Volume 9 of the series Mikrotörténelem [Microhistory], edited by Gábor Klaniczay and István M. Szijártó, offers an overview of professor Gyula Szvák’s research career on Russian historiography, a career which stretched over a period of some 40 years. The volume IV. Iván és I. Péter mikrohistoriográfiája [A micro-historiography of Ivan IV and Peter I] contains studies previously published in various journals and other volumes. Szvák explains the importance of publishing these papers again in a single volume in the introduction: “The present microhistory is in fact a micro-historiography, and it seeks to make claims about the entirety of Russian history through excavation. Thus, the series of micro-examinations focusing on the periods of the rule of Ivan IV and Peter I provide a picture of 200 years of Russian historical science” (p.8). As a result, the volume may catch the attention not only of those interested in Ivan IV and Peter I, but, as Szvák suggests, anyone interested in Russian historiography or history.

The introduction is followed by six papers of various lengths. The first two focus primarily on the Russian and Soviet historiography on Ivan IV, while the third discusses all the historiographical works published on Peter I in Russia. These three studies constitute the bulk of the volume (pp.19–136). Although the volume is not divided thematically, after the first section, which clearly deals with (micro)historiography, the second part, which begins with Chapter 4, focuses more on the oeuvre of a selected few historiographers. The first study discusses Russian historian Ruslan Skrynnikov and his historical conception of Ivan IV. The following chapter provides a comparison of Skyrnnikov’s career and the career of Hungarian historian József Perényi. The final chapter, the third thematic part of the volume, is a study on attempts to compare Ivan IV and Peter I.

As my intention with this review is to introduce a volume the studies of which have been published earlier, I will not discuss the studies themselves individually. It is worth paying attention to the introduction, however, which was written specifically for the volume. The introductory chapter consists of four smaller sections. The first one discusses a recent Russian-language anthology of Gyula Szvák’s studies, the main inspiration for the volume reviewed here. Since, according to the author, Hungarian readers are interested mainly in Ivan IV and Peter I, the Hungarian edition only contains studies written about the two rulers. Based on the decades the author has spent in the field of Russistics, this claim is supposedly justified. However, it might have been worth including at least a short list of the studies that were not selected for this volume. In the same section, we are given a brief discussion of the tenets and development of Gyula Szvák’s historiographical works, as well as of his “arrival” at “micro-historiography” as a concept. In the following sections, Szvák reflects on changes in Soviet historiography and the role of Russian studies in Hungary, with special regard to Szvák’s own experiences and expertise. The section provides an exciting insight into life as a historian in the period prior to the change of regimes through the eyes of Gyula Szvák and the “lens” of Russian studies in Hungary, of course. Szvák recalls limitations to academic freedom in Soviet historiography and, later, the loosening of these constraints, as compared with a more enabling Hungarian social and academic life.

The concluding thoughts of the introduction appear to be a summary of a historian’s career in the context of current political events. Although Szvák does not primarily deal with Russian historiography here, he does not fully digress from it either, since as the papers in the volume shed light on the relationship of historians of the given period to the state powers of the times, the final section of the introduction likewise mentions some major conflicts concerning the academic sphere in the past few years. In the author’s view, the parallel between the historical perspective of the volume and the situation report of the present time, formulated at the end of the introduction, is manifested in the tendencies of the development of an authoritarian rule and historians’ relationships to these tendencies. The selected subjects of the volume (Ivan IV and Peter I) practically determine the questions of this kind, as the historical assessment of the two monarchs was never an issue to which state power could afford to be indifferent.

The first three studies present the entirety of the Russian and Soviet historiography on Ivan IV and Peter I, thus achieving the aims laid out in the introduction: they provide a comprehensive picture of 300 years of Russian and Soviet historiography. The relationship between historian and state power, emphasized in the introduction, appears as merely a minor topic next to more imposing themes, such as the use of sources, the importance of belonging to certain schools of historiography, academic discourse, and the impacts of international Russian studies, among others. The spelling of Russian names to Hungarian can be done in several ways, and, in my assessment, Szvák is not consistent in this respect. Nevertheless, this obviously does not affect the value of the studies from the perspective of their content.

The second part of the volume foregrounds the work of historiographers Ruslan Skrynnikov and József Perényi, who have become historical figures themselves. The Soviet historiographer is mentioned in two studies, one of which discusses his works on Ivan IV. The greatest merit of the volume is this very in-depth examination: considering the previous study on the historiography of Ivan IV, the reader is given an opportunity to get to know the deeper connections and the oeuvre and mindset of the Soviet historian. At first glance, the only study which seems to fall somewhat outside of the scope of the topics of the volume is the one comparing the career of the Soviet historian and József Perényi, but the claims made in the introduction and the study on Skyrnnikov’s oeuvre create a logical connection between the studies. The two historians are connected not only by their works but also by the author himself, Gyula Szvák. This paves the way for the final study in the volume, IV. Iván és I. Péter [Ivan IV and Peter I], which is by Szvák and which offers a comparative analysis of the two monarchs. Szvák approaches the comparison from basic perspective, such as systems of historical theory, socio-political processes, autocracy, individual lives, and personality traits. It is important to mention here that, while the other studies in the volume meet the criteria of scholarly publications, the final section lacks proper references. It would have been worth spending a bit more time on correcting these oversights.

Overall, volume 9 of the series Mikrotörténelem offers much more than the title suggests, since, in accordance with the objectives, in addition to an (undoubtedly detailed) Russian historiography on Ivan IV and Peter I, it also provides a comprehensive picture of the entirety of historiography in Russia. It also offers insights into Gyula Szvák’s oeuvre and the achievements and professional life of Hungarian scholars of Russian history and culture in the past few decades, hallmarked by Szvák’s name. I recommend the volume for all those interested in the aforementioned topics.

Patrik Dinnyés
Eszterházy Károly University

Érzelmek és mostohák: Mozaikcsaládok a régi Magyarországon (1500–1850) [Emotions and stepparents: Mosaic families in old Hungary, 1500–1850]. Edited by Gabriella Erdélyi. Budapest: Research Centre for the Humanities, 2019. 307 pp.

While not entirely unprecedented, it is by no means common for someone to launch her own books series when also working as an instrumental member of a research group. With the support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Momentum “Integrating Families” Research Group, which has been active for three years now, published both study volumes and source publications in the Hungarian Family Stories series. The fourth volume, entitled Érzelmek és mostohák. Mozaikcsaládok a régi Magyarországon (1500–1850) [Emotions and stepparents: Mosaic families in old Hungary, 1500–1850], was published in 2019. In 2020, the fifth volume, Özvegyek és árvák a régi Magyarországon, 1550–1940 [Widows, widowers, and orphans in old Hungary, 1550–1940] was also published. As the titles (which at first may seem surprising) indicate, these works constitute examples of scholarship on the history of emotions, a trend in the secondary literature which is relatively new in Hungary and which promises an array of important insights and conclusions.

The title is surprising not simply from a linguistic perspective. This linking of something abstract (emotions) with a specific group (stepparents) may arouse some suspicion in the reader. The title, which begs some interpretation, may seem bold or far-reaching, while the subtitle maintains a discrete distance. The image on the cover, however, which depicts the Old Testament scene when Hagar is driven away by Abraham, offers a vivid visual portrayal of the mix of sentiments involved in this relationship, which arguably remains a less familiar part of our image repertoire even today. It also reminds us that these complex relationships were a form of cohabitation in Old Testament times. Apropos of this, one may well raise the question found on the inside cover, which can be considered the basic question of the volume: did family life actually change radically in the eighteenth century, a moment in our history at which, if one is to believe the discourses which have emerged on the subject, there was a new intimacy to the relationships among people living in the same household? The lines which follow this and the chapter by Gabriella Erdélyi, who is also the editor of the volume, make very clear that the authors focus on instances in which the family unit, understood in its classical sense, broke up and new family members (stepparents and stepsiblings) were added to it. Their discussions examine the emotional responses among family members to these changes.

The enterprise fits well into the arc of family history that has unfolded since the 1970s, following the work of Philippe Ariès and Lawrence Stone, whose contributions constitute points of departure in the field. However, as the work of Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, whose writings are quoted several times in the volume, shows, historical demographics, which is closely intertwined with anthropology, has been able to spring to new life from its earlier seemingly dead state precisely by adopting this multifaceted approach, so the volume seems to show a sense of the existing anticipation when it sets, as one of its aims, the goal of taking the first steps in research in Hungary on stepchildren in the early modern era (p.11). After this (and thus notably at the beginning of the book and not the end, where one might otherwise expect a summary of the conclusions of the various studies), in the introduction, Erdélyi describes the individual texts and contextualizes them in relation to one another. For a reader who is less familiar with the field and the existing secondary literature, the second half of this introduction may become more difficult to read, since it is structured according to the chapters of the book and thus does not acquaint the reader with the chains of reasoning on the basis of which the final ascertainments are made. Thus, for me, once I accepted the more complex intellectual challenge inherent in postmodern propositions, the introduction was more of a revelation when I read it a second time, after having read the volume itself. Perhaps this was the one of the editor’s goals.

For the most part, the authors who contributed to the volume are researchers tied to the Research Centre for the Humanities and Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), as well as one working at the University of Pécs and one at Central European University. Thus, one finds among them historians, art and literary historians, and an ethnographer.

The overviews of the secondary literature on the subject, which were done quite conscientiously by most of the contributors, are arguably important to research and scholarship in Hungary on the history of emotions. Dóra Mérai, Gabriella Erdélyi, Petra Bálint, and Mónika Mátay all draw on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. This is understandable, since the essence of the idea that emotions are social phenomena not only in their expression but also in and of themselves already increases the distance between the researcher and his or her topic. This notion forces the researcher to arrive at a premise which has been more scrupulously interrogated and also to ask about the place and validity of each emotion. Thus, the secondary literature on which the individual authors draw is linked to this, necessitating a rethinking of the research questions. This is true whether one is thinking of Susan Broomhall (on whom Gabriella Erdélyi and Emese Gyimesi draw), who analyzes approaches in the study of the history of emotions emphatically from the perspective of family relationships, Richard van Dülmen (on who Eleonóra Géra draws), who specifically examines sexual sensuality, or Thomas Khuen and Simona Cerutti (on whom Mónika Mátay draws), who consider the historical aspects of flexible legal interpretation. Thus, this volume, which can and indeed should be read (also) as a bibliography of the secondary literature on the history of emotions constitutes a major contribution to the secondary literature on the subject in Hungary, a contribution which drastically enriches the available palette of works on the topic.

From the perspective of the questions raised in the book, three chapters help orient the reader. In the section entitled “Family Objects and Practices,” Orsolya Bubryák of the Research Centre for the Humanities Institute of Art History uses the last will and testament of Palatine Pál Esterházy (among other sources) to examine the extent to which the emotional relationships between a testator and his heirs and shifts in these relationships influenced hereditary strategies. Dóra Mérai of CEU draws conclusions about the emotional bonds among close family members on the basis of differences in scripts on gravestones. Dalma Bódai of ELTE examines the gifts given to the daughters of Erzsébet Czobor, who was the second wife of Palatine György Thurzó. The chapter concludes with the study by Gabriella Erdélyi of the Research Centre for the Humanities Institute of History. Drawing on the seventeenth-century correspondence among members of the Esterházy family, Erdélyi examines how family correspondence went beyond the simple exchange of information and became a discursive space for the expression of emotions.

Although the first chapter contains discussions of some arguably acute situations, the second chapter, “Discussions of Family Conflicts,” dwells even more on family relationships that were rife with tension. A micro-historical study by Eleonóra Géra’s of ELTE recounts the story of a woman who married three times. Géra situates the narrative within the interpretative framework of the history of emotions, putting emphasis on the considerations which played a role in the decisions of this woman, who married first because she was compelled to do so, but who later remarried a second and third time as a consequence of her own wishes. The study by Petra Bálint, also of ELTE, begins with a question which may appear shocking at first: “Were girls and women who committed infanticide and child murder really evil and heartless? […] What did they feel, or did they feel anything when they did what they did?” (p.172) Bálint’s study is interesting in part because the protagonists belonged to the lower and peripheral strata of the feudal world. Research which draws on court documents and investigates the fates of women who committed infanticide or who poisoned their husbands is a new element in the scholarship on family history in Hungary. The third author of the chapter, Mónika Mátay, also of ELTE, pursues research on middle-class families in the city of Debrecen. She draws on an array of sources in her discussion of the implications, from the perspective of family history, of the last will and testament of a pig slaughterer who, as a denizen of one of the market towns in Hungary, enjoyed essentially the same rights as a citizen of a free royal city. Mátay makes subtle and sophisticated use of the tools of legal anthropology and offers an analysis of an intricate network of relationships.

The third chapter, entitled “Family Spaces, Identities, and Roles,” offers another exciting installment in Emese Gyimesi’s research on the life of Júlia Szendrey. Gyimesi acquaints her reader with the correspondence of the widowed Szendrey’s children born from her marriage to Árpád Horvát. She strives to arrive at some impression of the image that Szendrey’s children by her second husband had of their closest family members, for instance of their half-brother Zoltán Petőfi and their aunt Mária Szendrey (the complete correspondence among the children has since been published in a volume edited by Gyimesi). Zsófia Kucserka of the University of Pécs examines the diaries and correspondence of Etelka Slachta, sources which have already been published and which have been familiar for a long time to social scientists. Kucserka considers the impacts of the texts which Slachta wrote in various genres on her private life and the roles she played in the public sphere.

Some of the authors make use of an array of different types of sources, while others use a narrower range of source types. Naturally, when available, letters constitute an excellent source for the kinds of inquiries one finds here, and not surprisingly, many of the authors draw heavily on family correspondence (Erdélyi, Gyimesi, and Kucserka, for instance). In the absence of these kinds of sources, however, researchers are sometimes refreshingly innovative. Orsolya Bubryák, Eleonóra Géra, and Mónika Mátay make seasoned use of last wills and testaments, documents from litigation, and lists pertaining to bequests, among other things. Dóra Mérai tears her reader from the world of two-dimensional sources (i.e. the written word) and bases her conclusions on a database containing information pertaining to 314 tombstones from Transylvania. The sheer quantity of sources used by the authors and the impressive variety of sources compel the reader to be creative and open, as if reminding us that even sources which have been familiar to people in the field for a long time can show a very new face if one asks a few well-aimed questions.

I do not intend, in this review, to offer a detailed presentation of the results of the various endeavors. Rather, in conclusion, I would prefer simply to share a few thoughts. Orsolya Bubryák’s article provides a very revealing example of how a nobleman from the so-called highlands (or Upper Hungary, what today is Slovakia) could treat his children very differently in his will even though he loved them equally. Mérai does a masterful job acquainting us with the tombstones on which she basis her conclusions concerning emotional bonds in the family and the community. Dalma Bódai guides her reader through the intimate exchange of information among Erzsébet Czobor and her daughters, and Gabriella Erdélyi calls attention to descriptions of body language in the letters written by members of the Esterházy family (and others), descriptions which serve as expressions of emotion and complement textual communication. Géra Eleonóra offers an enjoyable narrative of Eva Elisabetha Wittmann’s three marriages, full of twists and turns, and she points out Wittmann’s character flaws. Petra Bálint makes a penetrating statement when she notes that what may appear to the historian who draws on court and litigation documents as the witnesses’ lack of sensitivity is more a feature of the source itself, as a type, than of the people involved. Emese Gyimesi’s focused and dense text presents and analyzes the Horvát family home in Hársfa Street and, thus, the private spaces used by the family and the rooms they used as spaces in which to welcome guests and members of the public. She also presents the practices used by the children in their correspondence and the roles of family celebrations. In Kucserka’s discussion of Slachta, writing again is given an important role both as tool and as act in the Biedermeier notion of the family and the ideal of the patriotic Hungarian woman.

In varying and arguably mutually reinforcing ways, the articles all proffer answers of a sort to the basic question. Ariès’s contention concerning the process which began in the eighteenth century and which saw emotional bonds come to enjoy an increasingly prominent place in family life has now found corroboration not only in the international secondary literature, but also in the secondary literature, more narrowly, in Hungary, thus prodding further research into the history of emotions. This is not simply some closing flourish, as clearly shown by the fact that, in 2019, a similarly monumental work was published on the subject in Hungary, Az érzelmek története [The history of emotions], a collection of conference papers compiled by the István Hajnal Circle and edited by Anikó Lukács and Árpád Tóth. Thus, this impressive volume edited by Gabriella Erdélyi both fills a lacuna in the secondary literature and will serve to nurture further research.

Gábor Koloh
Eötvös Loránd University

The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire. By Dominique Kirchner Reill. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 312 pp.

Dominique Reill, professor at the University of Miami, has done something that Hungarian, Croatian, and Italian historians have failed to do so far: in a coherent monograph, she has broken with a chronological, somewhat nationalist discussion of the political and diplomatic issues of the events in Fiume that followed World War I. This comes as no surprise, since Reill’s thinking has been greatly influenced by the ideas and arguments of István Deák, Pieter M. Judson, and Hannah Arendt, who tended to emphasize the diversity and plurality of the Habsburg Monarchy and reconsidered nationalism, as well as the studies by William Klinger, Ivan Jeličić, and Vanni d’Alessio on Fiume, in which the authors adopted a more modern approach and dispensed with stereotypes. Although Reill does not distance herself from theoretical postmodern theories and models, instead of oversimplifying theoretical discussions and relying on convenient absolutes, she builds her Fiume-narrative on empirical, source-centered research. This means that Reill summarizes the arguments laid out in previous individual studies explicitly and shapes them into a consistent narrative, while also verifying or refuting them by adding her own examples.

The subject matter of the volume is thus neither Gabriele d’Annunzio’s extravagant rule nor the career of some prominent figures or the endless disputes about where Fiume belonged. Reill is most interested in the community’s and people’s attitudes in various situations, as well as the continuation, gradual shift, and waning of structures of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In other words, instead of examining “what happened when,” she searches for answers concerning the reasons for the social and mental processes behind the historical events, such as why the ruling elite, which trumpeted nationalist slogans, so firmly insisted on the annexation of the Italian town when at least half of the inhabitants did not claim Italian as their mother tongue. Why did a multilingual and multiethnic small town want to insert itself into the Italian nation-state? In what ways, with what slogans, and under what conditions did it hope to do so? How compatible could nationalist and localist interests be? And finally, what was the experience of the inhabitants, living in existential uncertainty; in what forms did they experience this transitional phase?

Reill’s first thesis is that the basic situation of Fiume after the war was determined by its extensive autonomy under the Dual Monarchy, its state of being a corpus separatum, a “semiautonomous city-state.” As part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and, within that, the Kingdom of Hungary, the port could count on generous support by Hungarian governments, as well as the hinterland function of the entire empire: it had a large market and was part of a protective network. Without these favorable circumstances, the elites of Fiume were forced to take steps. The town councilors knew that Fiume was incapable of functioning on its own, so they looked for a new strong “protective shield,” a hinterland to replace the monarchy. Under the new circumstances, the most suitable alternative for a hinterland was Italy, regarded as the “Madrepatria” (mother country).

This leads to two other major arguments by Reill. First, the nationalization of Fiume or its transformation into “Italianissima,” as expressed at least by symbols and through statistical ratios, were justified by the abovementioned concerns. Second, although the people of Fiume did all they could to make their town part of the Kingdom of Italy, they remained localists with local interests, including the safeguarding of their privileges, even in their most nationalist moments. For them “Patria” meant their birthplace and place of residence, not Italy. This “theory of continuity” is closely linked to Reill’s fourth thesis, which queries the view that the end of World War I and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s endeavor of Fiume, ending with the Bloody Christmas of 1920, were simple and clear watersheds which divided political systems. Reill foregrounds continuities instead of breaking points, and she emphasizes the political elite’s opportunities and competencies to preserve their positions, as well as their adaptation strategies.

This firm emphasis on interests and the focus on aims could easily lead to a simplified, instrumental concept of nationalism, but that is not the case here. It enables Reill to avoid denying the residents’ zeal for and sentimental attachment to the Italian nation and to examine the local interpretations of “nationalism,” “localism,” and “autonomy” in a period which included the era of the Dual Monarchy as well. Furthermore, Reill offers a more nuanced picture and avoids banalities in part because she analyzes the transformation of structures and changes in people’s life circumstances in five large units, alongside the introductory and concluding chapter, through the dimensions of economic and financial difficulties (money), the relationship between power and autonomy (laws and independence), belonging (pertinency and citizenship), as well as internal and external manifestations of identity (symbols and propaganda), with a list of representative micro-historical examples from everyday life.

