If the casual reader or bookshop-browser were to follow my grandfather’s advice, they would start at the end to see whether my book was worth reading. In this case, they would find my final chapter covering the Empire’s afterlife in European history from the initial horrified reactions to its demise to its place in the current debate over the future of the European Union. Closer inspection of these pages will already suggest why the Empire still matters today, since how it has been interpreted tells us much about wider European history and how the continent’s past has been remembered and interpreted. An alternative starting point might be the numerous maps at the front of the book which show the Empire’s extent and something of its complex internal composition. These maps are a deliberate attempt to correct the impression conveyed by conventional historical atlases which show countries like France or England as solid blocks of colour in contrast to the patchwork quilt that covers central Europe into the mid-nineteenth century. This cartographical convention emerged with the rise of history as a modern profession backed by state funds and charged with writing each nation’s history as a coherent story. Most modern maps still fail to record the full extent of imperial jurisdiction as it existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whilst simultaneously obscuring how other European states remained composites of different regions, legal systems, social orders and economic networks until well into the nineteenth century.Fundamentally, this book shows that no European country has a singular story, no matter what generations of nationalists and populist politicians might have said. All Europe’s countries and peoples are interlinked through historical threads, and these are especially closely woven for those parts of northern, central and southern Europe that once formed the Empire. However, the Empire’s history also indicates that these interrelationships were complex and could be antagonistic. The complexities matter, not only for understanding the stories of what are currently the various European sovereign states, but for how those states currently interact and, indeed, might do in the future through the EU or whatever may replace it. The Empire’s story is primarily one of political culture, of ideal communities and attempts to realise those. A history of purely economic or social relations would no doubt produce a different picture, but one that would equally challenge the dominance of anachronistic national political narratives.The Empire’s history indeed suggests we should reimagine the European map. Even today, the EU and the continent as a whole are presented as a mosaic of differently-coloured sovereign states, yet the composition of those states differs enormously with central governments and citizens having considerably varying powers and allegiances. Formally, political order remains that defined by the ideal of the sovereign state, yet clearly few states fully-command their inhabitants’ actions or loyalties, nor can they control how external pressures influence their internal affairs. The Empire was characterised by fragmented sovereignty, overlapping jurisdictions, and multiple identities. Reconsidering its history might foster a better appreciation of current transnational and global problems.