Editor’s Note

It is a pleasure to begin my tenure as Executive Editor of the Austrian History Yearbook with this edition, volume 57, which highlights some of the most important lessons that Habsburg history has taught us: that national formations and expressions are always contingent; that states (empires or otherwise) are not monoliths but contact zones, in Mary Louise Pratt’s influential phrasing; and that this contact occurs both within a state’s borders and beyond them.