The part about the economy, for instance, begins with the example of a young legionary in Italy, who, with naïve enthusiasm, tells his fiancée about the beauty of the town and (an alleged) Italian localism, as well as the pretty, easy girls of Fiume (no doubt his purse was full of Italian lire and Hungarian/Austrian crowns). Reill, on the other hand, points out that the local inhabitants were acquainted with more currencies than these two. Borislavo Gjurić, for example, was arrested because in addition to Italian lire, he also had French francs, Serbian dinars, and Croatian-Slovenian and Fiume crowns on him. With the help of these examples, Reill illustrates how the monetary union of the empire collapsed, and by the spring of 1919, at least four different currencies and fake banknotes were circulating in Fiume. The uncontrolled circulation of money made the economic situation of both individuals and the town unstable.

Although restoring financial conditions was paramount, the elites of Fiume believed that settling currency issues was the duty of the state, so they expected the Italian government to do something about it. This gave a new impetus to the annexation program, indicated by converging Fiume crown to Italian lire, that is, gradually coordinating the economy of Fiume and Italy. Rome, however, believed that the Italian state had the exclusive right to annexation and was appalled by the town’s demand to be annexed in accordance with predetermined conditions (keeping its autonomy). There were further aspects to this questioning of the relationship between power and autonomy, in no small part simply because the issue of where the port belonged was debated for long time to come, so Fiume practically had to function as an independent state for a time. This position was difficult to manage, however, mainly as a result of an economic and financial crisis, growing unemployment, and permanent coal and food shortages due to consecutive blockades and military occupations.

Reill presents one way of dealing with procurement difficulties through the failed deal between Slavko Ivančić, a “trader in comestibles” from Fiume, and Ivan Rošić, an inn owner and agricultural supplier from a Croatian village. The story may also help demonstrate the continuity of the legal system and jurisdiction of Fiume, since it clearly shows that until the fall of 1920, the denizens of the city operated in accordance with the former laws and orders. Furthermore, by offering a comparison of financial and legal conditions, Reill also points out one relevant difference: while the multi-currency system was the result of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the challenges and opportunities of multi-system jurisdiction had shaped the lives of the inhabitants of Fiume for generations.

In her discussion of the everyday conflicts of the tobacco factory and the post office, Reill identifies similar elements of continuity in terms of the issue of language use. She comes to the conclusion that although the elites of Fiume strove for the establishment of monolingual (Italian) administration, this was mainly a façade to show to the rest of the world, as internal communication continued to be multilingual. The same is true of the implementation of the regulation concerning the Italianization of names, in connection with which Reill notes that while the measure served the purpose of emphasizing the Italian character and dedication of the inhabitants, there were huge differences between theory and practice. All this indicates that these laws were either not implemented at all or only to some degree and that there were individual preferences and choices. To underlie this claim, Reill mentions two concrete examples from among the many: despite their Italian nationalist convictions, Antonio Grossich, the widely respected elderly president of the Italian National Council in Fiume, kept the name Grossich, and his ambitious secretary, Salvatore Bellasich, continued to be called Bellasich.

One of Reill’s greatest merits is that she does not shy away from treating legal categories in a nuanced way. She dedicates a whole chapter to content-related and qualitative differences between concepts of citizenship and residence. This is justified by her emphasis on the continued validity of the municipal statute of 1872 regulating civic entitlement, which provided the elite of Fiume with an effective tool to enforce their rights under the shifting (and financially limited) conditions. In fact, by regulating the conditions of “Fiume pertinency” and concomitant active political participation (electoral reform), the elite of Fiume could both strengthen the support they received and their legitimacy and protect the (in a classical sense) “lawful” members of the community from competition in the form of a flood of “strangers” coming to the town. In this respect, even Gabriele d’Annunzio’s soldiers could not have been exempt from the rule: like the civilian “newcomers,” they could only receive the “citizenship to the Free City of Fiume,” reserved for “others.”

In addition to the redistribution of social, economic, and political privileges, education also served the purpose of preserving the positions and transmitting localist values. Reill proves this by pointing out that even in the fall of 1919, elementary schools in the city used traditional didactic teaching methods and Fiume-centered maps. Although the town seemed to become an “Italianissima” dressed in the Italian tricolored flag, for the locals it remained, for a long time, what it was before: the “true Patria,” which everyone had to know. Thus, mapping the district, the country, and the world could only start after one had acquired a rich knowledge of Fiume itself.

Overall, Reill offers a new interpretation of Fiume, using modern approaches and methodologies. Her volume will surely be one of the most, if not the most influential monograph on Fiume in years to come for two reasons. First, her monograph is impressive in its thoroughness, the precise use of terms, its clever methodological solutions, its welcoming style, and its use of convincing examples based on a rich and diverse collection of sources. Second, thanks to the distance Reill keeps when using theories and examining sources, she is able to see and show different phenomena in all their complexity.

Ágnes Ordasi
National Archives of Hungary

Language Diversity in the Late Habsburg Empire. By Markian Prokopovych, Carl Bethke, and Tamara Scheer. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 268 pp.

This volume about linguistic issues in the late Habsburg monarchy builds on both recent work in nationalism theory and Habsburg historical sociolinguistics. The contributions vary pleasingly in their geographic and methodological focus, yet converge on a few key issues: the influence of nationalist agitation, the role of the state, multilingualism, language shift, and the social domains assigned to different varieties.

Two initial chapters contextualize the volume in various scholarly literatures. The editors’ forward provides an excellent historiography while signalling an interest in the everyday practices which the volume’s strongest contributions examine. With his customary eloquence, Pieter Judson then considers Habsburg multilingualism in the context of other multilingual states, problematizing traditional assumptions according to which linguistic diversity leads inevitably to national conflict.

The remaining chapters provide the case studies which give the book substance. Csilla Fedinec and István Csernicskó’s study of language use in Transcarpathia is the only chapter to betray a nationalist perspective. The authors on three (!) separate occasions claim that the partition of Hungary transformed ethnic Hungarians into “a new minority” in the region (pp.161, 163, 193), even though Magyars have in fact never been Transcarpathia’s majority community. Their survey of Transcarpathia’s various nationalities treats each in a separate section, thus reifying sharp borders between them. They rely disproportionately on Hungarian-language sources: indeed, their discussion of Rusyns begins with two parish priests who wrote in Hungarian, and thus appear rather unrepresentative of Slavic opinion. Ultimately, the authors contradict themselves, claiming e.g. both that “Hungarian as the language of power did not become prestigious among the local Slavic speakers” (p.190) and that proficiency in Hungarian “was seen as a key to success in life” (p.175); both that “national indifference was also linguistic indifference” (p.193) and that “language has always had a key role in the self-identification process of the nation state and individuals” (p.162). The editors might have done better to have cut this chapter.

Carl Bethke examines the history of Sarajevo’s German-language newspaper, the Bosnische Post. Bethke describes the newspaper’s various editors, their editorial interests, their family lives, and their financial difficulties. Since the newspaper addressed various local constituencies and eschewed nationalism, Bethke ultimately concludes that “the German-language … did not ‘belong’ to one group” (p.114). While a respectable contribution to the history of Habsburg journalism, the chapter seems somewhat misplaced in this volume.

The remaining chapters, however, are not only strong, but complement each other. Anamarija Lukić emphasizes local particularism in a study of language use in Osijek, even providing lexical examples of Osijek German. By studying linguistic usage in local newspapers and the theatre, she documents the linguistic shift to Croatian without national triumphalism. Matthäus Wehowski views linguistic issues through the lens of a secondary school in Teschen, examining school yearbooks and considering student enrolments in Czech and Polish classes. Imperial loyalties and the desire for social mobility feature more prominently than nationalist agitation. Wehowski views his narrative as characteristic for borderlands generally, urging “scholars to take a closer look at the periphery” (p.217).

Marta Verginella considers the expansion of Slavic into Trieste, a town which had hitherto balanced Italian and German. Though Italian-speaking elites looked down on Slovene and sought to exclude it, Verginella’s research shows that Slavic increasingly gained ground in legal documents, such as testaments. Though her narrative follows traditional historiographic themes of discrimination and resistance, Verginella’s conclusion emphasizes “the fluidity of … identities and the fragility of the national historiographical paradigm (p.49).”

While Irina Marin narrowly restricts her attention to four Romanian generals, she compensates for this limited breadth with depth and insight. She shows that her four generals, though loyal to the Habsburg monarch and the Empire as a whole, both formed sophisticated opinions about linguistic issues and engaged in linguistic activism. She finds that they accepted multilingualism and opposed “language hierarchies, whereby one language took precedence over and stifled another,” concluding that such opinions “did not go against the grain of their military standing, but rather were derived organically thereof” (pp.133–34).

In a fascinating study of language use at the urban level, Ágoston Berecz documents the surprising impotence of Hungary’s Magyarization policies. Considering a handful of towns in Transylvania and the Banat, Berecz shows that city governments not only continued using German and Romanian for local business, such as minute-keeping, minor court cases, public notices, and job advertisements, but did so with the tacit approval of central authorities. The surprising and well-documented narrative emphasizes estate hierarchies and social exclusions, but above all the inability of the Magyarizing parliament to affect local use. Berecz also provocatively contrasts the relatively placid situation in Hungary, where “local governments seldom engaged in symbolic politics” (p.157), with the bitter nationalization of local politics of Cisleithania.

Rok Stergar places the military within the context of local politics, specifically examining the role of the army garrison in Ljubljana. While local patriots became involved in Slavic philological controversies and increasingly sought to promote Slavic even at the expense of German, the city council also sought good relations with the garrison, a source of income for innkeepers, tailors and so forth. Stergar shows that different actors invested linguistic acts with different symbolic meanings, grounding his general points with a variety of illuminating incidents laboriously gathered from an impressively diverse array of sources.

Jan Fellerer’s analysis of language use in Lviv also rests on concrete examples from particular events. Examining transcripts of court cases, he pieces together the linguistic backgrounds of the various litigants, persuasively surmising their various linguistic competencies, the means through which those competencies were achieved, and the social domains in which they were exercised. While a tour-de-force of painstaking and tenacious archival research, Fellerer’s chapter offers relatively meagre conclusions: it “offers glimpses of everyday multilingual practices” (p.242).

Jeroen van Drunen, finally, places his analysis of linguistic usage in Bukovina within a broader historiographical context. Problematizing both popular descriptions of Bukovinans as habitually multilingual and what he calls the “multilingualism-monolingualism dichotomy” (p.246), van Drunen documents language mixing affecting speakers of German, Romanian and Slavic. In a provocative conclusion, Drunen urges scholars to cease viewing languages “as monolithic entities without internal distinctions” (p.267).

The question of borders within languages seems most pressing for the Monarchy’s Slavs. The belief that all Slavs spoke the same language, hegemonic in the early nineteenth century, evidently persisted, since traces of Pan-Slavism appear in several chapters. Yet only Stergar alludes to a transition from “Carniolan Slavic” to “Slovene” (p.53–55). Verginella’s texts often refer to “Slavic,” but Verginella usually glosses such usage as references to “Slovene” (p.31, 34, 35, 43). Wehowski seems baffled by the designation “Czechoslavic” (p.205). Fedinec and Csernicskó mistakenly conflate Pan-Slavism with Russianism (p.194).

The various contributions thus differ widely in their geographic focus, though the volume as a whole curiously neglects Vienna, Budapest and Prague. The contributions also consider different social domains: schools, courts, the military, journalism, theatre, and different levels of state administration. Methodologically, the articles obviously vary in sophistication, both in relationship to linguistic theory and nationalism studies, but overall the volume reaches a very high standard. This work enhances our knowledge in myriad ways, and will make a welcome contribution to scholarship.

Alexander Maxwell
Victoria University of Wellington

Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association. By Cristina A. Bejan. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xxix + 323 pp.

The relationship between intellectuals and politics in interwar Romania emerged as a crucial topic after the fall of communism, and it generated cultural and often ideological debates that deeply marked the public life of the country. Attitudes ranged from an idealized rediscovery of the interwar period to a more critical approach towards what was a highly complex and controversial period in Romanian history. These debates generated an impressive amount of works, varying in size and quality, which maintain a certain level of interest in the topic even today. In this context, Cristina Bejan’s well-researched book represents a welcome addition to an already very crowded field of study, providing a fresh perspective on a highly controversial topic.

As has been the case with other works on this topic, the broad intellectual drive behind this book is the search for an explanation regarding the fascist sympathies of some members of what was termed “the 1927 Generation” or “the Young Generation” of Romanian interwar intellectuals. Among representatives of this trend, one could mention Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Mihail Sebastian, and Petru Comarnescu. Bejan tells the story of this generation by focusing on the Criterion Association, a cultural circle founded in 1932 which included many of the young intellectuals of the time. One of Bejan’s merits is that she has provided the first book-length account on Criterion ever published in English.

While much has been written about the fascist allegiances of a sizable part of the “1927 Generation,” the fact that some of its members did not join their colleagues on the path to “rhinocerisation”(to borrow the metaphor from Eugène Ionesco’s play, Rhinocéros) received less attention, and Bejan’s work is, in this regard, a step in the right direction.

The book is divided into nine chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. It begins by setting the stage conceptually and historically. In the introduction, Bejan discusses the sensitive issue of the connection between intellectuals and political extremism, and she places the Young Generation in the proper cultural context by situating it among previous Romanian intellectual traditions. She also pays close attention to the historical context in which this generation was active, marked by the growth of the political extremism which ultimately affected its own existence.

The next chapter documents the beginnings of the 1927 Generation and the influence exerted by Nae Ionescu, a philosophy professor at the University of Bucharest who also became a staunch supporter of the Iron Guard. Mircea Eliade’s prominence as a leading member of this generation is also presented in great detail, as well as the way in which these young intellectuals came together as a group, some being from similar backgrounds (former Bucharest high school colleagues), while others came from outside the capital city. Bejan puts particular emphasis on the importance of education abroad, especially for those who chose to study outside of Europe in places such as India (Eliade) and the United States (Comarnescu), instead of going to Western Europe.

Bejan is careful to make an important distinction in Chapter 3, aptly stating that the Young Generation and the Criterion Association did not fully overlap and should be seen as distinct manifestations of the interactions among young interwar Romanian intellectuals. In her discussion of the founding of the movement, the attention she gives to episodes regarding life in interwar Bucharest and the bohemian side of this group of young intellectuals helps further a more nuanced understanding of what brought these people together in the first place, the same way the brutal political turn from second part of the 1930s shows why this camaraderie did not suffice anymore to keep them on the same side. Bejan also points out the inner rivalries that marked Criterion’s activity, thus avoiding a rosy picture that would not do justice to the diversity of the group. Another salient and seldom covered aspect of the volume is the insistence on the way in which Criterion was organized and managed by its founder, Petru Comarnescu.

The activity of the group in 1932, its first and most prolific year of existence, is detailed in Chapter 4, including the public lecture series, which was followed by debates focusing on a wide array of cultural and even political issues, with diverse topics ranging from Lenin to Mussolini, Greta Garbo to Krishnamurti, and Gandhi to Picasso. These topics reflected the desire of the group to serve as a hub which would connect the Romanian audience with the most important cultural and political trends of the day. In a way, the group became a victim of its own success. The conferences, which were held at the Royal Foundation building in the center of Bucharest, were very popular, but with success came controversy, contestation, and also violence. Accused of having a hidden communist agenda, some of Criterion’s public conferences were targeted by far-right agitators, and this brought the group to the attention of the authorities.

Comarnescu’s rich plans for 1933, carefully detailed by Bejan in Chapter 5, were torn apart by what in the terms of that age could be described as history catching up with this generation. The political events of 1933, beginning with the February workers’ strike in Bucharest and ending with the assassination of the liberal prime minster I. G. Duca by members of the Iron Guard in December, paralleled a troubled year for Criterionists, who could no longer hide their political allegiances. The backlash following the assassination was also felt by intellectuals close to the Iron Guard, including some of the Criterionists. The dissolution of the group, thus, became imminent. A last attempt to maintain its presence was the publication of the homonymous journal in 1934, but the Association never returned to its former glory. Bejan credits the publication of the Criterion journal as having been a salient moment, and she offers a close reading of the main topics discussed in the seven issues that were published. While this analysis of the “last throb” (Zigu Ornea) of the group constitutes a novel and useful enterprise, it is also true that the journal never enjoyed the fame or influence that the group promisingly started to have in 1932–1933.

The commonly accepted explanation regarding the dissolution of the Criterion Association underlines the insurmountable political differences that permeated the group following the rise of the Iron Guard. This rise was made possible in part because of the contributions of several young intellectuals, some of them members of or close to Criterion. To this already beaten explanatory path, Chapter 6 adds another possible explanation for the dissolution of the group, namely a well-known public scandal from the mid-1930s in which members of the group were accused of promoting homosexuality. Petru Comarnescu, Criterion’s factotum, was one of the main targets of the scandal. As Bejan notes, this scandal marked the public and even personal trajectories of those involved, and Criterion would no longer be a part of their plans.

The “rhinocerisation” of parts of the Young Generation did not come as a surprise, and it accompanied the growth of the Iron Guard. Bejan documents the paths taken by famous Criterionists who sympathized with and supported this movement, and she also focuses on those lesser-known members who did not join their colleagues down this path. Among those who became fierce Iron Guardists, Marietta Sadova’s case has never been made the focus of serious scholarly discussion, and it is to Bejan’s credit that she has accomplished this by using relevant information from Sadova’s Securitate file, though it may be a bit of an overstatement to call Sadova the Romanian Leni Riefenstahl.

The book is at its best when it takes advantage of the rich primary sources which Bejan has diligently studied over the years in archives and libraries, bringing to light little known aspects such as those regarding the inner management and functioning of Criterion in its beginnings. Her style is neither dry nor pretentious, offering instead a lively and passionate reading experience that does not come at the expense of academic rigorousness.

In a sense, the story of the Criterion Association matches, up to a point, the story of interwar Romania. It is to Cristina Bejan’s merit that she has managed to capture the histories of this group so well, while also providing the reader with a portrait of interwar Romania in its best and worst moments. This well-documented work on a highly intriguing topic has been written in an enjoyable manner, thus making it a suitable reading for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Valentin Săndulescu
University of Bucharest

Sixties Europe. By Timothy Scott Brown. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ix+241 pp.

1968 and the “long sixties” have been at the forefront of scholarly and public interest since their rediscovery in 2008, on the 40th anniversary of perhaps the most salient year of the decade. This is true in no small part because “1968,” as a kind of shorthand, is a way to refer to the transnational and global character of contemporary culture and politics. Timothy Scott Brown, professor of history at Northeastern University, Boston, is one of the most important historians of this period, and his contributions have been paramount to dismantling the national framings of the 1960s protests and revolts and the reframing of 1968 in a global setting.1 His new book, Sixties Europe, continues and revisits themes he has touched on before. This book adheres firmly to a discussion of 1968 as a range of cross-national and interconnected struggles and affirms the deeply shared, global nature of its concerns. Admitting the relevance of anti-colonial struggles, particularly, Vietnam for radicals in Europe and their connections to extra-European activists, Brown nonetheless makes an important revisionist claim that Europe was central in shaping the forms and content of 1960s activism worldwide and that 1968 was a deeply European project. In Brown’s words, Europe provided the most important pool of postmaterialist values, movements in Europe rendered ways of living and the role of culture central for any critique of society and it was the most important site of negotiating the ways of organization of societies (p.3).

Brown makes three important points when he explains why Europe was of central importance in making 1968 a global event. First, he argues that politics was the emphatic concern of the revolt of the 1960s. Second, he highlights that 1968 presumed the transformation of everyday life as a condition for political change and strove for a coalition of movements in art, ways of life, and politics proper. Third, Brown considers the European scenes as vital in transforming decolonization and the antiimperialist struggles into a genuine global issue. However, while it is impossible to cover everything in equal depth, the narrative which he presents seems to miss a few important points. It ignores the fact that one of the crucial motors of the revolt of the 1960s was a generational shift. The book also underestimates the centrality of the Third World in making 1968 a genuine political revolt. The similarity of rebellion in the West and in the East is often taken for granted too hastily. Last, violence and gender, perhaps, were more important in shaping 1968 than Brown seems to assume.

