The Austrian domination of Venice and Venetia after the Congress of Vienna has traditionally received a bad press. The Restoration regime was long villifed as oppressive and exploitative, and in direct opposition to the interests of almost all classes of the population. This volume questions this view, arguing from detailed archival research that Francis I's rule brought many real benefits to his Venetian subjects. The root of the remarkable passivity of Venetia in the years after the fall of Napoleon should not be explained in terms of pervasive policing, heavy handed censorship and the presence of Metternich's 'forest of bayonets', but rather by the existence of a fair and responsive, if sometimes cumbersome, administrative structure. Having outlined the origins of Austrian control of Venetia in terms of radical political and territorial changes experienced during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, this work examines the mechanisms of Austrian rule. Early chapters focus on the uncomfortable tensions that existed between the temptation to retain a modernised machinery of state inherited from Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, and the desire to look to models existing in the rest of the Habsburg Monarchy with the aim of creating greater uniformity with the rest of the multinational empire. Various aspects of the Habsburg system are examined to assess the burden of Austrian control in the form of taxation and conscription, and the way in which education, policing, the Church and censorship were used in sometimes surprising ways to attach the Venetian population to their Habsburg masters. Finally, the book addresses the question of what went wrong between the death of Francis I in 1835 and the Venetian insurrection of 1848-9 to alienate the population so radically.

This book looks at the administration of Venice and Venetia as part of the multinational Habsburg Empire in the years between the collapse of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy and the death of Francis I in 1835. It rejects entirely the 'black legend' of Austrian domination that long informed the traditional Risorgimento historiography. Instead, it presents a picture of an administration that was a hybrid of Napoleonic modernization and Habsburg bureaucratic practices, which offered the most effective and responsive government in Restoration Italy.

When Austrian soldiers first set foot in Lombardy-Venetia in October, 1813, they were greeted everywhere as liberators and friends. In the spring of 1815, when Joachim Murat's efforts to establish a united Italy ended in miserable failure and when the Habsburgs announced the main features of the regime they intended to establish in their Italian provinces, the Venetians were still strongly pro-Austrian, but considerable anti-Habsburg feeling had developed among the Lombards. This carefully documented study of the first two years of Austrian reoccupation of Lombardy-Venetia examines all aspects of the Habsburg provisional regimes and draws some conclusions about the reasons for the different attitudes in the two provinces. In detailed sketches of the provisional governments of Venetia (Chapter I) and Lombardy (Chapter II) and an examination of Austrian economic policies and practices in both provinces (Chapter III), the author shows that although the governments of the two provinces shared many common traits, they differed in a number of significant ways. Actually, Venetia was much less efficiently governed than Lombardy; and the Lombards enjoyed at least a small measure of self-administration that was largely denied the Venetians. The Lombards were much more prosperous than their neighbors, yet they paid much less in taxes and were exempt from most of the burdensome military requisitions that the Austrians inflicted on the Venetians. In spite of these advantages, the relatively small nationalist movement in Austria's Italian provinces was almost entirely confined to Lombardy. The author examines public opinion in Lombardy-Venetia about liberal intrigues (Chapter IV); the relationship of secret societies to liberalism (Chapter V); the Brescian-Milanese conspiracy (Chapter VI) and the Austrian handling of that affair (Chapter VII); and the fiasco of Joachim Murat's "War of Italian Independence" (Chapter VIII).

The siege of Venice in 1848 is one of history's most thrilling and tragic episodes. After half a century of Habsburg imperial rule, the Venetians drove out the occupying army and established their own republic. Led by the Jewish lawyer Daniele Manin, a man of immense courage and personal integrity, they embraced the lofty values of the Risorgimento, Italy's struggle for national unity, freedom and justice. When the Austrians returned with a massive army, intent on recapturing Venice, Manin rejected their surrender demands. The city braced itself for a siege lasting more than a year, ending only when bombardment, cholera and starvation made further resistance impossible. This epic story, in Jonathan Keates's gripping and meticulously-researched account, embraces the wider world of the revolutionary Italy of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Pope Pius IX, warrior priests, militant actresses, death-or-glory poets, a Mata Hari-type siren spy and a rebel princess. At the centre of the whole crowded canvas, however, stand the truest heroes of all - the people of Venice. Their grit, humour and endurance, under a hail of bombs and a tide of blood sweeping across their once peaceful lagoon, make The Siege of Venice a profoundly touching and unforgettable book.

In this elegant book Richard Bosworth explores Venice—not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. Bosworth looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle époque and the dark underbelly of modernization, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the fascist regime, through to the “Disneylandification” of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. He draws out major themes—the increasingly anachronistic but deeply embedded Catholic Church, the two faces of modernization, consumerism versus culture. Bosworth interrogates not just Venice’s history but its meanings, and how the city’s past has been co-opted to suit present and sometimes ulterior aims. Venice, he shows, is a city where its histories as well as its waters ripple on the surface.

The very existence of diversionary wars is hotly contested in the press and among political scientists. Yet no book has so far tackled the key questions of whether leaders deliberately provoke conflicts abroad to distract the public from problems at home, or whether such gambles offer a more effective response to domestic discontent than appeasing opposition groups with political or economic concessions. Diversionary War addresses these questions by reinterpreting key historical examples of diversionary war—such as Argentina's 1982 Falklands Islands invasion and U.S. President James Buchanan's decision to send troops to Mormon Utah in 1857. It breaks new ground by demonstrating that the use of diversionary tactics is, at best, an ineffectual strategy for managing civil unrest, and draws important conclusions for policymakers—identifying several new, and sometimes counterintuitive, avenues by which embattled states can be pushed toward adopting alternative political, social, or economic strategies for managing domestic unrest.

The Jews of Bukovina were integral to, and at home in, local society. Rechter reconstructs their history while carefully locating it within larger intellectual frameworks.