During the Revolutionary War, the Habsburg monarchy, the largest continental European power of the eighteenth century, never formally recognized the United States, but its ruling and mercantile elites saw opportunity, especially for commerce. Bringing together materials from nearly fifty international archives, Jonathan Singerton of the University of Innsbruck reconstructs the full sweep of relations between the nascent United States and one of the oldest European dynasties during and after the American Revolution and offers a reexamination of the Revolution by highlighting how the American call to liberty was answered across the furthest reaches of central and eastern Europe.
About the Speaker
Dr. Jonathan Singerton is a lecturer and research fellow in history at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Previously, he was a fellow at the Institute for Habsburg Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Edinburgh in 2018 and was awarded the university’s Jeremiah Dalziel Prize in British History. He has also held numerous fellowships in the United States and Europe for his research that focuses on the global connections of central Europe, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Currently, at the University of Innsbruck, he teaches global and oceanic aspects of Austrian history. His first book, The Habsburg Monarchy and the American Revolution, explores the myriad responses towards the creation of the American republic in the Habsburg monarchy.