Brown explores the intensification of personal encounters of activists from various countries and the emergence of international networks. Nonetheless, as the book argues, internationalism for 1968 activists meant more than the physical crossing of national borders. As Brown convincingly shows, activists in Europe were deeply convinced that “all struggles were connected” and that their revolt in Europe against their national establishments were parallel with the anti-imperialist fights overseas. The apparently shared concerns to fight oppression and authority led activists both in the West and in the East to believe that rebellion in Paris or Prague and the war in Vietnam were interconnected, they were parts of the same struggle against imperialism outside of Europe and exploitation at home, and they also saw themselves as members of the same international army of revolution.

Social criticism (ideology) and action furthering social change (politics) went hand in hand in the 1960s. One of the book’s most original points is that these programs were sensitive to history. Brown explores how various groups and movements evoked historical antecedents of revolt, particularly the anarchist and libertarian communist traditions of Rosa Luxemburg, the Kronstadt mutiny, the Spanish Republic, or the workers’ councils in 1956 Budapest. The revival of suppressed knowledge of alternative forms of social organization provided intellectual and political ammunition in the assault against both capitalism in the West and official socialism in the East. Brown emphasizes that the politics of 1968 was inherently a politics of the left, and as such, it embraced ideas like liberation from exploitation, self-determination, and social organization based on solidarity. This left, the “New Left,” as Brown highlights, was based on knowledge suppressed both by capitalist and official socialist establishments. Hence, it represented alternative socialisms.

1968 activists had to reconcile anti-capitalism and the abrogation of private ownership of capital and means of production with the emancipation of the individual, who apparently was not alienated only amidst the soul-breaking routines of factory production in the West, but also living under the overly bureaucratic labor regimes of collectivist state ownership in the socialist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. Brown argues that such tensions explain why the question of what the left really was in this new context became inevitable for 1968. Notwithstanding the broad consensus in the East and the West that the new left must be defined against the Stalinist type of official socialism in the East and like-minded communist parties in the West, the character of the left in the 1960s was seen as most clearly discernible in the field of culture in a broad sense. The most typical forms of organization were various movements of lifestyle, famously, the communes of K1 in West Berlin and their followers across Europe. Brown is keen to establish that 1968 activism understood political liberation from authority and oppression as a fundamental liberation of the self, which included experimentations with new forms of living, work, leisure, sexuality, and womanhood.

Brown is shrewd to note that the move beyond the conventional frames of politics was not always peaceful. Protesters in France, Italy, and Yugoslavia were not reluctant to attack police squads, party headquarters, or office buildings of the press. Brown argues that activists were prone to see their violence as defensive and as a response to the violence of oppression used by the authorities. In this perspective, they understood violence as a strategic choice of resistance: to fight against oppression and authority sustained by inherent forms of violence, one needed to become violent, too. Post-1968 terrorism in Europe should be considered in this context, Brown argues. Whereas many discovered the possibility of change in the field of everyday life when the direct political protest began to flag in the West and was clamped down in the East, some embraced clandestine urban guerrilla violence as the proper form of triggering change in an ever-narrowing field of political opposition.

Brown’s discussion of violence and feminism suggests that both were conclusions to the story of 1968. Nonetheless, the story of these components as presented by Brown opens up new perspective from which to approach the history of activism in the 1960s. How important was gender in shaping the character of 1968? What were the implications of staging of the revolution as men’s affair and the iconic macho image of 1968 portrayed by Cohn-Bendit, Dutschke, or Che for reconsiderations of the meanings of revolt, resistance, and protest? Similarly, how was violence important in shaping the politics of 1968? How did the legacies of revolutionary cultures which embraced the violent smashing of the system shape activists’ programs and expectations? These questions suggest that both violence and gender may have been core constituents of 1968 activism, rather than elements of its outcome.

Connections with the extra-European world were crucial here. Radicals in Europe swiftly became passionate about what they perceived as the intransient commitment to revolutionary change: wars of liberation in the extra-European world. This, however, provided more than simple templates for the use of violence at home, and it did more than prompt global solidarities in Europe, as Brown seems to argue. Wars of liberation and antiimperialist revolutions in Asia, Africa and Latin-America were evidence for young revisionists, new left radicals, and, in some ways, old left elites of the validity of class-based revolutionary theories and the vitality of socialism. In short, the left (in its many groupings) saw the revolutionary struggles of Europe coming to new life in the jungles of Vietnam and the mountains of Cuba. Links to the Global South were crucial to a narrative of the politics of 1968 in the language of the left. In turn, one may wonder if the demise of the left in Europe and the loss of belief in viable anti-capitalist alternatives were linked more to the dissolution of the promises of decolonization as a cradle for possibly more just and democratic states in these regions. 1968 was a global event not simply because it was made so in Europe, but rather because the extra-European world had crucial agency in making 1968 a leftist project worldwide.

Whereas the Czechoslovak and to some extent the Polish cases may fit the portrait of 1968 as painted by Brown, other societies in Eastern Europe, particularly, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, were different in many important ways. Several major concerns of the left, such as working-class autonomy, third worldism, and the power of art, helped mobilize activism in these countries, as well. But many activists were motivated by different reasons. Some activists in Hungary were keen on protecting national sovereignty and allegedly authentic, traditional village lifestyles, issues which tend to have more resonance with the populist and conservative right than with a revolutionary left. Nationalism and national self-determination were crucial concerns of the Croatian Spring movement, too. Furthermore, religious activism was important in both Hungary and Poland. This activism strove to reform Christian culture and render it more flexible and socially concerned, including Christian practices such as the introduction of beat music and modern popular culture. Thus, the groups and scenes of 1968 were connected by a solid idea and the consensus of generation, which went beyond political comradeship.

Timothy Brown’s book proves that 1968, as a shorthand term for the complex process of reshaping contemporary Europe and the world, was an immensely multifaceted moment in history which cries for a plurality of approaches and interpretations. Sixties Europe pinpoints extremely important aspects of this history, such as the roles of politics, the global imagination, the reinterpretation of the agendas of the left, and communication across various areas of the world. It renders this history open to contestation and also offers a persuasive illustration of the potentials of polyphonic narratives of the past. It thus constitutes a work worthy of the admiration of any historian.

Péter Apor
Research Centre for the Humanities

Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969–1989: Snakes and Ladders. By Libora Oates-Indruchová. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 384 pp.

In Snakes and Ladders, Libora Oates-Indruchová constructs a rigorous theory of censorship based on the case of normalization-era Czechoslovakia (with Hungary as an asymmetrical comparison) and offers a compelling methodological vision for the future of cultural histories of state socialism. The book has been long in the making and, as a result, is layered in its source material and analysis. Originating in late 1990s Czech Republic with the author’s interest in the scholarly writing and publishing practices of her own professors before 1989, its main source base was collected in the early 2000s: twenty oral history interviews with Czech academics and eight interviews with their Hungarian peers. The interviewees were chosen from among scholars active before 1989 who still enjoyed the professional appreciation of their peers in the post-socialist period, which underscores Oates-Indruchová’s case for taking knowledge produced under state socialism and the agency of scholars seriously, yet also raises the question of how the boundaries between the scholarly and the non-scholarly have shifted over the past 50 years.

By the time the interviews were done, the “archive fever” of the 1990s was being critically reviewed,2 whereas the “ethnography of the archive” strand of research had not yet been fully articulated in studies of state socialism.3 This shows in Oates-Indruchová’s approach to the book’s archival source base. Chapter 2 reconstructs the official policies regulating scholarly life during normalization based on officially published documents from the Czechoslovak press that were collected in the 1960s and 1970s by the Radio Free Europe Research Institute and are now held at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest. The complex context of their collection, classification, and archival processing remains largely unexplored, and although this is unlikely to change the general outline of the party policy which they document, one wonders what Oates-Indruchová’s sophisticated methodological approach to the oral history interviews would yield if it were applied to this archival source base as well. As for the archives of the Editorial Board of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, they represent the counterpart to Chapter 4, where they are carefully discussed in the footnotes. To use the author’s conceptual distinction borrowed from James C. Scott, the “public transcript” of party and state institutions is thus “hidden” in what is doubtlessly Oates-Indruchová’s conscious choice to put the voices of the scholars themselves center stage.

These voices form the core of the book, five chapters which weave together the interviewees’ recollections on themes related to academic writing and publishing during the normalization period in Czechoslovakia: the institutional and personal strategies for surviving and navigating the constraints on academic scholarship after the Prague Spring (Chapter 3); the “highway code” of the publication process which saw a manuscript through various institutional loops (Chapter 4); censorship (including self-censorship, “friendly censorship,” and post-publication censorship) and how it related to authorship and authoring, that is, the articulation of the authorial self (Chapter 5); the language of publishing, from the acceptability of various research topics to the scholarly vocabulary to the use of subversive “code” (Chapter 6); and perceptions on the past and the afterlife of state socialist scholarly practices in the narrators’ present (Chapter 7). These five chapters are structured as “imagined conversations” among the Czech scholars in which Hungarian authors intervene as a counterpart to the Czech story. They consist of quotes from the oral history interviews, identified through a pseudonym (which indicates the age cohort, gender, nationality, and profession of the narrator) and ordered by the author with minimal textual interventions in her capacity of a “novice” initiated by her “mentors” in the workings of academic publishing under state socialism. This unique approach, dubbed “post-academic writing,” takes inspiration from feminist methodology and literary studies. As Oates-Indruchová argues in the introduction, it seeks to “make visible the lives and experiences of my narrators, treat them ethically by allowing them to represent themselves to the greatest possible degree, make visible the power relationship of the research situation, and lay the research process bare, while not shunning the emotional and the subjective.” Eight photographs placed immediately before and after the oral history chapters stand as visual representation of this fraught, usually invisible process.

The last chapter of the book is a rigorously crafted theory of academic publishing and censorship under state socialism, which (despite the fact that the author gives her reader permission to skip it in the introduction) is likely to become the go-to text on the topic for the university classroom and for scholars of intellectual production under late socialism. Oates-Indruchová argues that although the system of ideological control tightened from 1969 onwards, there was a noticeable shift in its target from content to form, or from scholars’ convictions to the appearance of loyalty. The system suffered from over-centralization, and scholars responded by developing a host of individual and institutional strategies to survive repression, the access to and experience of which were divided along generational lines. The “publish and perish” dynamics of academic publishing under state socialism meant that a manuscript’s entire journey from inception to publication was fraught with danger and regulated by an intricate code which was neither transparent nor entirely predictable.

Oates-Indruchová considers who could publish, how a text was approved, how the process could be helped or hindered and through whose agency, what was considered unpublishable, and what happened when the unpublishable was published. She distinguishes between (the authors’ experiences of) no censorship and preventive, post-publishing, and self-censorship, offering rich accounts of each. Most interestingly, Oates-Indruchová pairs censorship with authorship, highlighting how the pervasiveness of the first, especially in its preventive forms, contributed to the attrition of the latter. It is on the issue of censorship that the cases of Czechoslovakia and Hungary appear to diverge the most, suggesting the potential for a broader comparative analysis of the issue in the countries of East Central Europe. As a consequence of the politicization of research topics and the erosion of scholarly language, Oates-Indruchová argues, authors invested in the idea that a “code of communication” existed between them and the readers. Showing how elusive such a complex code is, she concludes that what developed was rather a vocabulary of expressions – the meanings of which were quickly lost for the post-1989 generations. The latter observation in particular leads Oates-Indruchová to explore the authors’ perceptions of the past and the consequences the system had for the interviewees in the present, both in terms of a lasting ideological dualism and the practices of academic research, publishing, and employment.

Oates-Indruchová has crafted a study of censorship at a time when both the fervent debates of the 1990s over issues of coercion, collaboration, and, importantly, moral responsibility have waned and the notion of writing against the totalitarian paradigm in studies of state socialism has itself become something of a cliché. This allows her both to state carefully and to answer unequivocally the main dilemma of the book in the introduction: why do some authors experience censorship as a set of practices which has the potential to nurture creativity while other authors experience it simply as stifling? The key is in the double effect of censorship, broadly defined, of creating (self-contained) academic communities of trust on the one hand and instilling a hyper-attentiveness to language in both authors and readers on the other. Oates-Indruchová shows that both have productive and restrictive dimensions, reflected in the authors’ contradictory evaluations of the past. Ultimately, however, she concludes that the game of “snakes and ladders” to which she compares academic publishing under state socialism worked to the detriment of authors, scholarship, and readers. Oates-Indruchová’s volume stands as an innovative model of how to explore a complexly mediated past through oral history and overcome legacies of dualistic thinking, overly cautious scholarship, and limited communication within and among self-contained academic communities.

Adela Hîncu
New Europe College, Bucharest

Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic. By Dóra Vargha. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 254 pp.

In the early spring of 2020, steps were taken by governments in the so-called West which would make what was a long-forgotten part of world history an everyday reality again. In order to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, measures were introduced which compelled societies to rethink their value systems and perceptions, and even many experts in various fields had little clear sense of the long-term consequences these changes would have. The current epidemic prompted nation-state governments to implement rapid and, in some cases, comparatively effective policies. In general, in the secondary literature on epidemiological history, pandemics have been viewed as transient and clearly defined periods which begin with the first cases and end with the last. This approach has exerted a considerable influence on the communication concerning the current pandemic. In her first monograph, which was published in 2018, Dóra Vargha, a lecturer at the University of Exeter, discusses the various waves of the polio epidemic in Hungary and the fight against it in the second half of the twentieth century. Significantly from the perspective of the health crisis today, she offers an entirely different approach to the concept of a “pandemic.”

Vargha’s monograph raises a question of historiographical significance when she asks whether the history of an epidemic in a given country should really be seen as coming to an end when mass illness has come to an end. This is a question with moral, biopolitical, and general implications for the writing of epidemiological history. Are we embarking down the right path, when we seek to write an epidemiological history within a “nation-state framework,” by examining a well-defined period of time? In part to investigate this question, Vargha discusses the flare-ups of polio in Hungary between 1952 and 1963 in a broader international context, and she traces the fates of survivors until the change of regimes in 1990.

The spread of polio in Hungary may serve as an appropriate empirical context for Vargha’s analysis in part because the illness was a concern not because of the high number of cases or the high rate of fatalities. It was dreaded, rather, in no small part because of the serious risk of permanent bodily harm to members of a social group whose health was seen as symbolic of the country’s allegedly bright future. According to the logic of the era, this group was supposed to determine the ultimate outcome of the Cold War as an ideological and socioeconomic conflict. Polio therefore could not be treated merely as a (nation) state affair. This is precisely why Vargha raises the question of how and within what framework it was possible, ten years after the beginning of the Cold War, to organize a wide-ranging cooperative international medical and humanitarian effort to defeat an enemy “unfamiliar with the Iron Curtain.” And what were the social consequences of this cooperative endeavor in Hungary, a country which abutted the Iron Curtain and a country in which the protection of the population from biological threats (such as polio) was indeed an ideological question which cut to the heart of the emerging welfare society, but where the political changes which were underway at precisely this moment of history determined the country’s domestic and foreign policy positions?

Vargha addresses these questions, but she does a great deal more than that. She sheds light on the social status of modern, Western medical knowledge in Hungary in the 1950s, which was precarious in many ways. At times, it met with a skeptical or even hostile reception. Vargha also helps her reader understand a situation which, at first glance, seems contradictory. If the authoritarian political-social systems were never hesitant to use physical force to harass or even destroy individuals who lived under their reign when it seemed to serve their interests, how is it that, at other times, they were capable, when facing challenges similar to the challenges faced by the democratic societies of the West, sometimes to address the needs of their citizens, from certain perspectives, even more effectively?

The monograph consists of six chapters, which are arranged in chronological order, given the fundamental importance of the course of epidemics over time. The organizing thread, however, is not merely chronology. Rather, it is provided by the three major issues raised in the discussion, issues which are turned into analytical perspectives and which, with varying emphasis, run through the argument as a whole and outline the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. One of these issues is the problem of the global production and distribution of knowledge concerning polio in a global policy context in which the biological protection of citizens and the production of scientific knowledge in general were the basis for competition. Vargha’s analysis clearly shows something that historians of medical science in the second half of the twentieth century have been striving in recent years to emphasize in more and more empirical fields, namely that the Iron Curtain proved to be a “loosely woven fabric” when it came to the flow of scientific knowledge. The joint testing of polio vaccines which were originally developed in the United States (it is perhaps worth noting that the vaccine developed by Albert Sabin was first tested in the Soviet Union on large populations a few years before it was used in the United States) and the polio-conferences held until the early 1960s clearly indicated wide-ranging cooperation. At the same time, an examination of the discourses in the countries involved in the fight against the epidemic also allows Vargha to identify subtle distinctions: the East-West opposition appears as a topos to be broken down, but one also has a clear sense of the dilemma that was created by the fragility of the trust the two sides had for each other in the Cold War, despite their shared achievements.

By adopting an approach that goes beyond the national framework, Vargha reminds us of the permeability of the Iron Curtain and the global nature of the flow of knowledge. Furthermore, she offers an alternative to the approach based on the assumption according to which the flow of scientific knowledge generally considered to be modern consistently went from West to East. She argues convincingly that the immunization campaign introduced in Hungary in 1959, the manner in which the state-organized program was administered, and the monitoring of vaccinations and complications later served as a model in Cuba and Brazil, and they were also points of departure for the global strategy adopted by the WHO to eradicate polio. Hungary, which was the first country to introduce a vaccination program on the national level, served as a prominent example in these efforts, but, as Vargha indicates, so did several other communist countries.

The meso-level of Vargha’s study is her analysis of biopower intentions, which she presents mostly in the context of the fight against and prevention of epidemics in Hungary. Given her comparative approach, these phenomena can be traced, at least in part, in the context of the Soviet Union and the United States, and she shows how, due to certain historical features, similar tools available in epidemic management led, at least temporarily, to different successes in the prevention of infection. In the case of Hungary, for a health care system which had suffered catastrophic damage in World War II, the measures taken in the course of the 1956 Revolution and the offers of international assistance created the foundations for the fight against polio at the end of the decade.

In the case of Hungary, the state had a strong intention to provide care for the population, and there was, similarly, a strong demand for intervention. Nonetheless, the question of state jurisdiction over children’s bodies still put the issue of the relationship between power and the individual in the foreground, as well as the question of paternalism as the fundamental stance of the socialist state. Although policy with regards to children in the modern state has tended to see state participation in the rearing of children as essential even from the moment of birth, in order for the campaign to slow the spread of the virus to be effective, the state still needed to convince parents of the importance of its efforts and to clarify their role. Vargha shows that, at the initial stages of the epidemic, attempts by the state to insist on the urgency of protective measures appeared in the press and the narratives of health policy-makers as a common struggle by the state and parents, even if there were paternalistic motifs in the discourse. However, this rhetoric also made it possible to blame parents for the failure of the Salk vaccination in 1957.

The micro-level of the analysis concerns the discussion of the problems which arose in the everyday lives of individuals, problems which, effective international cooperation and state intervention notwithstanding, sometimes made it impossible or at least more difficult to protect the population. As Vargha’s analysis shows, the epidemic was not always taken as seriously by the general population as it should have been, and compliance with state regulations fell short of expectations, as did the actual number of vaccinations. When the epidemic flared up in 1959 and caused more destruction than it had in earlier bouts, it may have been tempting to attribute this to the decisions made by parents who went against the will of the state. However, as Vargha makes clear, defiant parents were not the only cause of the flare-up. The administrative confusion of the first vaccination campaigns and the early technical uncertainties concerning inoculation with the Salk vaccine, which was used first as a prophylactic measure, created a situation in which even large-scale immunization did not provide complete protection for the population belonging to the most vulnerable age group.

Vargha offers subtle insights into the contradictory and tense relationship between the paternalistic state and society through a discussion of a pressing issue of health care policy, and she also considers the ways in which the intentions of the state and the wishes of the population diverged or collided, sometimes because of problems with implementation and sometimes simply because of individual aims or perceptions. She does a great deal more than this, however. Because she uses a conceptualization of “epidemic” which is broad both in time and space, she also incorporates into her discussion an examination of the circumstances of those who survived the pandemic, stretching all the way up to the change of regimes in 1990. Thus, she also considers phenomena which were part of the larger strategies used by individuals during the Kádár era to assert or achieve their perceived interests, and she casts light from a new angle on the social and political dysfunctionalities which were, ultimately, the foundation on which these strategies were built.

