If one had looked at Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian’s desk on any given evening in February of 1863, they would have seen: a letter about publishing the scientific findings of the Novara expedition, a report about bellicose rhetoric in the Kingdom of Italy, a report from then Commandant Wilhelm von Tegetthoff about ongoing instability in Greece following the 1862 Revolution, an anonymous plea from a Polish patriot for Austria to support their homeland, a letter from the Austrian consul in Egypt about the Suez Canal project, and a series of letters from General Almonte, the head of the monarchist forces in Mexico. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian has passed into historical memory as Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico, whose idealistic tenure as a constitutional monarch ultimately ended in tragedy. Compelling as the story is, it has largely been siloed off into Mexican national history. However, as the pieces of paper that cluttered his desk indicate, the archduke was involved in questions of international commerce and shifting European power relations alongside the Mexican question. The research that I undertook this summer, with the generous support of a CEHS research grant, takes Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as a case study to illuminate Austria’s complex and far-reaching European and global footprint. 

I arrived in Vienna on June 1, 2026 with one primary goal: to read the personal papers of Archduke Maximilian. This trip was a long time coming and filled one of the most important gaps in my dissertation research, since an indexing project had made the Maximilian von Mexiko collection in the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv inaccessible for the past two years. The extensive collection is somewhat unusual in that, alongside personal correspondence, it contains correspondence and reports from the foreign ministry, including papers on naval policy. To properly capture Maximilian’s global perspective, I needed to be able to document the wide geographic extent of his personal, professional, and political correspondence. When I received the email in January 2026 that the collection was available again, I used the new finding aid to create a plan for when I could return to Vienna. I had originally planned to go earlier in the summer and stay for two months until the end of June, but my schedule shifted to accommodate obligations in mid-May in Germany. Thus, I spent June and July in Vienna.

I did, however, take a break from archival research to present at a conference hosted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences on the role of Consuls and Consulates in Austrian foreign relations. I presented a paper on the Foreign Ministry’s strategic use of consuls as agents to gather information on Mexico while keeping the extent of Austria’s involvement strictly confidential. Understanding the mechanisms of Austria’s foreign service is, I argue, essential for revealing the connections between Austria’s global presence and Mexico. By the time that I left at the end of July, I had scanned and read almost all of what I planned to get through. I am now in a position where I can finish writing my dissertation by the end of the academic year.