The Life and Death of States

Natasha Wheatley is assistant professor of history at Princeton University. She is the coeditor of Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands and Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History. Her writing has appeared in Past & Present and the London Review of Books.

"The Life and Death of States is a carefully researched and beautifully written work, a book in which ideas matter, and a welcome contribution to the field. . . . It is a pleasure to read a book that plants its flag on the fundamental importance of legal concepts and arguments as revolutionary, historically meaningful ideas. In The Life and Death of States, Natasha Wheatley has taken on a demanding and timely challenge. She has met it with admirable diligence and poise, and she offers readers of international law a valuable gift: a vivid account of their predecessors, to whom many have given little thought until recently."---Ville Kari, European Journal of International Law --- "Wheatley masterfully and lucidly guides the reader through a convoluted but consequential run of constitutional writs and debates (as well as their elaborate historiography); makes sense of the struggles over rights the empire generated; confronts some of the more outré bubbles of legal thought; and shows in well-curated and deeply researched detail how the complexities of the empire generated not only a path-breaking legal jurisprudence in abstract terms but also a more realistic appreciation of the world of sovereign states than the notion of the unitary state as the paragon of sovereignty could offer. All this is accomplished with reflexive candor and a dose of black humor that is a delight and, above all, entirely suited to it subject."---Micahel Geyer, Journal of Modern History --- "The Life and Death of States is a dazzling history of the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the creation of the modern state system, and an extraordinary combination of legal history, philosophy, and much more. . . . [R]ichly rewarding and deeply thought-provoking."---Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy --- "Brilliant"---Quinn Slobodian, H-Diplo --- "[The Life and Death of States] combines several aspects excellently, including primary source analysis and the reinterpretation of secondary sources, legal debates and political disputes. . . . Wheatley’s insightful underlining of the importance of socio-political crises for debates on the ontology and epistemology of statehood is a powerful reminder of the historically specific origins of the modern international order of states are in fact quite recent."---Lauri von Pfaler, International Affairs --- "[A]n impressive and extremely ambitious narrative of the constitutional vicissitudes of a post-1848 Habsburg Empire."---Carl Landauer, Journal of the History of International Law --- "Monumental. . . . Wheatley’s narrative recovers a world where international law was not a dead letter but a blueprint for a multinational and pluralistic world."---Yosef Malka, BR!NK --- "It’s rare to read a work of history that is not only full of facts and stories and brimming with ideas, but also instils in the reader a strong desire for more of all three while setting off a series of ultrabright flares that light up whole landscapes of thought and experience in wide, overlapping circles. Natasha Wheatley’s The Life & Death of States does all of that."---Holly Case, H-Diplo --- "A valuable contribution to the extensive, and growing, historiography concerning the origins of the modern state. While others have concentrated on non-Western or Western European countries to reach their conclusions about the evolution of modern politics, Wheatley’s case study breaks new ground in its analysis of an especially difficult case, the Austrian Empire after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867." --- "A really fascinating read."---Justin Kempf, Democracy Paradox --- "A richly rewarding book. . . . Wheatley gracefully unpacks the complicated constitutional issues faced by inhabitants of the Habsburg monarchy." --- "Path-breaking and field-defining. . . . It is a testament to Wheatley that she catalogues and engages with the many directions the theorization of sovereignty took in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its immediate aftermath. Reconstructing this rich intellectual world, she pierces the sovereign state’s static and immutable image in order to reveal the remarkable political fluidity and theoretical ingenuity involved in its construction."---Adom Getachew, H-Diplo --- "[Natasha Wheatley] has a penchant for metaphor and an inventive flair that make her legal histories come alive. . . . Wheatley has accomplished something far more consequential. She traces the legal history of statehood and self-determination to a new origin point in Central Europe, to the ashes of the Habsburg Empire—the 'ghost in the machine' of international law. Her book is an impressive account of the challenges that legal thinkers of Hans Kelsen’s generation faced in describing the cataclysmic changes of their time."---Linda Kinstler, New York Review of Books --- "Winner of the ICON-S Book Prize, International Society of Public Law" --- "Shortlisted for the Laura Shannon Prize, Nanovic Institute for European Studies" --- "Honorable Mention for the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas" --- "Honorable Mention for the Robert L Jervis and Paul W Schroeder Best Book Award, International History and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" --- "A New Statesman Book of the Year" --- "Winner of the Felicia Krishna Hensel Book Award, International Studies Association"