Furthermore, since the early 1960s, the social circumstances of the individual fundamentally determined the circumstances of survivors of the polio epidemic. Since new cases of polio began to decline, polio itself no longer constituted a medical, social, or political problem. The Heine-Medin Hospital, which had been set up during Imre Nagy’s second term as prime minister, was closed, and knowledge concerning the disease was less and less a part of a practicing physician’s immediate repertoire. In the absence of reliable, organized state care, the quality of life for the people who had survived polio and who had been left with lasting handicaps depended on their circumstances and/or the circumstances of their families. By dwelling on this question, Vargha very justifiably suggests that, even if the epidemic was cured on the larger societal status, the Kádár regime ultimately failed to provide professional medical care, available regardless of one’s social background, even though this was one of its most prominent sociopolitical aims. For survivors of polio, differences in social level were factors which had a strong influence on the individual’s ability merely to exist.

Vargha makes persuasive use, in support of her various propositions, of a diverse array of sources, including archival documents, printed sources and sources from the press, an impressive body of secondary literature, and even oral history interviews done earlier with patients. Her use of the interviews allows her to present subjective perspectives on the illness and care and treatment, thus providing, to some extent, a “patient’s view,” or in other words, a perspective which is often seen as a worthy goal in the scholarship on medical history, but which, given the nature of the sources, is hard to provide (in the case of Vargha’s book, this perspective is particularly significant in the second, fourth, and sixth chapters). The interviews also enable her to make the changes of scale which are used in the other chapters and which constitute the most exciting points of her analysis. These changes of scale vividly show the reader how the decisions that were made in the interests of protecting the population from disease (decisions which, with small changes, ultimately did provide protection) were different, during the first wave of vaccinations, on the individual level because of the administrative chaos. In other cases, the shifts in scale show how, as gradually there were no cases of new infections, the question of providing care for polio survivors was no longer an issue that could be easily integrated into the communist social vision, and thus the provision of care essentially became the task of the families and friends who lived with or around people grappling with handicaps of various seriousness.

It is difficult to imagine a subject which could be more pertinent at the moment, considering the pandemic currently underway. But beyond its im­mediate relevance, given the questions she raises, the scholarship on which she draws, and the scientific and social-scientific perspectives she offers, Vargha’s book will be an essential work in the international scholarship on medical history in the next few years, as well as a substantial contribution to the scholarship on state socialism in Hungary during the Kádár era.

Viola Lászlófi
Eötvös Loránd University – École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.155 

The centuries following the foundation of the Christian kingdom of Hungary by Saint Stephen did not leave later generations with an unmanageable plethora of written works. However, the diversity of the genres and the philological and historical riddles which lie hidden in these works arguably provide ample compensation for the curious reader. There are numerous textual interrelationships among the Gesta Hungarorum by the anonymous notary of King Béla known as Anonymus, the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum by Simon of Kéza and the forteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle consisting of various earlier texts, not to mention the hagiographical material on the canonized rulers. For the historian, the relationships among these early historical texts and the times at which they were composed (their relative and absolute chronology) are clearly a matter of interest, since the judgment of these links affects the credibility of the historical information preserved in them. In an attempt to establish the relative chronology, philological analysis is the primary tool, while in our efforts to determine the precise times at which the texts were composed, literary and legal history may offer the most reliable guides. László Veszprémy has very clearly made circumspect use of these methods in his essays, thus it is hardly surprising that many of his colleagues, myself included, have been eagerly waiting for his dissertation, which he defended in 2009 for the title of Doctor of Sciences, to appear in the form of a book in which the articles he has written on the subject since are also included.

Veszprémy aims to shed light on “the most critical questions of medieval Hungarian chronicle research.” However, the focus of his discussion is the Gesta Hungarorum by the anonymous notary of King Béla III and the early chapters of the fourteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, which narrates events from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Later developments in the Hungarian chronicle tradition after the middle of the thirteenth century, such as the aforementioned Gesta by Simon of Kéza, fall beyond the scope of his analysis, though the author very clearly would have a great deal to say on the subject.

The first section of the volume offers ample testimony to one of the greatest virtues of Veszprémy’s method. It provides an overview of the beginnings of and later developments in Hungarian historical literature against the backdrop of medieval European historiography. The rich tradition of history writing in Europe was available only to a limited extent to the first Hungarian readers, as indeed the analysis of the Pannonhalma library catalog demonstrates. However, demand for and interest in historical works date back to the eleventh century, even if the desire to revive the heroic pagan past (or rather, to construct it) was only fulfilled by the work of Anonymus around 1200. One could mention, as evidence of this early interest, the Pozsonyi Évkönyv (‘Annals of Pozsony’) and the annals of the Somogyvár Formulary, the latter of which Veszprémy discusses only briefly. Based on the layout of the pages of the codex of the Pozsonyi Évkönyv, Veszprémy came to the possible but not entirely compelling conclusion that the earlier material of the annals was edited and clarified in 1114, which unquestionably would fit into our understanding of the impetus given to writing practices in Hungary and the surge in interest in history under the reign of King Coloman the Learned.

It is common knowledge that the earliest foreign sources on which Hungarian historiography drew were the Annals of Altaich and Regino’s Chronicon. We do not know, however, when the two narrative works came to the attention of Hungarian chroniclers. While news of the Annals of Altaich (which show a pro-German bias) may have reached Hungarian historiography already in the eleventh century (at least by 1108), during the long armed confrontation between the Holy Roman emperors and the Hungarian kings, the first Hungarian author to make use of Regino could hardly have been active before Cosmas of Prague (†1125), who was the first historian in the Central European region to have access to the Chronicon.

These questions lead us to one of the most important assertions made in the book. The Hungarian chronicles contain a great deal of unquestionably authentic information concerning the eleventh century, though critical analyses of style have suggested time and time again that the narrative was composed or written down in the twelfth century, particularly in the case of the Gesta regis Ladislai, which offers an almost epic account of the struggles for the throne between King Solomon and his cousins, the dukes Géza and Ladislaus (the future Saint Ladislaus I). This is also the section which bears the most affinities with the court romances of Western Europe. Veszprémy seeks to resolve this riddle with the suggestion that in the eleventh century only historical notes were taken, the trace of which may have been preserved in the entries of the Annals of Pozsony. As the brief annalistic entries could hardly have grown into the vibrant narratives found in the chronicles, Veszprémy argues that these historical notes may have been more ambitious writings which covered longer periods of history, while they did not aspire to offer a unified account of Hungarian history. This hypothesis unquestionably offers an explanation for one of the fundamental questions of early Hungarian history writing, though it is perhaps made slightly less persuasive by the fact that Veszprémy, who has a thorough knowledge of the larger European context, makes no mention of any generic parallels which might explain why the individual historical notes were even created or what the intentions of the authors may have been.

After his discussion of the admittedly complex beginnings of Hungarian historical literature, Veszprémy turns his attention to the text of the fourteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, which preserved many earlier works, including the abovementioned Gesta Ladislai regis and the Gesta by Simon of Kéza. The next few chapters examine the problems concerning the sections of the text which deal with the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Central to his discussion is the issue of authenticity, or in other words, the exact time at which the parts in question were composed. Veszprémy offers an informative analysis of the influence of Gregorian Reform on Hungarian literature. Saint Ladislaus embodies the vision of the ideal ruler at the time, who becomes king thanks to his Christian idoneitas, though quite against his will. Of particular interest are the chapters of the chronicle which, as we can conclude on the basis of a comparison with the Gesta of Anonymus, had undoubtedly been written before the anonymous notary was active (ca. 1200), i.e., the chapters concerning the Battle of Mogyoród and the Battle of Kerlés. Instead of using the vague expression ancient gesta (“ősgeszta”), which one often stumbles across in the modern historiography, Veszprémy consistently writes about a pre-1200 chronicle redaction. This conscientiousness about terminological precision constitutes an example worth following.

The next section focuses on Anonymus’ Gesta Hungarorum, the study of which has certainly been one of the motivating forces for the rise of medieval studies in Hungary over the course of the past 250 years. Veszprémy’s interest was captured by the rhetorical models of the work, which was composed in the decades following the death of King Béla III, and other elements which offer indications as to when it was written. Earlier, Veszprémy identified several citations which are from a Latin novel about the fall of Troy entitled Excidium Troiae. The work was not extremely popular, but it was definitely used in schools. Now, Veszprémy has managed to determine that the version used by the anonymous notary resembled the text preserved in the Brussels manuscript of Guido Pisanus. This constitutes one more clue in the relatively long list on the basis of which Veszprémy concludes that Anonymus probably studied in Italy (though he does not rule out the possibility that he stayed in France, a notion which is often found in the secondary literature). Elements which indicate the period of the writing include the mention of the Black Sea, formerly known in the West only as Pontus, which appears in Anonymus as Nigrum Mare. As the expression was first used in western sources only in 1265, the occurrence of the term here used to be considered as one of the few reasons for a later dating of the relevant chapter of the Gesta (to the late thirteenth century). Veszprémy and Orsolya Csákváry, his coauthor, now point out that this name already appears in the Scandinavian saga literature in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, though the term may well have made its way to Hungary considerably earlier, during the golden era of ties between Scandinavia and Byzantium in the eleventh century. Veszprémy arrives, after a similarly exciting investigation, at the conclusion that the fate of the only surviving codex of the Gesta Hungarorum may be intertwined with the fate of the Turkish-language manuscript Tarih-i Ungurus, or History of the Hungarians, which has a considerable textual link to the Hungarian chronicle tradition.

The third major section of the book contains case studies which concern reports on Hungary found not in Hungarian sources but rather in sources from abroad, such as Adémar de Chabannes and the Bavarian traditions of Scheyern. Among these studies, only the one on the European sources of the Hungarian Hun tradition which is very clearly tied to the subject indicated in the title of the book. Veszprémy very clearly feels that the association of the Hungarians with the Huns and with Attila predates Anonymus. This association, however, could hardly have stretched back to the period before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin and rather should be attributed to intellectuals familiar with the German Attila tradition, who traveled in great numbers to the Kingdom of Hungary in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

László Veszprémy’s book thus offers an engaging intellectual adventure, and as far as the content is concerned, the reader will not be disappointed. The organization and editing of the book, however, at times leaves something to be desired. I myself was somewhat annoyed that Veszprémy discusses some of the more significant problems (such as the relationship between Anonymus’ Gesta and the earliest textual layers of the Illuminated Chronicle) in isolation, following the structure of the studies that had been published earlier as articles. The book is not always sufficiently didactic, a problem which is also related to the manner in which the boundaries between the various studies have not been adequately transcended. This will make the book more difficult to use as a handbook on early Hungarian historiography. True, that was not Veszprémy’s goal, but given the source material in the book and the new findings which are presented, the specialist readership will undoubtedly hope to use this beautifully published book in this capacity.

Dániel Bácsatyai
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Earthly Delights, Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900. Edited by Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2018. 534 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.160 

The absence of modern writing on Eastern European food history is sometimes rather conspicuous. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to find that Brill has recently published a volume titled Earthly Delights, Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900, which is part of its Balkan Studies Library series. The volume, edited by Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu, contains 17 studies by various authors spanning 534 pages and comes with color illustrations and a general index at the end. The collection starts with the editors’ introduction, which is well written and informative. There are also brief biographies of the participating authors, a short historical chronology of the Balkans starting from 1456, and notes on translation and transliteration.

The project was divided into five thematic parts, each containing two to five studies. The first part focuses on the Ottoman world, the second deals with ingredients and kitchens, the third shifts its attention to trade and food supply, the fourth discusses local cookbooks, and the last part examines the issue of representation, in other words how Balkan food, cooking, and (in)hospitality were perceived by foreign observers.

The essays in the collection generally speaking fall into two categories. Some authors strove to present the reader with an overview of a broadly outlined topic, like Moldavian or Wallachian cuisine in the early modern era, while others delved deep into the details of one particular theme, e. g. when and how olive oil replaced butter as the primary source of fat in Turkey. In the following paragraphs, I briefly comment on each study and then share a few general remarks.

After the excellent introduction by the editors, the first study written by Suraiya Faroqhi from Istanbul Bilgi University deals with the gradual introduction of olive oil into Turkish cuisine. It presents an interesting perspective, demonstrating that the dominance of olives was not as absolute as one would have expected in this area based on what we know about ancient Roman and, later, Italian cuisine. It also introduces the topic of cultural resistance, when Faroqhi explains that the relative reluctance of Turks to use olive oil as a staple of Mediterranean cuisine might have been caused by its popularity among Greeks.

The next study, by Hedda Reindl-Kiel, provides a well-written overview of the sources available on Early Modern Eastern cuisine, including a seventeenth-century Persian cookbook, shopping bills, and lists of food distribution from the sultan’s court. This last item is particularly illuminating, and Reindl-Kiel demonstrates how food distributed in the upper echelons of Ottoman society surpassed simple nutritional functions and gained an important symbolic value. As reports written by contemporary European observers, such as the one by the Habsburg ambassador to the High Porte, Heøman Èernín of Chudenice (1576–1651), suggest, foreigners often misunderstood the distinctive role of food in Turkish society.

Özge Samancı’s chapter on cuisine in nineteenth-century Istanbul lists a broad variety of foodstuffs utilized in early Turkish printed cookbooks, the oldest of which appeared in 1840. Margareta Aslan’s work contains a discussion on the history of food in Transylvania with particular focus on Turkish influence. She points out some interesting comparative differences in food culture between Romanians, Turks, and Hungarians (e. g. the use of sweeteners in certain contexts or diverging preferences for various spices in the Balkan regions). The first part of the collection comes to a close with an essay by Olivia Senciuc dealing with the attractive theme of coffee and tea in eighteenth-century Moldavia and Wallachia. Perhaps Senciuc’s most interesting conclusion is the realization that despite the constant Ottoman political, economic, and military influence, the wealthy boyar families began to consume coffee relatively late, only in the second half of the seventeenth century, which coincided with the adoption of caffeinated drinks by upper classes in the other regions of Central and Eastern Europe.

The second section of the book, titled “Ingredients, Kitchens and the Pleasures of the Table,” opens with Kinga S. Tüdõs’s study of early modern festivities in Transylvania. For a readership particularly interested in Hungarian culture, this is perhaps the most relevant passage, as Tüdõs brings into focus the Hungarian group of east Transylvanians, called Székelys. Tüdõs’s extensive use of inheritance inventories resembles similarly oriented research on the cultural history of the dining customs of the early modern noble classes, which became a subject of considerable interest in Bohemia in the 1990s and early 2000s.1 The study draws heavily on the manuscript cookbook of Princess Anna Bornemisza (1630–1688), which prompts me to suggest that it might be beneficial to compare this source with a collection of three mid-seventeenth-century handwritten cookbooks attributed to the Czech nobility and preserved in the National Museum and Strahov Library in Prague. These Czech collections are nearly contemporary to Anna Bornemisza’s cookbook and reflect a similar socioeconomic background.

The following study by Maria Magdalena Székely draws the readers’ attention to another historical region, the principality of Moldavia. Székely does not rely exclusively on the scarce written historical records, but also introduces information gleaned from archeological, archaeobotanical, and archeozoological sources which provide an additional perspective. Székely’s work offers a comparative analysis of early modern food culture in Moldavia, which will help other Central and Eastern European historians better contextualize their own research. Violeta Barbu, the author of the next study on early modern food culture in Wallachia, uses an equally broad approach, basically providing a textbook-like delineation usable by any historian searching for comparisons with findings in their own research. Like Székely, Barbu also makes creative use of the sources, for example Rituale Romanum.

From the conceptually broad studies, we move back towards microhistory at the beginning of the third part of the collection. It begins with a paper by Enikõ Rüsz-Fogarasi describing food supply in the Romanian city of Cluj in the early modern period, in which Rüsz-Fogarasi builds on her previous interest in the history of hospitals in Transylvania. This text is valuable for its focus on a comparatively early period (1550–1650), but it also shows how challenging it is to work with relatively scarce written sources. Analogically, Mária Pakucs-Willcocks’s study focuses on a single Transylvanian place as well, the city of Sibiu. Her paper therefore works very well in comparison with the previous chapter. Pakucs-Willcocks begins with an examination of import fees and other legal contexts for trade with the Ottomans and later delves into detail when discussing the individual types of food. I would highlight her attempt to shape often limited sources into series of data, systematically tracking certain commodities.

While the two previous studies dealt with trade more or less exclusively in Transylvania, Gheorghe Lazãr’s paper shifts the focus to trade in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Wallachia. Lazãr divides his interest between what he calls “the big retail trade,” which means the export of horses, cattle, and grain and “the small trade,” referring to the import of luxury goods. Both are equally valuable, but quite distinct from the perspective of writing about the history of food culture, as they offer testimony to differing socioeconomic realities.

The fourth section of the book, which is also the shortest, consists of two chapters examining historical Balkan cookbooks. First, Castilia Manea-Grgin describes two early modern handwritten collections of recipes: “Compendium on the Preparation of Day-to-Day Dishes,” owned originally by Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664), and the slightly more recent “Book in which Dishes of Fish, Crayfish, Oysters, Snails, Vegetables, Herbs, and Other Dishes for Fast and Non-fast Days are Written, In their Due order.” The origin of this second manuscript is uncertain, but it is likely a seventeenth-century source possibly linked to Constantin Cantacuzino, who served between 1675–1677 as the Great Steward to the Wallachian princes. It is worth noting, however, that the analysis avoids the food-related parts of both collections, focusing instead on related topics, such as the management of orchards, gardening, and viniculture. Nevertheless, the study is still quite useful for food historians, because these topics are related to the history of nutrition, and Manea-Grgin also provides a thorough examination of the foreign influences she was able to detect, particularly in the Romanian collection.

In the following article, Stefan Detchev writes about the oldest printed cookbooks in Bulgaria, which were published in the 1870s. As this is a very modern topic, it is well outside my area of expertise, but I imagine that a comparative study with other cookbooks of the period, for example, might yield interesting findings related to the birth of modern femininity in the Central and Eastern European context.

The introductory study of the last section was written by Andrew Dalby, the prolific British historian of food, who examines several travelogues written by foreigners about their stays in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Romania. Although mostly focused on modern history, this chapter does occasionally delve into much older, seventeenth-century reports by William Lithgow, John Smith (of Pocahontas fame), Robert Bargrave, and Edmund Chishull. Dalby’s text is an excellent read and very entertaining, though it does present (understandably) an exclusively outsider’s perspective of the Balkans, as Dalby does not read local sources.

Fortunately, Angela Jianu, the author of the following chapter, addresses this issue in her analysis of travelogues from the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Dalby, Jianu provides feedback on information published by the travelers mentioned in her paper. She also pays careful attention to concepts like “commensality” and “otherness” in the Balkans, which she describes as a region “in-between” the East and the West. The penultimate study by Anna Matthaiou draws on a plethora of information concerning modern food culture in the Balkans, while also commenting on its fractured nature. This study chronologically extends well into the twentieth century and provides interesting insights into the construction of Hellenized “national” cuisine and the homogeneity versus the diversity of local traditions.

Finally, Andrei Oiºteanu draws the readers’ attention to the Jewish tavernkeepers in Romania with an emphasis on prejudice and stereotypes associated with the life of this minority in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. His chapter also brings up broader contexts and is worth reading for those interested in Judaic history from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.

Overall, Earthly Delights presents an intriguing and critically important collection of studies. The volume is well organized, and the shortcomings to which a reviewer might draw attention are only minor. There are a few typographical errors, but not more than one would expect in such large project. I particularly appreciate the fact that most of the studies were written by authors with clear links to the Balkans and not by foreigners theorizing about the region. This is necessary due to the difficult linguistic landscape of the region, as shown for example by the painstakingly documented trilingual toponyms in passages related to Transylvania.

For foreigners like me, the study highlights certain issues inherent to Balkan historiography. For example, I find it interesting to observe the propensity of Romanian historiography towards the French theoretical tradition of the Annales school. In Czech historiography, this source of inspiration is filled mostly by German scholars and, recently, the growing importance of English historical writing.

Another general observation I would make concerns the relative lack of written sources, which became more abundant only after the mid-seventeenth century. It can be partially supplemented by archeological and archaeobotanical findings, but I suspect that this form of research requires levels of funding which are not yet readily available in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps the most striking feature is visible particularly in the final chapters, where readers are continually reminded of the Protean nature of the Balkans as a simultaneously backward, static place where time stands still (and good inns are hard to come by), while it was also a place of tumultuous change in a “melting pot” of cultures, nationalities, religions, languages, and political interests. The editors appropriately reflect on this phenomenon in the introduction when they claim that globalization and multiculturalism are not modern inventions, as regions like Transylvania were faced with similar challenges centuries before these terms became fashionable, contentious issues for present culture wars. Overall, Earthly Delights is an essential read for any historian of food, especially a historian focusing on the seventeenth century and later periods.

