ABSTRACT
This book focusses on the development of nationalist movements within the three multiethnic empires that were destroyed by the First World War: the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Russian empire, and the Ottoman empire. Each of these enormous and unwieldy political entities had taken shape through a process of gradual territorial accretion and incremental military conquest over the course of hundreds of years. As of 1914, each of them had been ruled continuously for several centuries by a single dynasty. By the same token, all three regimes had recently permitted (or been forced to accept) the creation of elected parliaments, institutions whose very existence could be seen as fundamentally incompatible with the principle of monarchic authority.
