Conclusion

Abstract

Under the impact of conditions of fiscal-military exigency as well as shifting conceptions of government and representation, the relationship between Habsburg rulers and their elites changed continually between 1650 and 1820. In an ongoing process characterized by both cooperation and conflict, the two sides came together around the standing army. The Estates’ operations on its behalf encompassed at varying times military administration, tax collection, credit mediation, among other activities. As lenders to the dynastic state, the Estates were never more important than between the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic wars. With the exception of Great Britain, whose national debt was guaranteed by Parliament, no other eighteenth-century great power accorded the representative tradition such significance in the question of borrowing and finances as the Habsburg monarchy. After 1830 political, social, and economic change undercut the Estates und unravelled their relationship to Habsburg authority. They would be abolished in 1849.