Karel Černý
Charles University
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Estates and Constitution: The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary. By István M. Szijártó. Translated by David Robert Evans. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2020. 350 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.166

Readers interested in the history of Austria, the Habsburg Monarchy, and its successor states may have become accustomed to the high academic quality of the series Austrian and Habsburg Studies (edited by Howard Louthan and published by Berghahn Books in association with the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota), which covers a wide range of themes in fields from ethnic conflict and nationalism to fin-de-siècle culture and women’s history, to mention only a few of the subjects which have been covered since 1996, the year in which the first book in the series was published. István M. Szijártó’s new book (the 30th title in the series) fits perfectly in this trend both because of its subject and by virtue of its complexity and rigorousness. Szijártó’s outstanding monograph offers an admirable example of a work of scholarship on complex problems in the somewhat “exotic” history of early modern East Central Europe which both conforms to the local (in this case, the Hungarian) historiographical tradition and meets the standards of the Anglophone academic world. In the case of the latter, credit is also due to the excellent work of the translator, David Robert Evans.

Szijártó’s endeavor is unique in the sense that he attempts to bring close to non-Hungarian readers the history of the Hungarian Diet, a topic which has been “grievously neglected in international scholarship,” to use the words of Robert John Weston Evans from the back cover of the book. This is not to say, however, that the subject has been entirely ignored in recent non-Hungarian historiography. One could mention, perhaps first and foremost, the monograph by Jean Bérenger and Károly Kecskeméti, Parlement et vie Parlementaire en Hongrie 1608–1918 (Paris, Honoré Champion Editeur, 2005). Yet Estates and Constitution offers more than a work written in the traditional vein of parliamentary history in its narrower sense. To support this statement, it is worth taking a look at Szijártó’s earlier works in the field to understand their evolution and determine their places in relation to one another. This is all the more important, since Szijártó himself felt it necessary to point out at the beginning of his work that his book is “the product of almost three decades of research” (xi).

The first significant fruit of Szijártó’s long-term research project was his 2005 monograph A diéta. A magyar rendek és az országgyűlés, 1708–1792 [The Diet. The Hungarian estates and the parliament, 1708–1792] (Budapest, Osiris), which became the fundamental work in the field. Although attention was paid to the social historical background (first and foremost to the fundamental role of the bene possessionatus nobility, the prosperous landowning gentry in the counties, and, later, the Diets) both in this monograph and in Szijártó’s subsequent collection of studies, entitled Nemesi társadalom és politika: Tanulmányok a 18. századi magyar rendiségről [Noble society and politics: Studies on the history of the estates in eighteenth-century Hungary] (Budapest, Universitas, 2006), in his later works, Szijártó offered more thorough and nuanced discussions of the social-historical aspects of institutional change. In his 2016 book A 18. századi Magyarország rendi országgyűlése [The Diet in eighteenth-century Hungary] (Budapest, Országgyűlés Hivatala) and in his 2017 DSc thesis Emberek és struktúrák a 18. századi Magyarországon: A politikai elit társadalom- és kultúrtörténeti megközelítésben [Individuals and structures in eighteenth-century Hungary: The political elite from the perspective of social and cultural history], he provided a thorough analysis of the roles of the bene possessionatus nobility and the career paths of political actors. However, in these works, the change of perspective became manifest on another level, namely in Szijártó’s growing interest in questions concerning cultural history and the history of political discourse. In fact, these latter aspects come to the fore in Estates and Constitution, too, which is a “modified, extended, and restructured” version of Szijártó’s abovementioned 2016 book in Hungarian (p.xi). In a sense, Szijártó’s recent monograph in English can be seen as a concise account of the main findings of this long-term research project, adjusted to the extent necessary to specific circumstances arising from the situation when a scholar aims to speak to a “global” audience about historical problems rooted in chiefly “local” contexts.

The structure of the book is quite user-friendly, and although its primary character is that of a monograph, it could also be used as a handbook. It has been broken into three sections, each of which is divided into chapters, which again have several subsections, most of them a few pages long. Broadly speaking, each of the main parts covers a fundamental aspect of eighteenth-century politics and is written from a specific analytical viewpoint. In the first part (Chapters 1–2), the principal structural elements of early modern Hungarian politics and the machinery of the Diet are outlined; in the second (Chapters 3–7), the parliament is presented as a functioning institution and the main locus of political practice; in the third (Chapters 8–10), some aspects of the political discourse and social-cultural history are in the foreground, alongside the historiography of the early modern parliament.

One of the main strengths of the book is its primarily holistic outlook. Szijártó presents institutional, social-cultural, and intellectual issues as different aspects of one and the same history. If one reads the analyses carefully, one gets a detailed picture of their complex interrelations, at least in the context of the eighteenth-century parliamentary history of Hungary. In addition, Szijártó’s essentially holistic approach goes hand in hand with his highly sensitive insights into grassroots level phenomena. Big processes and large structures are handled in close relation to the dimension of human agency and everyday practices of parliamentary life, and individual occurrences are never treated as mere illustrations of general tendencies. This feature of the book seems to be all the more important, since the mutual interdependence of these two dimensions becomes manifest on various levels throughout the analyses. Accordingly, the most common narrative structure of the subsections is a sequence consisting of a general account of the overall trends, followed by a thorough analysis of the most relevant cases supporting, nuancing, or modifying the original statements. Of course, this manner of writing history is only possible on the basis of a vast corpus of historical sources, and indeed this can be seen as the backbone of the whole work.

Chapter 1 provides a summary of the most crucial elements of eighteenth-century Hungary’s political system. Szijártó pays particular attention here to the dualism of king and estates, which made eighteenth-century Hungary an estate polity (Ständestaat), and he emphasizes the paramount importance of the tractatus diaetalis, the process of negotiation between the two sides of the political chessboard (pp.12–17). The long-term functioning of the Diet as the main locus of the bargaining process between king and estates demonstrates that the power of the latter proved much more durable in Hungary than in other parts of the empire, since the Habsburgs felt it necessary to convoke the Diet in the country “even after a hiatus of five, ten, or even twenty-five years” (p.18). The historical fundament of the Hungarian Sonderweg, as Szijártó stresses several times in the book, was the Rákóczi War of Independence and the compromise between crown and country which came in its wake, codified in the Treaty of Szatmár, which “stabilized the position of the Hungarian estates, restoring the dualism of king and estates of the previous era” (pp.2, 98–99). The significance of the separate path taken by Hungary became manifest during the War of the Austrian Succession, in the course of which the Hungarian estates remained loyal to Vienna and, as a result, Hungary (unlike the Hereditary Lands and the Czech provinces) was left out of the centralizing and rationalizing reforms of Haugwitz, which “represented a turning point in the political development of the Habsburg Monarchy” (p.99).

After portraying the main institutional factors of the workings of the Diet in Chapter 2, Szijártó goes on to outline one of the main findings of his book, and he demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, a profound change took place in the political agenda of the parliament, leading from confessionalism to the emergence of the dualism of king and estates dominated by constitutional questions. Religious issues, after dominating the debates in the 1710s and the 1720s, were (at least until 1790) omitted from the discussions of the Diets. Denominational divisions lost their former importance, and the defense of different aspects of noble privileges came to the foreground in parliamentary politics. As the investigations in Chapter 4 show, this process made it possible for the estates to take a strong line against the ruler in questions concerning the size of the yearly contribution (contributio) and the nobility’s exemption from taxation. The new situation induced the decrease of the level of polarization within the estates and gave rise to a new form of antagonism vis-à-vis the crown, narrowing the possibility of compromise between king and estates considerably. In Chapter 6, this sharpening of divisions between crown and country is also demonstrated on the level of the political decisions of the deputies, displaying the process in the course of which “oppositionality and government loyalty” became “mutually exclusive choices” (p.171).

The main social-historical component of this process was the emancipation of the well-to-do gentry, the bene possessionatus nobility from the aristocracy, which came to dominate the political life of the counties in the course of the first half of eighteenth century. In the background of this process, which is described in Chapter 9, we find the dissolution of the old networks of familiaritas between the aristocracy and the lesser nobility and the takeover of the power of the landowning prosperous gentry in the counties. The breaking up of the system of patron-client relations resulted in a significantly higher degree of social and political independence of the bene possessionatus nobility. On the institutional level, the growing significance of the well-to-do gentry manifested itself at first at the county assemblies, where it became the leading political force.

However, several aspects of the institutional development of the Diet in the eighteenth century (most importantly the decision-making mechanisms and the increase of the importance of the county deputies, as shown in Chapter 7) make it clear that the bene possessionatus nobility was able to reassert itself on the level of parliamentary politics as the predominant political factor. Undoubtedly, the “noble-national” movement in Hungary in 1790 was part of this process: in fact, it can be seen as an attempt by the well-to-do gentry to reshape the political system of the country according to its own interests and values, aiming to convert its local dominance in the counties to real political power on the “national” level.

At this point, the relevance of the perspective of intellectual history, from which Chapter 8 is written, becomes clear. Through textual analyses of various sources, Szijártó verifies his thesis concerning polarization between king and estates as the “central tendency of politics” (p.263) on the level of political discourse as well. Szijártó demonstrates inter alia the rise of the term “constitution” in the political parlance of the Diets, a process that can be seen as a main element of the conceptual foundations of nineteenth-century developments in political discourse and in the politics of grievance in general.

Henrik Hőnich
University of Public Service, Thomas Molnar Institute for Advanced Studies
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Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism. Edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. 416 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.171

At the height of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Jarosław Kaczyn˙ski, head of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, explained his strong anti-immigrant position by claiming that the Polish nation had a historic mission to defend Christian Europe from enemies who wanted to destroy it. He has also used this argument to justify homophobia and attacks on women’s rights. Similar claims resound across Eastern Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has made similar claims about Hungary, as has Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša for Slovenia. Pro-Western Ukrainians intent on joining the European Union also see their country as a bulwark protecting Europe, albeit against a different enemy: Russian imperialism. In each case, nationalist leaders look back in time and translate histories of wars fought against Bolsheviks, Ottoman armies, and Tatar invaders into myths of heroic martyrdom in order to cast themselves at the center of present-day struggles to define where Europe is and what it should mean to those who live there. Eastern Europe today abounds with visions of nations vying with one another to be the rampart of Europe, a bastion protecting a continent surrounded by enemies. Why are these myths so ubiquitous? And what gives them such power?

The urgency of these questions today makes Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism, edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher, especially welcome. The fourteen essays in the volume analyze examples of rampart or bulwark nation myths in a variety of contexts, ranging across the region from Russia and Ukraine to Hungary and Romania and in time from the late fifteenth century to the present-day. A helpful introductory essay by the editors frames the entire volume, highlighting the power of these myths to create meaning through the cultural imagination of space. Bulwark discourses abound, they write, “where it is necessary to strengthen identity and culture, to define a society in demarcating it from Others and to imagine a territory” (p.11). They suggest that competition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to define imperial spaces as national space made Eastern Europe especially fertile ground for this kind of myth-making, imparting fantasies of national sacrifice and civilizational defense with a cultural power still felt across the region today.

Many of the essays in this volume illuminate the ways in which visions (and narratives) of borderlands and border security are so often shaped by beliefs in a civilizing mission. In her own contribution, Heidi Hein-Kircher shows how the city of L’viv (Polish: Lwów) was imagined in late nineteenth-century travel guides as an outpost of Polish civilization surrounded by barbarism. Echoes of this theme can be found in other essays, for instance Paul Srodecki’s comparison of anti-Bolshevik ideology in interwar Poland and Hungary, Philipp Hofeneder’s account of Polish and Ukrainian history textbooks in Habsburg Galicia, and Steven Seegel’s fascinating analysis of maps and the politics of mapmaking in East Central Europe. Volodymyr Kravchenko explains that bulwark myths were largely absent from Ukrainian national discourse until the late nineteenth century, when historian Mykhailo Hrushevskyi made this trope a staple element in the national historical imagination. By contrast, several essays—Stephen Norris’s on the complex afterlives of artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s famous painting Warriors and Kerstin Jobst’s on the cultural construction of an Orthodox Crimea—reveal how Russian imperial ideology legitimized itself through historical myths about the origins and early history of Slavic Orthodoxy. These studies show that the bulwark myths so central to the cultural geography of Eastern Europe were not always imagined in opposition to enemies from the East. Sometimes the threat came from the West.

Other contributors highlight the sacral power that modern nationalist bulwark myths drew from older languages of religious threat. Kerstin Weiand locates some of the earliest instances of a pan-European bulwark discourse in late fifteenth-century speeches made to the Imperial Diet by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, councilor to Emperor Frederick III and later Pope Pius II. In them, he called on Christian Europeans to unite against an implacably savage Ottoman Muslim enemy. His warnings, which circulated in print form throughout Europe, found especially receptive audiences in Poland and Hungary. Centuries later, nationalists in both countries would refashion this history into dramatic myths of resistance and martyrdom on the eastern marches of European civilization. But this ideological transformation was not peculiar to Catholic societies. According to Liliya Berezhnaya, the Russian Orthodox monks of the Pochaiv Lavra monastery remade their collective memories of conflict with an expanding Ottoman Empire into a vision, updated for the nineteenth century, of Orthodoxy under attack from Jews, Polish Catholics, and a host of cultural ills coming to Russia from the West. Zaur Gasimov proposes that the religious origins of modern bulwark myths were even more malleable, showing in his essay how émigré Turkic intellectuals from the Soviet Union imagined Atatürk’s Turkey as a (non-Christian) bulwark defending Turkish and Turkic culture from Communism.

This collection reflects the diversity of bulwark myths in Eastern Europe. It has less to say about causes: why do bulwark myths spring to life at some times and lie dormant at others? The volume also leaves readers to draw their own connections between bulwark discourses in Eastern Europe and myths of civilizational defense at work in other places. Today, no less than in Piccolomini’s age, calls to defend the bastions of Christian civilization resound throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. As this volume shows so well, bulwark myths persist in many places. Rampart Nations is an excellent guide to a problem that shows no signs of going away.

Paul Hanebrink
Rutgers University
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The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 367 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.174

Over the course of the last thirty years, we have seen a growing amount of research in the field of cultural nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe. Most of these endeavors have aimed to examine, within multidisciplinary frameworks, the complex political, economic, and social roles of the various kinds of cultural activities in the area of great empires and “small nations.” The Matica and Beyond is indeed the twenty-first book in the National Cultivation of Culture series published by Brill.

The book is a collection of fifteen works written by cultural historians from all over Europe. The fifteen texts result in a surprisingly consistent volume, as the essays are methodologically and thematically very similar, and they draw on an array of exciting new sources and offer similarly engaging conclusions. The editors of the book, however, faced challenges in combining the essays to form a meaningful whole.

As far as the geographical range of the studies is concerned, the book consists of six manuscripts dealing with cultural organizations in the Habsburg Monarchy, whereas the rest of the papers deal with other European associations, though these organizations and associations all had the same essential purpose: to enhance national and ethnic awareness among members of a certain nation.

In the introduction, Joep Leerssen presents the structure of the book and explains the extent to which the phenomenon of Matica has been investigated or marginalized both politically and in the scholarship. Leerssen also calls attention to significant similarities and links in the national movements under discussion and the surprisingly important role of the Maticas in linguistic turns and geopolitical changes.

The first essay, Zsuzsanna Varga’s “The Buda University Press and National Awakenings in Habsburg Austria,” is about the roles of publishing in strengthening national consciousness and identity among Slavic peoples. Varga examines numerous books written in vernacular languages and spellings, especially works by Serbs, who played a leading role in the struggle of the Empire’s Slavic nations for autonomy and independence.

Magdalena Pokorna provides the first essay in the collection that offers insights into a Matica’s activity. Pokorna offers a detailed discussion of one of the crucial Maticas for the Slavs, the Czech one. It is nicely complemented by “The Slovak Matica, Its Precursors and Its Legacy” by Benjamin Bossaert and Dagmar Kročanova. Due to the different political circumstances, these two Maticas did not have similar operational policies, but they did have the common aim of establishing stronger connections with the other Slavic nations (Croats, Poles, Serbs, Slovenians, Bulgarians, etc.) in order to achieve greater cultural and national independence in opposition to the dominant German culture. The fourth essay is a short overview by Miloš Řezník of actions taken by Lusatian Serbs, Ruthenians, and Czech Silesians. Řezník offers insights into the ways in which regionalism and nationalism often collided.

Marijan Dović offers an essay on the work of the Slovenian Matica, in which he explains how this organization was not just a place for book publishing, but also for self-education and common thinking about issues like the school system and the media culture.

Daniel Barić discusses the emergence of the Dalmatian Matica and how it later became part of the Croatian one. Barić claims that “the first maticas were founded in the South Slav area in a time of redefinition of the nation, hence there were competing terms in use” (p.119). He also states that “the multiple engagement of the Croatian maticas mirrors the efforts made to cultivate and celebrate a distinctiveness within a multicultural environment” (p.134). Ljiljana Guschevska’s essay on Macedonian societies details how intellectuals struggled to form a multilayered Macedonian identity.

The essay entitled “Language, Cultural Associations, and the Origins of Galician Nationalism, 1840–1918” deals with the strengthening of language identity, which was meant to be a source of power in boosting nationalism. Philippe Martel offers another example of a struggle for more powerful nationalism through language use in an essay focusing on the “Impossible Occitan Nation.” Martel foregrounds the absurdity of the idea of Occitania due to language and identity anachronisms.

In the Netherlands, in contrast, the rule was one language, two states, and many nations. The essay “Educational, Scholarly, and Literary Societies in Dutch-Speaking Regions, 1766–1886” by Jan Rock deals with three main types of organizations and clubs: philological, intermediating, and non-governmental. These clubs strengthened the language identity of different communities in Netherlands. The author also perceives the similarities with the model of governing the Maticas, although “one major difference lies in the political contexts and therefore in the nature of governmental support” (p.204).

The struggle for independence among the Welsh sought cultural and linguistic autonomy rather than political autonomy. Marion Loffler, in her contribution to the volume, presents a nuanced comparison of Welsh cultural nationalism with the aspirations of Slavic people and explains the major differences between pan-Slavism and pan-Celticism. Similarly, Roisín Higgins emphasizes the importance of newspapers in strengthening the Irish nation. She relates the Young Ireland movement with the Illyrian one which began to rise to prominence in the middle of the nineteenth century in Croatia.

Jörg Hackmann focuses in his essay on the roles of school associations in the rise of national consciousness. Through school associations and struggles for language rights in the gymnasiums in bigger, linguistically mixed cities such as Riga, Tartu, and Jeglava, the Estonians, Latvians, and Germans tried to resist the russification of their communities.

Iryna Orlevych presents the activities of a crucial organization which was responsible for cultivating a sense of national consciousness in Austrian Galicia. During almost a century of its existence, Matica was a very powerful pillar of the Church and an important element of Galicia’s cultural identity. Later, it lost its fundamental role (to strengthen cultural identity) and became a political organization of the Russian Empire.

The last paper in the book deals with specific aspirations of Tatars, among the most marginalized people in the Russian Federation. The author of the paper, Usmanova, examines Tatarian cultural and educational opportunities in Russia, touching on all the obstacles to a possible strengthening of the Russian Tatars’ identity.

In a slightly complex conclusion, Alexei Miller claims that “the Maticas and comparable organizations were part of the history of European peripheral nationalisms, but they were also a part of the history of Empires” (p.362). Therefore, as Dović formulates it, Maticas were the “heart in the body of the nation and [...] literature was its blood” (p.104).

The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe is definitely a unique and successful scientific project which has the novelty to give a detailed overview of the activities and roles of cultural organizations, such as the Matica itself, in Central and Southeastern Europe. It unquestionably constitutes a contribution to the secondary literature which will be of interest to historians, sociologists, and scholars of culture, since it concerns a very dynamically developing field and draws attention to an array of intriguing topics, such as the role of individuals in these organizations and the complex relationship between regional and national identities. The volume is particularly interesting in part because of the way in which it treats key moments and the Maticas’ key roles in the so-called national awakenings among Slavic nations. Some papers would definitely have been more interesting if they had been accompanied by explanatory figures. Overall, the book offers an overview of and insights into the ways in which the Maticas and many other associations, such as councils, clubs, cultural and art societies, and political parties, acted in order to strengthen regional and ethnic components of nations in Europe. The book successfully fulfills its ambition to emphasize in a multidisciplinary way the importance of cultural associations in the political and social histories of “small European nations.”

