![]() ‘Election day constituted a critical ritual of empire’.The empire Judson wishes to describe contains a range of diverse ‘cultural, religious and social practices’.A school isn’t a place where stuff is taught or learned, it is a site where teaching practices are carried out, or where the state engages with its citizens.people don’t have religious beliefs, they have religious practices.If concrete could speak this is what it would sound like. Thus: Site, situate, construct, locate, engage with, negotiate, difference, diversity, practicesĪre applied over and over again, about everything, to make everything sound the same. It uses the same dozen or so key terms over and over to drain the life out of any subject or period: The problem with this sociological-inflected style is that it is grey, flat, boring, extremely limited and highly repetitive. I can’t find out whether Pieter Judson is a native English speaker nor not, since his grasp of idiom is so wooden, but he is certainly fluent in sociological jargon. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sadly, I had misgivings after five or six pages and gave up after 50. Published in 2016, The Hapsburg Empire looks to be the most recent large-scale narrative history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the 1740s to its dissolution in 1918. ![]()
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