Representative government in early modern Britain and Austria

The article compares early modern British and Austrian representative institutions, exploring the history of both in order to explain how they came to function as crucial parts of the fiscal-military states of both countries. The article examines the history of the Austrian and Hungarian representative bodies in an attempt to understand how they came to play the same role in their state as the British Parliament did in its state. In the case of Austria, I will explore how the history of the estates contradicts the traditional interpretation of the establishment of a Habsburg “absolute” state.