Ivan Brlić
Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar
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Genealogies of Memory 2020 – The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives. Conference report.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.178

Organized by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), the conference entitled Genealogies of Memory 2020 – The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives took place in the form of eight sessions between November 4 and 26, 2020. Due to the ongoing pandemic, instead of an in-person event, the organizers conducted the conference online, streamed via Zoom and Youtube, thus making it accessible to a wide international audience.

The most important goal of the conference was, according to the website of ENRS, “to assess the current state of Holocaust memory research” in the light of increasing globalization, as well as various new trends. Through seven key topics and a final roundtable discussion, the speakers explored issues connected to the interaction of universal and local Holocaust memory and ethical questions related to them. Each session started with a keynote address, which was followed by presentations by young and established scholars and the observations of a commentator.

The first session, which addressed the practical ethics of Holocaust memory, started with Piotr Cywiński’s (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum) keynote, in which he delineated the development and major turning points of Holocaust remembrance. The following four presenters highlighted certain episodes and practices of the memorialization process, such as the role that Raul Hilberg, eminent scholar of the Holocaust, played in the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Olof Bortz emphasized that Hilberg wanted to make the museum’s exhibit as authentic as possible, which generated tensions between different views on how to present the past and thus contributed to the discussion on commemoration.

The second session was dedicated to the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of documents compiled by the Oneg Shabbath group in the Warsaw ghetto, which is considered “the earliest historiography of the Holocaust.” Keynote speaker Omer Bartov (Brown University) linked the Ringelblum Archive to the main topic of the conference by discussing four factors: the increasing importance of history writing from below, local histories, the Holocaust as a first-person history, and the benefits of these new approaches. According to Bartov, the term “industrial killing,” which is so often applied to the Holocaust, is problematic because it obscures the fact that in many cases the victims stood face to face with the perpetrators before they were killed. Research on these atrocities and the relations between Jews, their neighbors and the Germans, as well as individual experiences can further an understanding of the nuances and dynamics of the Holocaust.

Bartov’s points were supported by the following presentations, which discussed various characteristics of the Ringelblum Archive. Katarzyna Person, for instance, focused on the situation of women who were forced to become prostitutes in the ghettos and the assessment of their role by the historians of the archive. By placing a relatively small group in the center of the investigation, Person could provide a more detailed picture of their agency, the difference between sexual barter and rape, and the specificities of how they were written about in the archive.

The third session, which dealt with “borderland memories,” began with Éva Kovács’s (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute) keynote lecture. Kovács explored and compared various spaces of remembrance: a private Holocaust museum in Rwanda, an exhibition about Srebrenica in Budapest, and the efforts to uncover mass graves of Holocaust victims in Minsk. She then elaborated on the intertwining local and transnational memory, touching on idealized or suppressed local remembrance too. The following panel presentations also addressed the topics of landscapes of memory and remembrance culture, among them the project description of Nadja Danglmaier and Daniel Wutti. The educational project aimed to integrate the common cultural history (including the Holocaust) of Carinthia, a border region between Austria and Slovenia, into school curricula on both sides of the border.

The session “Overlooking the Local Dimensions of the Holocaust,” which raised questions concerning linguistics and translation, started with a keynote lecture by Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Minister of Culture of Lithuania and an academic, about the diaries of Jewish children in Vilnius. Three of the panelists then discussed Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah. Dorota Głowacka, for instance, explored the mistranslations in the movie’s languages: Polish, Yiddish, German, French, and how this implicitly conveyed an image of anti-Semitic Poles who were ignorant of Jewish culture. Roma Sendyka’s presentation, on the other hand, suggested a possible solution to this problem, namely the re-translation of the Polish bystanders’ lines.

The fifth session addressed current shifts and methods in Holocaust studies, such as avantgarde environmental history, as discussed by keynote speaker Ewa Domańska (Adam Mickiewicz University), which aims to reveal the complex relationship between the events of the Holocaust and their environment and thus to construct holistic knowledge. In her presentation, Hannah Wilson presented three objects connected to survivors of the Sobibór death camp and how the meaning of these objects changed from generation to generation.

Jackie Feldman of Ben-Gurion University delivered the keynote for the sixth session. Feldman touched on the digital turn, the end of the age of the witness and the ways in which various technological solutions may alter the existing memoryscape. Liat Steir-Livny’s presentation on the short film Eva.Stories was strongly linked to this topic. The movie, which is a compilation of Instagram stories, managed to foster interest among masses of young people, and Steir-Livny analyzed the components of its success.

The topic of the seventh session was the connection between global and local memory, to which Daniel Levy of Stony Brook University provided an adept background in his keynote address. The entanglement of national, cosmopolitan, and global memoryscapes was also tackled by Agnieszka Wierzcholska, who discussed the difficulties that emerged when she was pressed to satisfy the expectations of both Polish and German audiences with her research on social relations in pre-war and post-war Tarnów.

During the final roundtable discussion, Éva Kovács, Ewa Domańska, Daniel Levy, and Jackie Feldman summarized the core issues of the conference, raising new questions and discussing new trends and possibilities in Holocaust research. All in all, the conference offered a rich variety of topics examined by some of the most eminent researchers, and it offered young scholars opportunities to talk about their research. Since the sessions were recorded, they are still available both on the Youtube channel and the Facebook site of ENRS. Thus, those who missed the original event can still listen to them. This can be recommended not only to Holocaust scholars but to anyone interested in contemporary history.

Borbála Klacsmann
University of Szeged
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Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-Building, the Fate of Minorities. Edited by Sabrina Ramet. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. 360 pp.

DOI: 10.38145/2021.1.181

The volume, published in the series “Routledge Studies in Modern European History,” brings together ten internationally renowned scholars to discuss the challenges that interwar Europe faced. The preface positions it in the wake of other all-embracing volumes looking at interwar Central and Eastern Europe, the most recent examples being Josef Rothschild’s East Central Europe Between the two World Wars (1974), and Ivan T. Berend’s Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (1998). Recent years have witnessed the emergence of new scholarship drawing inspiration from entangled history and looking at continuities in the post-imperial areas, as well as the impact of nationalizing policies on the processes of democratization. Nonetheless, these trends do not seem to have exerted much influence on the structure of this volume, which is articulated through national unities.

Sabrina Ramet uses the first chapter to clarify the aims of this effort: to trace the roots of the failure of democracy in East Central Europe, as well as the impact of this failure on the statuses of minorities, looking at both domestic (instability and political violence) as well as external factors (the economic crisis and the expanding role of Nazi Germany).

In the second chapter, M. B. B. Biskupski investigates the two alternatives with which the Polish leadership was faced, the one represented by Józef Piłsudski, who envisioned a large and inclusive Poland, and the other, a vision of a smaller and nationally homogeneous Poland, championed by Roman Dmowski. Biskupski, who regards these views as respectively “civic patriotism” and “ethnic nationalism,” blames external factors, which led to a downsizing of Poland’s geopolitical perspective and made the federalist option unfeasible. Chapter three, by Sabrina Ramet and Carol Skalnik Leff, focuses on interwar Czechoslovakia, the only country in the area whose political system is usually praised for its democratic nature. Nevertheless, its major weakness was what the authors describe as the “securitization of democracy” against external enemies. In this context, both the Slovak population and minorities (the German, Hungarian, Jewish, and Ruthenian communities) found themselves in a position of subalternity and unevenness. In chapter four, Béla Bodó examines the Hungarian case, focusing on both minorities within the country and Hungarian minorities abroad. While revisionism remained a central issue of foreign policy, minorities enjoyed diverse statuses, ranging from that of the Germans, whose fate was increasingly entangled with the relationship between Hungary and the Third Reich, to the Jews, who were subjected to early anti-Semitic legislation which culminated in the late 1930s. The roots and the idea of the “ethnic privilege” enjoyed by the “state-forming nation” in Romania are central to the chapter written by Roland Clark (chapter five). Clark offers an overview of the social, ethnic, and religious context of the country, which included Transylvania, bringing into the country significant Hungarian and German minorities, and saw antisemitism across the political spectrum. As Clark argues, interwar Romania established itself as an exclusionary type of democracy, which drew on the idea of homogenization of minorities. In chapter six, Christian Promitzer explores the case of interwar Bulgaria, retracing its political evolution from the first postwar years of the Agrarian bloc, marked by land reform, to the following shift towards authoritarianism, albeit not fascism, as the later head of the Communist Party, Georgi Dimitrov, would have claimed. This was reflected in the attitude towards the Turkish minority, which was characterized both by increasing discrimination and an attempt to forge an alliance with its most conservative sectors in order to marginalize Kemalism. This marked a difference between the treatment of the Turkish minority by the Bulgarian state and the treatment of Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks, whose assimilation was actively pursued. Promitzer also shows that the contemporary influx of Bulgarian refugees was directly connected with increasing pressure on internal minorities. In chapter seven, Stipica Grgić offers a focused discussion of the Yugoslav state, whose weaknesses and disparities in standards were laid bare in its process of unification. In the background of the rising tensions between centralist and federalist strands as well as widespread instability, non-Slavic minorities experienced pressure, enacted also through the land reform, but they nonetheless tried to establish agreements with government parties. In chapter eight, Bernd J. Fischer offers insights into the turbulent interwar years in Albania, with the ascent to power of King Zog, who created an authoritarian power in a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt to achieve modernization, unity, and stability. While minorities did not represent a troublesome issue for interwar Albania, the existence of an ethnically Albanian population outside the border of the state conditioned both domestic and international relations. The only thematic contribution (Chapter nine) to the book, authored by Robert Bideluex, focuses on peasant parties across East Central Europe. Rejecting the image of backwardness often attached to the agricultural world in Eastern Europe, Bideluex argues that, should they have risen to power, peasant parties would have pursued an alternative (and more human) pattern of development in respect to both liberal capitalist and communist forces. The afterword to the volume, written by Stefano Bianchini, traces similarities and differences among the case studies and positions the political threads of the region in the interwar period, with an initial minimalistic approach to democracy, which included fair elections but not a real democratization of society, and a gradual shift toward authoritarianism, which accelerated after the beginning of the global economic crisis in 1929.

The effort to put together such a comprehensive volume is noteworthy, though the contributions could have been further harmonized. Moreover, the book acknowledges, with uneven efficacy, the entanglements between domestic and international factors in the treatment of minorities in East Central Europe, which, for the first time, found a theoretical protector in the League of Nations. Furthermore, it shows the social background of the authoritarian drive which led to the demise of democracy in the region by the end of the 1930s.

Nonetheless, the reader might get the impression that, in some of the contributions, nations are regarded as pre-existing entities and multinational states are deemed to fail as not founded on consensus. A further contextualization within the wider European context would have shown that the crisis of democracies was hardly exclusive to the Eastern part of the continent. Furthermore, a deterministic view of the fate of Eastern Europe seems to emerge from time to time, reenforced by the fact that the only country geographically located in Eastern Europe which did not turn to socialism after the Second World War—but shared many features with its neighbors in the interwar period—Greece, is excluded from this analysis. While several contributions stand out for clarity and represent recommended reading for students, specialists might have aspired to some more coherence and transnational insights within the volume. However, the volume is timely in analyzing from a historical perspective two issues that still challenge contemporary Europe: the dialectic between liberal democracy and authoritarianism and the relation with the Other.

Francesca Rolandi
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences
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Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. Edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 352 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.184

Recently, a small yet growing number of researchers have been working on the transnational history of the socialist countries during the Cold War. Their studies make clear that the socialist countries after the 1950s were far from isolated or autarkic and that these countries developed various transnational connections with the Global South and other parts of the globe. However, while they shed light on various concrete cases of these interconnections, it is often not easy to situate these findings in a larger picture of postwar globalization. The present volume edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung makes an important contribution to the scholarship, not only by illuminating various aspects of the East-South interconnections, but by also synthesizing these case studies into a wider history of “alternative globalizations.”

The book consists of an introduction and fourteen essays on political, economic, and cultural aspects of the Soviet and Eastern European connections with the Global South. Many contributors do not adopt the simplistic view of the Cold War as a mere binary confrontation between the two camps and instead depict the story of the East-South entanglements in connection with the activities of the Western counterparts. Furthermore, they often do not regard these relations as a one-sided transfer of socialist modernity from the developed East to the Global South and point out various unintended or surprising impacts on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The introductory essay by the three editors deserves particular attention, since it integrates the essays of the volume and situates the interactions between the Eastern and Southern peripheries in a broader process of postwar globalization.

The first essay, by Mark and Yakov Feygin, offers a well-written overview on the rise and fall of the alternative, anti-imperialist visions of global economy presented at the fora of the United Nations by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s. As Mark and Feygin show, while the socialist countries initially advocated these visions, their adherence to economic bilateralism, the halfway commitment to them, and the accumulating debts to the West fundamentally weakened such visions. The provocative yet stimulating essay by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony also focuses on Soviet economic relations with the Global South in the 1950s and 1960s, but from different standpoint. According to Sanchez-Sibony, none of the visions of an alternative modernity were the main motive behind the Soviet economic entanglements with the Global South. Rather, these entanglements were motivated by the desire to increase economic exchange with the outer world in the margins of capitalist globalization. While these two articles differ widely from each other on the role of socialist modernity, they are, in fact, mutually complementary and are of special value in that they both further a rethinking of the processes and characteristics of postwar economic globalization.

On a more concrete topic of the interconnections, Alena K. Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel explore Vietnamese labor migration into Eastern Europe. The Vietnamese labor program was initially designed as a means to help Vietnam, but as the economic crisis and labor shortage in Eastern Europe deepened, it became a source of a cheap workforce in the receiving countries. Massimiliano Trentin also examines the attitudes of non-Soviet actors by investigating East German policy in the Middle East. He points out that because of its rivalry with West Germany and its own economic interests, East Germany sometimes behaved autonomously in the region.

As to the cultural relations with the Global South, Łukasz Stanek investigates the interactions between Eastern Europe, West and North Africa, and the Middle East in the field of architecture. To deal with their “weak” bargaining positions, Eastern European actors in West Africa and the Middle East behaved flexibly, which made them highly instrumental for local elites in these areas. Marung examines Soviet Africanists’ activities concerning African agricultural problems. The failure of the Soviet agricultural model in Africa urged these scholars to rethink Soviet agricultural policy at home. The impact of transnational relations on the domestic politics of the socialist countries was also examined by Kalinovsky. He analyzes the interrelations between the Soviet policies in its own South and in the Global South, and he concludes that the Soviet attempt to instrumentalize the regions of Central Asia and Caucasia as a showcase for development in the Global South backfired. In fact, it revealed the weaknesses of the model and encouraged resistance against the regime in these Soviet republics. Maxim Matusevich focuses on the strained relations between the Soviet authorities and the African students at Soviet universities. Whereas the Soviet authorities wished to educate African students about socialist modernization, in practice, these students often emerged as educators of their fellow Soviet students. These interesting case studies make clear that socialist entanglements with the South were not a simple diffusion of a certain model, but the developed socialist countries were also influenced and reshaped by the South.

At the same time, it should be noted that the transnational approaches by the socialist countries, like every other such endeavor, had its limits. In the case of socialist globalization, the actors from the East often did not show great interest in thinking and acting within a global framework, preferring instead to maximize their own interests. For example, Bogdan C. Iacob presents an interesting case of Balkan scholars’ encounters with the Global South in UNESCO. Using the UNESCO project as a platform for their cause, these scholars emphasized the shared experience of Western European colonialism in the Balkan region and the Global South. But since their aim was Eurocentric rather than transregional, they lost momentum in the global arena. Such limits were also present in the transnational relations cultivated by the oppositional movements in Eastern Europe. Kim Christiaens and Idesbald Goddeeris examine transregional collaboration between the Polish Solidarność and the oppositional movements in the Global South and conclude that the engagement of Solidarność abroad remained limited in scope, as its reserved attitude toward the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa suggests. Adam F. Kola approaches the limitedness of the Eastern European intellectuals’ internationalism from a different perspective. He examines the reason why Polish intellectuals in the late socialist period avoided postcolonial discourse in emphasizing the “Soviet colonization” of Poland.

While these essays analyze the Soviet and Eastern European entanglements with the decolonizing countries, the essay on Sino-Soviet competition over the Global South by Péter Vámos broadens the scope by introducing the Chinese factor to the discussion. In response to the Chinese attempt to forge a worldwide anti-Soviet coalition, the Soviets coordinated the policies of bloc countries vis-à-vis China in an attempt to isolate it globally. Hanna Jansen examines the intellectual thaw under Khrushchev and the activities of Soviet Orientalists in the context of Sino-Soviet disputes. Quinn Slobodian focuses on East German grassroots internationalism, which emerged as a result of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

The book thus covers geographically and thematically wide-ranging topics of global interconnections that emerged after decolonization in the 1950s. The introductory essay provides a good reference point to position these cases within a wider framework of postwar globalization. On the whole, the book enhances our knowledge of the socialist postwar global entanglements with the Global South, and it will be of use and interest to readers who are curious to know more about the subtle, as yet lesser-known aspects of globalization.

Jun Fujisawa
Kobe University
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DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

DOI 10.38145/2021.4.800

Vrijeme sazrijevanja, vrijeme razaranja is the third volume in the series Biblioteka povijest hrvata, published by Matica hrvatska in 2019. This series eventually will consist of seven volumes in Croatian covering the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands from late antiquity until the late twentieth century. The first volume was published in 2015 and the third, which covers the period of the late Middle Ages, in 2019. The third volume of the series has twenty-three authors (five more than the first one), who are the most prominent scholars in their fields, which include history, legal history, economic history, church history, and historiography, and the authors belong to the younger or middle generation of Croatian historians. The volume begins with a preface written by editor Marija Karbić, who highlights that the book covers a turbulent period of the Croatian history characterized by integration and disintegration. This period included the rise of Venetian authority in the coastal territories, continuous conquests by the Ottoman Empire, and turbulent periods when some of the Croatian lands were part of the Kingdom of Hungary. According to Karbić, the volume aims to follow the path of the first book in the series in its structure and topics. She also highlights that the volume follows the path of two previous Croatian history projects, “Hrvatska i Europa” and “Povijest Hrvata.”

This volume, like the first volume of the series, thematically can be divided into three parts. The first part is a general overview which offers different perspectives on and approaches to the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands. It also deals with fields that are usually less frequently discussed, and it offers new approaches alongside the traditionally popular topics. The first two studies, which were written by Borislav Grgin, give an overview of the political history of Croatia in the late Middle Ages (pp.3–23 and 25–38). They are followed by Ante Birin’s chapter on the history of the Croatian nobility (pp.39–54). Damir Karbić then discusses the characteristics of the late medieval Croatian peasantry (pp.55–61). The last chapter, which is about the general social history of the Croatian lands, was written by Gordan Ravančić, who offers a look at urban communities and society (pp.63–77). Following these discussions of social topics, Sabine Florence Fabijanec examines the economic aspects of Croatia, including farming, forestry, viticulture, fishing, trade, commerce, and finance (pp.79–98). Her chapter is followed by two chapters on the continuous Ottoman conquests, both of which were written by Ivan Jurković. The first chapter discusses the migration caused by the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans (pp.99–113) and military history and defense campaigns against the Ottomans (pp.115–33). Zrinka Novak and Zoran Ladić deal with church history and religious life in late medieval Croatia, including the history of the different orders, ecclesiastical organization, and social questions (pp.135–161). Nella Lonza then examines various legal developments (pp.163–77), and Sandra Ivović and Meri Kunčić deal with the intellectual and cultural history of the period in question. Zoran Ladić and Goran Budeč discuss some aspects of the history of the families and private life as the final part of the first thematic unit (pp.213–33).

