectual and artistic past into the present.

Austria-Hungary’s defeat in the war was a juncture in long-term historical processes rather than a decisive break with the past in matters of morality. Bureaucratic transition did not necessarily parallel political transition, so there was no dramatic change in the regulation of prostitution in the states of the defunct Monarchy. Most legislation changed regulation only piecemeal in the first months and years after the war, incorporating various forms of control, which reflected attitudes about sexuality, particularly, women’s. Public attention to prostitution continued—anxiety about venereal disease and public hygiene, trafficking, public morals—yet with a modern inflection. Middle class, often female, reformers had more political power in the interwar “democracies” and accomplished change they could only dream about at the turn of the century. Finally, the scientific turn in understanding race and nation infected professional thinking about both the regulation of commercial sex and the women who engaged in it.

The German Reich, established in 1871, was an empire in more than one way. Under Wilhelm II, the German government had acquired colonies in South-West Africa (today’s Namibia), Cameroon and East Africa (Tanzania) as well as in the Chinese province of Shandong and a number of smaller outposts in the South Pacific. This chapter will look at the mobilization of imperial subjects, their role in the war on the Western, Eastern and African fronts, the impact of (short-lived) imperial expansion in the East on future German aspirations in the “lands between” and the consequences of defeat in 1918, both for the imperial subjects that were now given national independence (or, in the case of the overseas colonies, received new colonial masters) and German geostrategic thinking.

Entering the postclassical world, this chapter examines what happened when Roman power structures were inhabited by so-called barbarian, do-nothing kings. Focusing in particular on the multilayered depiction of Chilperic I (c. 539–589) in the Histories of Gregory of Tours, the chapter shows that the Merovingian kings are rebuked not only for barbarous and un-Christian behaviors but also, surprisingly, for being ‘too Roman’. These critiques originate with local political and ecclesiastical elites, who feared a destabilizing displacement of their own authority and jurisdiction as the Merovingians strove to centralize their state after the model of Rome. Once again, therefore, foreignness of various kinds becomes the marker of a bad king, this time reflecting the interplay between the complex sociopolitical developments of the sixth century and the Roman imperial tradition.

This chapter investigates the revolutions in the social and political organization of the Ottoman imperial domains – the Balkans and today’s “Middle East” – from the 1908 Young Turk Revolution to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, although this transformation cannot be considered to have ended then, or to have ever been completed. The instability that marked this period was replaced by equally unstable regimes, and its aftershocks have continued to define the region. The great number of casualties, displaced people, and forced migrations produced long-term socioeconomic consequences: urban populations did not return to pre-war levels until the early 1950s.