Austria-Hungary as Maritime Empire

Trieste, the Habsburgs’ urbs fidelissima, was its most important port from 1848, when Austria’s faith in Venice was irretrievably lost, until the Empire’s dissolution in 1918.  Standing on Trieste’s Piazza Grande in 1900, one was surrounded on three sides by buildings designed by the same architects who created the imposing landmarks along Vienna’s famed Ringstraße. On the fourth side, however, an unobstructed view of the sea invited onlookers to think outward – south to Mediterranean Africa, East through the Suez Canal, or West beyond Gibraltar to the New World. This unfettered access beyond continental Europe created in Trieste a cosmopolitan culture that was mobile, work-oriented, and self-consciously international. Its situation at the border of Habsburg Europe and at the center of Austrian overseas commerce made it particularly vulnerable to the newest trends in modern consumerism, labor relations, mobility, and tourism.  Trieste was simultaneously a city of labor, literature, commerce, linguistic diversity, and international communication.  It was also the center for the Austrian Empire's pretensions to global commercial power commensurate with its prestige and standing on the European continent.  In this paper, I will discuss how the Austro-Hungarian diplomatic corps understood the significance of its Adriatic access as the opportunity for it to assert its commercial outreach through maritime activities and networks.