The second main part of the volume reflects the historical and cultural regionality of Croatia. It deals with territories of Medieval Croatia, including lands that are part of present-day Croatia but were separated in the Middle Ages and territories that are culturally, socially, and historically closely connected to Croatia. The first two chapters, by Marija Karbić and Stanko Andrić, deal with northwestern and northeastern Croatia separately (pp.235–54, 255–304). Both chapters are structured in a similar way. They show the history of the regions in different periods of the Hungarian Kingdom and deal with urban, social, and church history. The following chapter, by Marija Mogorović Crljenko, deals with Istria and the Kvarner Gulf (pp.305–26), followed by a chapter on Gorski kotar, Lika, and Krbava by Ivan Jurković (pp.327–39). The late medieval history of Dalmatia is divided into three parts. Irena Benyovsky Latin offers an account of the history of northern and central Dalmatia (pp.341–59), and Zrinka Pešorda Vardić writes on the golden age of Dubrovnik (pp.361–90). The third part, by Ivan Majnarić, is about Kotor (pp.391–400). The final chapter of the second part, by Ivan Botica, deals with the territory of Bosnia and Hercegovina (pp.401–42).

The third and final section of the volume (which is also the longest section) provides geopolitical context, as it deals with the countries and empires that had close relationships with either the Croats or the territories of present-day Croatia or held any parts of it. Marija Karbić discusses Hungary (pp.445–62), followed by Kornelija Jurin Starčević’s examination of the relationship between Croatia and the Ottoman Empire (pp.463–80). Jadranka Neralić deals with the relationships between Croatia and the Papacy between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries (pp.481–502). Lovorka Ćoralić analyses Venice’s role and advances in Croatia (pp.503–20). Borislav Grgin examines Croatia’s ties to southern Italy and Spain (pp.521–29). Robert Kurelić deals with Croatia’s relationship to the Holy Roman Empire (pp.531–44) and Austria (pp.545–59). Damir Karbić analyses the history of the Czech territories and Poland (pp.561–69), and, finally, Vjeran Kursar deals with the Balkans (pp.571–97). After the final unit, the volume includes an index of people’s names (pp.599–616) and an index of geographical names (pp.617–36).

The volume is a continuation and the outcome of a huge project started in 2015. The authors of the volume are among the greatest experts in their fields, and they have composed one of the finest syntheses of Croatian history. Their work and the sedulous work of the editor offer new perspectives on Croatian history, with chapters written about topics that to a large extent have eluded discussion, though they fit well into present trends in international historiography. The division of the book also offers new perspectives. It helps further an understanding of Croatia’s regional diversity and the varying histories of the regions of the country, and it also puts the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands into an international and regional context. The volume includes impressive studies, and it will appeal not only to the community of historians, but also to the wider reading public. Furthermore, it constitutes an important addition to the materials available for educational purposes. This volume, like the first book in the series, is a modern historical synthesis, and as such, it provides an excellent example on which new projects on other Central European countries can draw.

Judit Gál
Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities
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Dalmatia and the Exercise of Royal Authority in the Árpád-Era Kingdom of Hungary. By Judit Gál. Budapest: Research Centre for the Humanities, 2020. 228 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.803

Coloman the Learned, king of Hungary (1095–1116), was crowned king of Croatia and Dalmatia in 1102. Within three years, he occupied the most important cities of northern and central Dalmatia, thus unifying Hungary and Croatia into a union that lasted till 1918. The monograph under review, this valuable contribution to common Hungarian-Croatian history, analyses the southernmost part of the Kingdom of Hungary, or more precisely, Dalmatian cities and their place within the kingdom in the first two hundred years through the lens of the exercise of royal authority. Although several aspects of this relationship have been dealt with by Hungarian and Croatian historians, Judit Gál’s monograph has two major strengths. First, it is a modern original work based on hundreds and hundreds of hours of diligent archival work accompanied with intelligent comparative analyses of both national historiographies. Second and no less important, it is a highly analytical, yet comprehensible piece of scholarly work written in English, or in other words, it is accessible to a comparatively wide audience.

The book begins with a concise but very useful discussion of the socio-historical and geopolitical background. On the one hand, there was a relatively young and quite active Kingdom of Hungary which managed to extend its influence on the Adriatic although, on the other side, the doge of Venice had adopted the title duke of Croatia and Dalmatia in the late eleventh century, at the time when the Byzantine Empire was occupied with other affairs in the east. Dalmatian cities, those precious ancient (apart from Šibenik) urban shells in that frustratingly narrow coastal strip beneath the mountainous region in the north, have always had special status and a degree of autonomy which they mostly maintained within the Kingdom of Hungary.

The study is pursued here in two major chapters, constructed and intertwined around the role of royal authority. The first one is dedicated to the church, which played an essential role even in the secular life of Dalmatian cities. When addressing ecclesiastic affairs, Gál focuses on the three most important aspects: the changes in the structure of the Dalmatian church and the role played by Hungarian rulers in its modification; the personalities of the prelates of Dalmatia and changes in their roles; and the role played by royal and ducal donations to the church in the exercise of royal authority. The kings of Hungary did not have permanent local representatives in Dalmatian cities, so the archbishops of Split were Hungarian kings’ right hands, administrators with an extended reach. Dalmatian bishops and archbishops served as symbolic representatives of royal authority who promoted royal policies in their cities. Split archbishops, who inherited the metropolitan status of ancient Salona and were primases of Dalmatia, connected their city with the royal court and helped manage local affairs and promote the kings’ foreign-policy interests.

In the second chapter, Gál examines aspects concerning the exercise of Hungarian royal authority related to secular administration and urban communities. First, she analyses the privileges granted by the kings of Hungary to the cities of Dalmatia. She then examines the roles of the representatives of Hungarian royal authority: the dukes of Slavonia and the bans of Slavonia. She concludes with a discussion of shows of royal power and authority, mostly displayed through royal and ducal visits to Dalmatia. Her analyses of rulers’ show of power reveal that these visits were in fact complex performances with practical and symbolic functions. King Coloman made his visits to Dalmatia, during which he was accompanied by his splendid retinue consisting of Hungary’s highest-ranking secular and ecclesiastic dignitaries (as well as their Dalmatian counterparts), according to a regular schedule: every three years. Other kings traveled less frequently, never managing to follow this pattern, while the dukes of Slavonia mostly travelled to Dalmatia shortly after acquiring their titles. The bans became increasingly powerful after the Mongol invasion of 1241–42, but the overall Hungarian royal authority deteriorated after King Bela IV died (1270), and the local oligarchy, especially the Šubić clan, gained more influence in Dalmatia.

There are four very useful appendices at the end of the book. The first is on “Iohannes Lucius’ Collection of Historical Manuscripts,” which Judit Gál probably knows better than anyone else at this point, at least among the younger generation of historians from both sides of the Pannonian border. The second is the list of “Dalmatian Toponyms in Various Languages.” The third is the list of “Hungarian Kings’ and Dukes’ Donations to Dalmatian Churches” (1102–1285). The fourth and final appendix is a list of “Hungarian Kings’ and Dukes’ Grants of Privileges to the Cities of Dalmatia.” The book ends with four other additions: two indices (of personal and geographical names) and two sets of historical maps. The first set presents the city maps of Zadar, Biograd na Moru, Šibenik, Nin, Split, and Trogir in the period of Árpád kings. The second shows Dalmatia in 1105, 1180, 1205, and 1298, and it also includes a map of the Catholic Church in Croatia (as of 1298).

Gál spent a substantial amount of time in the Archive of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb and the Archbishopric Archive in Split, and she has made admirable use of the sources she found in both. She came to Zagreb as a MA student, and she brought with her an infectious enthusiasm, good knowledge of Latin, and an ever-improving ability to use Croatian scholarly literature. Dr. Damir Karbić, the director of the Historical Department of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, quickly realized what a promising scholar she was, and showing his usual hospitality, he made sure that she had the proper guidance through Croatian institutions. But all other credit goes to her for her dedicated, disciplined, old-fashioned hard work in the archives. This book is not the only fruit of the many years she spent pursuing research. She has also written numerous scholarly papers, digitized material, and made fresh discoveries in the undeservedly forgotten yet very valuable collection of sources. Historians of Central Europe in the Middle Ages cannot help but be impressed by her achievements, and it is worth noting that Gál, who only completed her PhD in 2019, is still at the beginning of her academic career.

Mirko Sardelić
Department of Historical Research Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
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Katonabárók és hivatalnok grófok: Új arisztokraták a 18. századi Magyarországon [Soldier barons and office-holder counts: New aristocrats in eighteenth-century Hungary]. By Tamás Szemethy. Budapest: MNL–BTK TTI, 2020. 479 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.806

Tamás Szemethy’s book, analyzing the emerging Hungarian “new aristocracy” of the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of social history, is based on a PhD thesis defended in 2020 at Eötvös Loránd University under the supervision of István Szijártó. Szemethy is one of the most promising members of a circle of young social historians who are gathered around Szijártó’s “school” at the Department of Social and Economic History of Eötvös Loránd University. Szemethy’s doctoral thesis was finalized and turned into a book within the framework of the research group “The political culture of the Hungarian estates’ system (1526–1848)” (NKFI K 116 166), coordinated by the National Archives of Hungary and the “Integrating Families” Research Group of the Institute of History of the Research Centre for the Humanities (LP2017-3/2017), supported by the “Momentum” (“Lendület”) Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The main goal of the book is simple: to validate or refute the topos of the “dilution of the Hungarian aristocracy” in the eighteenth century, which Szemethy considers a persistent commonplace in Hungarian historiography. The volume raises some crucial questions concerning the so-called “new aristocrats,” i.e., those who earned the title of a Hungarian baron or a count as plain nobles, characterizing it as a social group to establish his chosen research methodology. His main inquiry concerns the framing of the group, the careers of its members, and other factors preceding the elevation of their ranks, as well as possible explanations as to why the ruler decided to bestow on them a new rank. Finally, Szemethy also considers the typical career moves of the group.

Methodologically, the author commits himself prosopography, one of the auxiliary disciplines of social history, arguing that it can provide a qualified set of data which enables one to arrive at findings concerning the main tendencies of the group in question and general changes in the eighteenth-century social elite. Szemethy tries to define what he means by this in the first chapter, which could be treated as a practice-oriented contribution to this field of historical auxiliary sciences. According to this, not only has prosopography been separated from the traditional genre of archontology, but its advantages and disadvantages have also been considered. Referring to the work of English historian Lawrence Stone, Szemethy mindfully reflects on the limits and difficulties of doing prosopographic research, highlighting the problems of gathering sources that are of adequate quality and quantity, as well as the scarcity of narrative sources (first of all, ego-documents). He also cautions against conflating the typical characteristics of the whole group with those of its few prominent members, e.g., those individuals who held high offices and stirred interest among contemporaries. Based on these considerations, Szemethy constructs a group of “new aristocrats” as the subject of his analysis, zooming in on 91 people from 76 families between 1711 and 1799. He excludes from this group naturalized foreign aristocrats (indigenae) and those who earned the title due to their relatives and not their own career moves. In practice, apart from the chapters on atypical careers, his research is based fundamentally on the classical and more recent genealogical literature on the one hand and on the Royal Books (Libri Regii) on the other, though Szemethy also uses urbarial conscriptions, files from the Austrian State Archives in Vienna (nobility files, etc.), and other archival sources, if to a lesser extent. His style is succinct, clear, and factual, and his chapters are rhetorically well-structured, but the richness of the information provided sometimes makes it rather difficult to read them.

The book is divided into four main chapters and includes an almost 200-page long appendix, which contains all the relevant biographical and career data concerning the members of the group, as well a much shorter list of the high-ranking soldiers who earned the Military Order of Maria Theresa. This well-built database constitutes the backbone of the analyses. The structure of the whole book and the individual chapters is clear and logical, almost didactic. The short methodological introduction is followed by the longer prosopographic analyses of “typical” careers. The subsequent chapter then presents three “atypical” cases, and finally, a conclusion summarizes the achievements of the project.

Within the group of “new aristocrats,” two bigger subgroups, namely the office holders and the soldiers, have been set apart, and the title-donations of lower (baron) and higher (count) value are examined separately. By reason of the changing tendencies, the baronial donations implied different inner periodization and further subgroups: regarding the officials, the two subperiods are 1711–1770 (18 persons) and 1770–1799 (16 persons). In the case of officers, the timeframes are 1711–1758 (10 persons) and 1758–1799 (16 persons). In the first case, the dividing line is grounded in the emergence of a professionalizing office holder, marked by the baronial donation of Károly Reviczky, which approximates the conclusions of a study by Szijártó and Tünde Cserpes on the “high office holders” of the eighteenth century, cited frequently by Szemethy. The second case is much simpler, because the foundation of the Military Order of Maria Theresa definitely marks the beginning of a new period.

Concerning each group and subgroup, the careers, social backgrounds (ancestry, social status), and financial situations of its members are compared. Their financial situations are reconstructed on the basis of the amount of land they owned according to the urbarial conscriptions, an indicator which offers a rough approximation of the wealth of a certain family. However, the urbarial conscriptions indicate only possessions that were burdened by urbarial services. The measure of the current social status and the degree to which the “new aristocrats” could be said to have been integrated into the traditional aristocracy is assessed based on the connubium, i.e., the marital strategies of people recently elevated in position and their children from the perspective of the social and legal statuses of their spouses.

The subgroup of soldiers who earned baronial titles before 1758 is similar to the officials of the same period. In other words, most of them were elevated from wealthy noble families. After 1758, in contrast, several soldiers of humble backgrounds rose to the new aristocracy as well. However, the estimated wealth of the so-called “soldier barons,” based on the urbarial conscriptions, of the period was much less on average than the wealth of the officials. While the meritocratic elements of selection became significant among the soldiers in the last third of the century and this criterion (merit) also began to by more frequently applied within the central bureaucracy of the period, it remained only a subsidiary reason for bestowing a baronial title on officials. Regarding officials who earned a baronial title, Szemethy also points out that the father’s career was a factor only in a few cases of title donation, while the legal status of wives and mothers could also contribute to a certain extent to the rise of the nobility into the layer of aristocracy.

A subchapter focuses on those who earned the title of Hungarian count, making up the top elite of the emerging new aristocracy. As Szemethy points out, the Habsburg Monarchy had neither a unified aristocracy nor a unified nobility. Thus, the Austrian provincial, imperial, Transylvanian, Bohemian, and Hungarian title donations were all available at request at the same time, though at different prices and representing varying contents and values. The Hungarian titles were of the greatest value because of the political rights they potentially provided, i.e., the participation of aristocrats in the meetings of the upper house of the Hungarian diet in person or by proxy. The title of Hungarian count was not only more expensive than the title of baron, but as Szemethy presumed and has verified, it required a more successful military or civilian career, in addition to wealth and ancestry. From the group of 91 people, 28 became counts, and a third of them earned their title in two steps. As the author points out, most of them belonged to wealthy noble families with mid-size and large-size estates, and a significant number of them acquired their lands by themselves. While the number of official and soldier barons was balanced in the period, in the case of counts, only those who had a successful official career could advance, and only five soldiers were given this rank, who also needed to earn a significant land donation. Because of these reasons, until the end of the period under study, the subgroup of counts formed a more exclusive and prestigious circle than the barons within the new aristocracy and the group of magnates in general.

In contrast to the quantitative analysis in the second section, which is dry but rich in information, the third part focuses more on narrative methods and careers and elevation in rank of three persons considered “atypical.” These chapters originally were intended to complete and contrast the prosopographic analysis of the group of new aristocrats. However, each of them could be read as a micro-historical essay in itself. Zooming in on the three atypical careers, Szemethy shows further sides of his talent as a historian by examining other problematic questions and using new types of sources. In the case of István László Luzsénszky, Szemethy focuses on the role of the patron-client relationship between the ambitious nobleman and clergyman Luzsénszky and his influential patron, Imre Csáky. In doing so, he relies on their highly formalized “functional” correspondence, based on a method used by Heiko Droste. Szemethy points out that the elevation in rank was an outcome of the accumulation of Luzsénszky’s family inheritance as wealth and as socio-political symbolic capital. Reconstructing the case of György Farkas Chiolich, the author tries to track a charge of cradle-snatching against the bishop of Zengg-Modrus. He proves that Chiolich took steps to earn an aristocratic title in addition to his prelateship in order to accumulate more power and authority not only among the clergy, but also among laymen. Finally, the third case study focuses on Mihály Manduka, later known as Mihály Horváth, an ambitious Greek merchant of non-noble background who rose to become a figure of the Hungarian nobility and, a few years later, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, of the aristocracy as a baron. The chapter affirms the findings of renowned urban historian Vera Bácskai, according to which Horváth should be regarded as an “ennobled burgher” rather than as a “new aristocrat” who embraced the identity and ethic of the landowning nobility. Consequently, he could be considered one of the predecessors of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs.

In his concluding remarks, Szemethy, on the one hand, points out that the efforts of the Viennese court to make talented military officers more visible by bestowing titles on them led to a kind of “dilution” of the Hungarian elite. On the other hand, he calls attention to the fact that, of the officials, those who received a baronial title belonged to the wealthy and were able to reach the required standards. The new counts remained an exclusive group the members of which could assert themselves better in the environment of the traditional aristocracy. Szemethy summarizes his findings as follows: “[I]t would be more accurate to consider the social changes of the second half of the eighteenth century not simply as the dilution of the elite, but rather as its transformation and complementation with new elements.” All things considered, Szemethy has drawn a persuasive image of the eighteenth-century “new aristocracy” based on the method of prosopography, complemented in some cases with the inclusion of different kinds of primary sources, as well as some more innovative ways of analysis. Nevertheless, I cannot help but make a few critical remarks concerning some aspects of his undertaking which follow mainly from Szemethy’s presuppositions and the inflexibility of his method.

First, with regard to the treatment of primary sources, two significant shortcomings have to be mentioned. Szemethy did not research and use family archives systematically or extensively. Furthermore, his research on the practices of the chancellery and the changes it underwent over the course of the century is also flawed. Szemethy was frank about this, claiming that his “research in family archives yielded disappointing results,” and he mentions as an example the Luzsénszky family archive and the lack of narrative sources, first and foremost private family correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. Nonetheless, the conclusions he draws are hardly convincing, and they are even less so if all the related families are considered. Due to the lack of narrative sources, he is unable to demonstrate how “new aristocrats” considered and represented their own social status within the public sphere or what attitudes emerged in the narrower and broader social environment towards them. The contemporary set of the positive and negative topoi concerning new aristocrats should have been analyzed too, irrespective of their factual content. With regards to the former point, the case study of the Luzsénszky–Csáky relationship offers the possibility of narrative analysis, and with regards to the latter, the same is true of the “pilot study” on Gábor Draveczky in the first chapter. As for the practices of the chancellery, it would have been fruitful to consider the requests that did not result in title donations, particularly regarding the Military Order of Maria Theresa.

Second, while the starting date of the study, 1711, is unequivocally considered the beginning of a new era, marked by the year when Charles III ascended the throne, the ending year, 1799, is rather disputable. In Szemethy’s, his choice enables him to examine the tendencies of the fin-de-siècle in the context of late eighteenth-century military and political history, while the context of Napoleonic Europe provides a fundamentally different framework. The French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars profoundly changed the political and military situation for the traditional powers of Europe, including the Habsburg Empire and thus the Kingdom of Hungary. Nevertheless, the whole period between 1792 and 1815 (or so forth) should have been treated rather in its entirety to show tendencies in progress under the rule of Francis I, marked as “cabinet absolutism.” This would have made it possible to assess the effects of the French Wars on the subgroup of the emerging “military aristocracy.” For example, the case of Dániel Mecséry, who earned not only the Knight’s but also the Commander’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa and thus became a baron still struggled for land donation in vain and died relatively poor. Moreover, he left behind a German autobiography which constitutes a valuable narrative source, in contrast with those on whom Szemethy has focused in his research.

Finally, some remarks should be made with regards to the structure and appearance of the book. The method of presenting factual information, sometimes to a superfluous extent within the main text (apart from the three analyses of the “atypical” careers, where it seems necessary for the reader to be able to follow the text), is to some extent debatable, because the appendix contains detailed biographical data concerning each member of the group. Instead of this, the publisher could have published the tables in the appendix as an online searchable database (which would have been a more concise and economical option). Fortunately, this is also in progress, according to the latest information. Since the subject and name indices are missing from the volume, the use of the appendix and, in fact the whole volume is difficult. Nevertheless, the book can be downloaded for free, which remedies this problem to a certain extent. Notwithstanding these remarks, however, the richly illustrated and attractive book is well-edited and of very high quality.

