In All likelihood, Reuben John Rath will be best remembered by Austrian historians for his achievements as an “academic entrepreneur, ” if only because enterprises like the Austrian History Yearbook have provided a common institutional bond that unites all of us in the field. Nonetheless, there are many scholars who will recognize him most for more solitary scholarly endeavors that he pursued with such persistence in European archives and with such painstaking care at the controls of a manual type-writer. Six decades of scholarship have produced three books and more than thirty articles in field-specific journals like the Journal of Central European Affairs, the Austrian History Yearbook, and Der Donauraum, as well as in the American Historical Review and the Journal of Modern History. Moreover, his work has made lasting contributions to three discrete fields of modern Austrian history. Hence the need to divide this historiographical retrospective into three segments on Napoleonic and Restoration Italy (by Alexander Grab), the Revolutions of 1848 (by Pieter M. Judson), and Engelbert Dollfuβ(by James Miller).

It was said that Count Kaunitz, the Austrian chancellor under the enlightened despots Maria Theresa and Joseph II, settled Belgian and Italian affairs every morning while putting on his stockings. The thick volume of correspondence between Vienna and Milan in the second half of the eighteenth century and the wide reform program which the Austrian rulers launched in Lombardy during those years demonstrate, however, that this Italian dominion was much more important to the Habsburgs than the ironic anecdote implied. Indeed, research over the last fifteen years on the reform policy of the enlightened despots in Lombardy has shown that this province was highly significant for the Viennese rulers, who made considerable efforts to integrate it into their empire. Lombardy had both strategic and economic value for the Viennese authorities; strategically, it served as the northern gateway to Italy, thus helping the Habsburgs to maintain their influence in the Italian peninsula. Economically, Lombardy possessed a highly developed agriculture, which provided Vienna with a rich source of revenues.