ABSTRACT
Three great dynastic empires dominated central and eastern Europe. Only one of them (the Russian) was in 1880 formally an autocracy, but all three were, in different ways, resistant to the liberal and constitutional ideas so widely accepted in western Europe and diffused by the French Revolution, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany all also shared in varying degree a common problem: the existence of alien nationalities within their borders which, it was believed, might endanger the unity of the state. Their tyrannical rule of Poland since the eighteenth century provided the outstanding example. All three states were also ruled by monarchs who still saw them in the old dynastic way as, in a sense, personal and family estates whose function was to support the dignity and standing of the ruling house. Hohenzollerns had ruled Prussia, Habsburgs Austria and Romanovs Russia longer than the Hanoverians had ruled England. Furthermore, though Germany had already shown remarkable industrial dynamism, social power in each of the three empires was still closely tied to land. Over much of eastern Europe, there lived in 1880 men and women who had been born serfs, adscripti glebae, committed to bond-labour in some form or other. More of the European Middle Ages survived in the three great empires than any other part of Europe in the late nineteenth century and this explains many of the paradoxes to be observed in them.
