The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy (Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press, 2021).
UVA Press Store: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5768
Open-Access Edition: https://open.upress.virginia.edu/projects/the-american-revolution-and-the-habsburg-monarchy
“A pathbreaking study making a major contribution to both American and European history.”
Jonathan R. Dull, Yale University
“Accessibly written and extremely well researched, it tells a fascinating story.”
Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire
“A must read for all those interested in the Habsburg Monarch, the American Revolution, and eighteenth-century Enlightenment.”
Michael-W. Serruys, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
“Singerton has meticulously scoured a range of archives and secondary sources in multiple languages to piece together a story of US-Habsburg relations.”
Nicole M. Phelps, University of Vermont
“A fresh and exciting read!”
Eduard Habsburg, Hungarian Ambassador to the Holy See
“Singerton’s book is one of the most simulating studies of recent years.”
Michal Wanner, Charles University Prague
“Singerton’s monograph is a true triumph that Americanists, Europeanists, and scholars of the Atlantic world should read and celebrate.”
Eric Grube, Boston College
“This provocative, well-written book […] provides vivid, engaging vignettes about individuals crossing the geographical and mental spaces between North America and Habsburg Europe.“
Jonathan Kwan, University of Nottingham
“This meticulously researched work pulls on the personal stories, political foibles, trade economics, and cultural detritus of the American Revolution as a global event.“
Marie Basile McDaniel, Southern Connecticut State University
“Singerton’s impressively well-researched book makes an important contribution to the history of Europe as well as North America.“
Stephen Conway, University College London
Reviews: 2022 (1), 2023 (1, 2, 3), 2024 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
In 1783, the Peace of Paris treaties famously concluded the American Revolution. However, the Revolution could have come to an end two years earlier had diplomats from the Habsburg realms—the largest continental European power—succeeded in their attempts to convene a Congress of Vienna in 1781. Bringing together materials from nearly fifty American, Austrian, Belgian, British, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Swedish archives, Jonathan Singerton reconstructs the full sweep of relations between the nascent United States and one of the oldest European dynasties during and after the American Revolution.
The first account to analyze the impact of the American Revolution in the Habsburg lands in full, this book highlights how the American call to liberty was answered across the furthest reaches of central and eastern Europe. Although the United States failed to sway one of the largest, most powerful states in Europe to its side in the War for American Independence, for several years, the Habsburg ruling and mercantile elites saw opportunity, especially for commerce, in the news of the American Revolution. In the end, only Thomas Jefferson’s disdain for Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and avoidance of Habsburg diplomatic representatives in Paris prevented Vienna’s formal recognition of the United States, resulting in a half century of uneven Habsburg-American relations.
By delineating the earliest social and economic exchanges between the Habsburg monarchy and the United States after 1776, Singerton offers a broad reexamination of the American Revolution and its international reverberations and presents the Habsburg monarchy as a globally-oriented power in the late eighteenth century.
Familiar Strangers: Habsburg Encounters with Native America, edited together with Markéta Křížová, and Michael Burri (Amsterdam: Central European University Press, 2025)
AUP/CEU Press Store: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048571802/habsburg-encounters-with-native-america
Open-Access Edition: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/103294
“A collection that opens entirely new ground on a longue durée of trans-Atlantic encounter between the Habsburg lands and the indigenous cultures of North America.”
Howard Louthan, Professor of History at the University of Minnesota
“This volume shows in an impressive way how the encounter between people from the Habsburg Empire and Native Americans was characterised by fascination and sincere interest.”
Claudia Augustat, Curator of South American Collections at the Weltmuseum Wien
“A fascinating voyage through the early encounters between Native Americans and the Habsburg Empire.”
Carlo Krieger, Institut Grand Ducal of Luxembourg and
former Ambassador to Brazil of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
The central European lands of the Habsburg monarchy have long shared an intertwined past with the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. This volume focuses on the process of encountering these peoples as a continual action across several centuries that has produced numerous and varied instances of cultural dialogues, perspectives, and understandings. Moreover, this central European element is something that has not been considered in its own right before now and has been overshadowed by the focus on a wider Germanic fascination for Indigenous cultures. Breaking away from this wider narrative allows us not only to recover a more distinct historical connection but also uncovers the particular dynamics of direct and indirect contact between Indigenous worlds and that of the Habsburg monarchy.
Forthcoming Works:
Beginning Her World Anew: The Life of Maria von Born (1766-1830).
I plan on submitting my next manuscript as a biography of an Austrian countess—Maria von Born, who fled to the United States in the 1790s and returned to Vienna in the late-1810s—will be used as a vehicle to explore to the divergent political and social worlds offered by the early American republic and post-Napoleonic central Europe, including the Italian peninsula.
Jonathan Singerton 