Ágoston Nagy
University of Public Service
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A Mighty Capital Under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800–2000. Edited by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim. History of the Urban Environment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. 282 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.812

This collection of ten papers covers the major urban environmental changes in London over the past two centuries. The British capital was the first global city: the explosion of population growth and the concentration of the population in a smaller area during the nineteenth century presented previously unprecedented challenges. At these times, as was true in many countries in Europe, Central Europe, including the Hungarian capital, followed the technical and scientific innovations introduced in London in response to urbanization. From the 1850s onwards, London made several environmental improvements in order to enhance the living and health conditions of its citizens. Alongside news and publications, word was also spread by the flow of British professionals to Europe. Their role in the major infrastructure projects in Budapest (e.g., the Chain Bridge, the water and sewerage networks, etc.) also makes this volume of studies of particular interest to specialists in the history of Central Europe.

The book is introduced by a substantial editorial foreword, which provides insights into the historiography of urban environmental history followed by a brief overview of the last two centuries of London’s environmental history and the major crises and problems the city faced.

Jim Clifford’s study (“Greater London’s Rapid Growth, 1800–2000”) describes the city’s growth over the last two centuries and the changes that have occurred, drawing primarily on a comparative analysis of maps. Defining (the boundaries of) the city is extremely difficult. The administrative boundaries do not cover the whole of the city’s surroundings, and local government in this period operated quite independently of the (otherwise weak) central leadership. This and the following study, in its concluding remarks, draw attention to the increasingly serious and urgent need to address the continuous risk of flooding as a result of climate change and the city’s expansion. The second paper, by Christopher Hamlin (“Imagining the Metropolitan Environment in the Modern Period”), examines the history of London as an environment, with a specific focus on the human aspect of how contemporary people understood the city as a physical and social medium.

Anne Hardy’s study (“Death and the Environment in London, 1800–2000”) examines the problems we have seen so far from demographic and epidemiological perspectives. Rapid population growth in the nineteenth century presented environmental challenges to housing, and mortality rates were extremely high. The city authorities were unable to cope with these issues until the second half of the century. The problem was linked first to pollution and poverty and, from the middle of the century onwards, more specifically to the quality of air, water, and geographical locations and to periodic outbreaks of epidemics (e.g., cholera and typhoid). Environmental improvements were sought as a solution, and a slow decline in mortality did indeed begin. Contemporary and historical observations have described London as an environmental death trap, but this picture is much worse than the actual situation was. According to Hardy, this could be explained by poor central control, as the various historical studies have always been concerned with the administration of a given local borough, and thus the London-wide context is not really known.

Christopher Ferguson (“London and Early Environmentalism in Britain, 1770–1870”) examines the relationship between early environmentalists and London. The individuals and associations that fell into this category sought to understand the various impacts of urban growth on the environment with the aim of protecting and improving human life and its values. In many respects, they were important predecessors to today’s environmentalists. Although the medical approach of the 1870s focused more on the human body than on the living environment in terms of the development of disease, the spread of the idea of prevention and control led many European cities to focus on environmental hazards in terms of public health.

Finally, a later study in the book by Bill Luckin and Andrea Tanner (“‘A Once Rural Place’: Environment and Society in Hackney, 1860–1920”) also belongs to this thematic unit. This paper is directly linked to Ferguson’s study through its examination of the relationship between sanitation and environmental practices in Hackney, an inner London borough. The paper reviews the environmental hazards associated with health problems already identified in earlier studies. By the 1920s, the influence of the sanitary movement, which linked moral conditions to health, was beginning to fade. This case study also reflects and supports Hardy’s demographic conclusions.

Peter Thorsheim’s study (“Green Space in London: Social and Environmental Perspectives”) looks into the evolution of green space in London and the uses of green spaces over the past two centuries. The notion of sustainability, in which environmental, social, and economic issues are inextricably intertwined, are traced in this study of the history of uses of green space.

Leslie Tomory’s study (“Moving East: Industrial Pollution in London, 1800–1920”) explores London’s industrial pollution problems. The crises caused by industrial pollution in the nineteenth century were not as acute as the epidemics and pollution around dwellings, and they therefore have attracted less attention. Industry representatives also made it difficult for local authorities to regulate industries, and eventually they had to be regulated at government level. The city’s air was gradually cleaner as factories moved eastwards, where they could operate under less regulated conditions, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that real changes were made in relation to smog.

Two papers in this volume are dedicated specifically to a historical examination of the problem of water supply. Vanessa Taylor’s study (“Water and Its Meanings in London, 1800–1914”) examines the changing meanings and management of water in the long nineteenth-century London. The chapter provides a substantial chronological summary of the history of water supply in London. The paper then thematically reviews the city’s debates about local supply, the relationship between changing conceptions of water and sanitation, and the changing forms and roles of domestic supply in everyday life. Increasing water supply in response to an elevated demand facilitated further population growth in expanding urban spaces. The possibilities and conditions of water availability for urban dwellers improved considerably, but major infrastructure decisions were made over their heads, and the ongoing debates about this in the nineteenth century were linked to London’s governance mechanisms (e.g., the lack of central control and the strength of local government). There were conflicting priorities regarding urban rivers (the public was more concerned with water supply and sanitation, while the administration was basically interested in the function of rivers as a pollution removal system, although it monitored their deteriorating condition over time), but their “natural” state did not yet matter much. The idea of the river as an ecosystem had not yet been raised. The final chapter of the book also expands on the issue of water supply and the urban environmental history of London with a comparative study of New York by Bill Luckin and Joel A. Tarr (“Water for the Multitudes: London and New York, 1800–2016”). As Taylor does in his study, Luckin and Tarr examine the ways in which the growing population was supplied with water. Which proved more efficient, a privately controlled water supply or a publicly funded water supply? New York’s system, established by the 1830s, solved the problem of supply through the use of sources far from the city. The water quality was better, but this meant regular conflicts with the locals, with whom a final agreement was only reached in 1995. In London, the problems of municipal administration were seriously resolved in 1902, when water supply was transferred from private companies to the then Metropolitan Water Board, which significantly improved the situation.

The volume concludes with an extensive appendix of notes and an index to the studies. In the former, the authors have taken care to draw the reader’s attention to a large body of additional literature on the various subtopics. The index is very rich, with names of persons, geographical names, and key terms. It is a particularly useful tool for the sub-topics that are covered by several studies from different perspectives (e.g., London’s administration, different territorial definitions, environmental and epidemiological issues, etc.).

Most of the studies are well structured, and cross-references between the chapters help the reader find links within a given topic. Hamlin’s study, which seeks to examine the global city from several angles, stands out somewhat. It fits in the volume in terms of its topic and ambitions, but it is more of an essay that raises thought-provoking points. Rather than dwell on the classic topics of urban environmental history, these papers offer a glimpse into the history of various complex debates (urban green use, the construction and control of urban space, the many different meanings of pollution and water, etc.). There is also a strong emphasis on the current and future impact of acute problems.

Ágnes Németh
Eötvös Loránd University / Budapest City Archives
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Vielfalt ordnen: Das föderale Europa der Habsburgermonarchie (Vormärz bis 1918). By Jana Osterkamp. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. 531 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.816

In the historiography, the Habsburg Monarchy has long been characterized as the “prison of the peoples” (Völkerkerker), a state which, allegedly, would inevitably have fallen apart because of “nationality conflicts” while it was also (again, allegedly) shaped first and foremost by the issues of “nationality politics.” However, in the more recent scholarship, more emphasis has been put (not least because of the pioneering works of Pieter Judson) on the fact that the Habsburg Monarchy offered a legal framework for different identities and self-localizations, beyond the national cluster thinking, and represented a functioning legal system.

While the micro-historical studies explore the complexity of the local level, Jana Osterkamp has tried to put these local pieces of the puzzle together in a new narrative. Given her legal and historical knowledge, Osterkamp is able to interpret new findings of Habsburg research from a legal perspective.

With her innovative concept of the “cooperative empire,” Osterkamp succeeds in capturing both in historical and legal terms the supranational and proto-federalist character of the Habsburg Monarchy, especially the Austrian half of the empire. She introduces the concept of the “cooperative empire” as a description for legal and political opportunities beside and among the local structures (Jana Osterkamp, Cooperative Empires [2016]). The concept emphasizes integration, equality, and symmetries among the imperial “peripheries.” Therefore, the Habsburg Monarchy can be understood as an interdependence of several centers and peripheries, in which a complex multi-level system was established beyond (and even against) the imperial centers.

This approach allows Osterkamp to make the supranational character and the legal-administrative functions of the Habsburg Monarchy more visible. Statehood was not nationalized in Austria (Pieter M. Judson, L´Autriche-Hongrie était-elle un empire? [2008]), and the Habsburg Monarchy did not grant any single people a constitutionally anchored supremacy because there was no “nation” in the sense of a political nation (Peter Urbanitsch, Pluralist Myth and National Realities [2004]). A very important legitimation function was therefore assigned to the law (James Shedel, The Problem of Being Austrian [2001]. Despite the empire’s ethnic-linguistic, religious, and regional diversity, which would have made neither the hegemony of a nation nor a democratic nation-state possible, all citizens enjoyed the same rights in the Austrian part of the Monarchy, regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation or their professed native tongue.

In her new book, Osterkamp applies the results of federalism studies to the Habsburg Monarchy. She comes to the conclusion that proto-federalist elements can be recognized in the complex structure of Austria-Hungary, which, on the one hand, could not yet clearly come into play at the time (because of crown land interests, nationalisms, and the idea of an Austrian confederation), but which, on the other hand, anticipated a post-nation-state age of the “political.” Osterkamp perceives federalism as a pre- and post-modern idea (p.2 et sq.). In the age of emerging nationalisms and nation-states of the late nineteenth century, this federalist-supranational idea might seem outdated, but especially for the Habsburg Monarchy, the existing structures (such as the crown lands) gave new impulses and meanings while at the same time opening up discourses for new constitutional ideas.

With the concept of federalism, Osterkamp can overcome a state-focused perspective in both historical and legal debates: “Multi-level systems of rule do not have to be sovereign state in their entirety if one wants to examine them as federal systems” (p.10). In this sense, Osterkamp understands federalism as a “vertical division of the state power by different decision-making levels within a long-term existing political order” (p.215, emphasis in original).

The lack of a unified nation does not turn out to be backwardness or a reason for decay, but rather enabled new paths and ideas for an empire that had to legitimize itself beyond the “national”: “The state doctrine of the Habsburg Monarchy could not rely on the central idea of the nation. The place of the nation-state was taken by an enlightened ‘overall state idea’ [Gesamtstaatsideee] oriented towards the effectiveness and welfare of the population, on which Austrian political science had been working since the 18th century” (p.47). The social pluri-culturalism and the imperial-supranational structure corresponded to a formalistic-legalistic understanding of law, which—instead of relying on metajuristic-fictional and emotionally charged categories, such as “nation” or “state” —brought the dynamic processuality and the positivistic formality of the legal system to the fore (Urbanitsch [2004]). The lack of a unified “nation” and even the lack of such a state idea favored a model in which law and administration (as form and function) stood at the very center of state activities. This explains the strongly legalistic tradition of Austrian legal thought, which continued to have an effect after 1918 (and in fact until today) (Ewald Wiederin, Denken vom Recht her [2007]).

Osterkamp gives plurality and supranationality, long considered as deficits of the Habsburg Monarchy, a positive meaning. Although the Habsburg Monarchy could not build one nation (p.121), its constellation enabled a system in which ideologically motivated terms, like nation-state and sovereignty, were not in the foreground. The Habsburg Monarchy yielded a multi-level structure of the administration instead of centralized, one-dimensional governance (pp.87, 214 et sq.). Osterkamp differentiates between various forms of federal structures (administrative federalism, crown land federalism, union of dualism), which she compares with the federalist ideas of the time (trialism, non-territorial personal autonomy, a “United States of Austria,” etc.) (p.413).

Osterkamp’s analysis offers a new explanation for the state structure and cooperation within the Habsburg Monarchy, and it may also explain the discrepancy between the narrative of the “prison of the peoples” and the reality of a functioning (although muddled) administration. Pieter Judson ascribes a certain theatricality to Viennese politics: polarizing debates on the stage, but cooperation behind it, or, as Osterkamp writes: “People talked about each other in public, and in the back rooms with each other” (p.224).

Osterkamp investigates not only the structures existing at the time or the federalist (federalizing) proposals, but also takes into account the reality of proto-federalist cooperation as well, for example among the crown lands vis-à-vis Vienna. Her book also analyses the different compromise models (in Moravia and Galicia), the crown land conferences, the petition practice of the local population (especially in Galicia), the financial equalization between the crown lands and between Vienna and Budapest. Separate chapters are devoted to the proto-federalist agricultural, social, educational, administrative, and health policies.

Jana Osterkamp’s monography thus represents the first attempt to describe the constitutional functioning and the administrative practices of the Habsburg Monarchy as part of her innovative concept (“cooperative empire”) and also with regard to today’s jurisprudential and theoretical debates on supranational, federalist entities (like the European Union). It is an admirable attempt impressive in its findings and insights.

Péter Techet
Institute of Political Sciences and Philosophy of Law, Hans Kelsen Research Centre,
Albert-Ludwig-University of Freiburg / Centre for Legal History Research, University of Zurich
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Milan Rastislav Štefánik: The Slovak National Hero and Co-Founder of Czechoslovakia. By Michal Kšiňan. London–New York: Routledge, 2021. pp. 300.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.819

In recent decades, Milan Rastislav Štefánik (1880–1919) has become one of, if not the, most important Slovak historical figures in Slovakia. Born in Nitra County, he left Hungary in 1898 after completing grammar school, first to study in Prague and then to live in France as an astronomer. He then spent years traveling the world and became a prominent figure in the French scientific and political elite. In 1912, he acquired French citizenship. He joined the French army when the war broke out and used his contacts with members of the political elite to reach Prime Minister Aristide Briand, through Czech émigrés Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, whom he knew from Prague, and Edvard Beneš. Together with them, he quickly won support among the great powers for the post-war liquidation of the Monarchy and the creation of new state structures. Štefánik’s political vision and his diplomatic and military organizational work thus played a major role in the creation of the new state of Czechoslovakia. Tragically, however, Štefánik never actually set foot on the soil of this new state. On his journey home, not far from Bratislava, his plane crashed on landing.

Several impressive papers on Štefánik’s life and work have been published in recent years. One of Kšiňan’s innovations in this already vibrant discourse is that he has created a deconstructionist biography: he deliberately does not follow a linear chronological sequence from birth to death (and does not bring his narrative to a close with Štefánik’s death, but rather ends much later). This method allows Kšiňan to focus on what he considers the most important issues in Štefánik’s life. Given the complexity of Štefánik’s personality and the remarkable turns his life took, it would be almost impossible to organize these penetrating analyses into a straight narrative. Over the course of some 39 years (and especially during the last decade and a half of his life), Štefánik pursued a multifaceted career that was almost unprecedented not only in Hungary, but probably in Europe. This presents the historian with daunting challenges. Within the framework of a single narrative, one has to delve into the inner workings of the French astronomical society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while also considering the subtle shifts in domestic politics in Ecuador, France, Bohemia (or the Czech lands), Russia, England, the United States, Italy, and Romania, not to mention the systems of rules and customs in the French salons, the functioning of the Masonic lodges, and countless other contexts, for without this detailed backdrop, Štefánik’s life and achievements are hardly comprehensible.

After an introductory historical overview intended presumably for the non-Slovak reader, Kšiňan has divided his book into four major themes. It is worth noting that he does not cover Štefánik’s entire life. Apart from a few digressions into some of the events of Štefánik’s youth, he concentrates on the last 15 years of his life, the period between 1904 and 1919, when Štefánik gradually emerged as an increasingly prominent figure in intellectual and political life in France. As Kšiňan himself states in the preface, he is primarily interested in the Štefánik as the “Slovak national hero.” More precisely, he seeks to consider the qualities, networks, relationships, and events in Štefánik’s adult life, between the ages of 24 and 39, that made him such an important figure, so rapidly elevated by the new state to the status of a national icon.

The first chapter, which begins with a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of social capital, examines how Štefánik created his network of French social contacts before the outbreak of World War I and how he transformed his social and cultural capital into economic capital. Kšiňan also considers how Štefánik used his interests and hobbies (astronomy, photography, a passion for collecting, an interest in the arts) to maintain his social capital. This analysis is important, as it furthers our grasp of how Štefánik was able to convince French decision-makers in the middle of the war to consider the views of two Czech emigrants (Masaryk and Beneš), how he was able to persuade them and Western public opinion to entertain a new vision of the future of Central Europe, and how he was able to balance the interests of Russia and France, powers which initially had different ideas about how to resolve the Czechoslovak question.

In the second chapter, Kšiňan uses Max Weber’s concept of the charismatic leader as a point of departure to explore, through various case studies and micro-studies, how Štefánik influenced his those around him, or in other words, how he used the network of relationships presented in the first chapter. Kšiňan devotes particular attention, for example, to Štefánik’s relationship with women, which was one of the most important elements of this network. From his Prague years onwards, Štefánik, who apparently was not a terribly fetching man, eagerly sought the company of the daughters of wealthy, powerful, aristocratic families with good connections, and he often accepted large donations from them. This subchapter also offers a good example of how Kšiňan, despite his basic premise, maintains a critical distance from the subject of his study. For instance, he makes the following contention: “Štefánik’s flirtations and frequent partings were a consequence of his impulsiveness and fear of being trapped by common stereotypes of relationships. Often, however, he enjoyed the process of seducing and conquering women; he was more of a seducer than a Don Juan. The interest of ladies certainly catered to his egocentrism and narcissism since he always needed to be in the spotlight.” The analysis of Štefánik’s mission to Ecuador is also outstanding. It offers a detailed discussion of the geopolitical context of Štefánik’s secret mission and how his negotiations brought the South American country into the French sphere of interest.

In the third chapter, which follows the most classical format of a biographical narrative, Kšiňan presents Štefánik’s military and political activities during World War I. Unlike many earlier authors, however, Kšiňan does not take the founding of Czechoslovakia as a fundamental goal, i.e., as a goal established at the outset. Rather, he suggests that it was a political innovation which took clearer form during the war years.

The final major section analyses Štefánik’s identity and the political debates after his death, showing that although Štefánik was far from satisfied with the setup of the new republic, he was not fundamentally in favor of Slovak aspirations for autonomy. Rather, he would have strengthened the Slovak presence in a centralist state on the basis of parity rather than Czech dominance. The last two subchapters provide superb micro-examinations of two myths about Štefanik. The first concerns the circumstances of his death, about which conspiracy theories are still common (for instance, that his plane was shot down by Hungarians or that it was mistakenly shot down by Slovaks who, because of its Italian markings, mistook it for a Hungarian plane, or that Beneš had the plane shot down, or that Štefanik deliberately committed suicide). With exemplary thoroughness and critical distance, Kšiňan points out that the circumstances of the crash cannot be clarified because of the negligence of the investigating authorities, and he convincingly refutes various unfounded theories. The second myth concerns Štefánik’s alleged Freemasonry, which is also a popular theory, though one finds no support for it in any sources and there are far more arguments against it than there are for it.

Kšiňan’s monograph, which draws on a vast source base of unprecedented size and new methodological approaches, persuasively rewrites the historical narrative concerning Milan Rastislav Štefanik, calling attention to details which previously were only superficially understood, introducing new topics, and refuting stubborn legends. The book is clearly one of the best biographies of the Štefánik. Kšiňan takes as his point of departure the notion that Štefánik is a national hero, but the book is really about much more than that. It furthers a far more nuanced understanding of who this man, known today as a Slovak national hero, really was.

József Demmel
University of Public Service / Historický ústav Slovenskej akadémie vied, Bratislava
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The Hungarian Agricultural Miracle? Sovietization and Americanization in a Communist Country. By Zsuzsanna Varga. Translated by Frank T. Zsigó. The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2021, 323 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.823

Zsuzsanna Varga’s comprehensive account of the political economy of Hungarian agriculture during the Cold War exemplifies the international and transnational turn in research on agricultural and rural history. The book is ordered chronologically and consists of seven chapters. After the introduction, which outlines the research approach, chapter one offers an overview of the Stalinist system of socialist agriculture and exports to East Central Europe. Chapters two, three, and four cover the phases of the collectivization of Hungarian agriculture and the retrenchment to private farming from 1949 to 1961. Chapters five and six deal with the transfer of Western knowledge and technology, including “closed production systems” from the USA, after the conclusion of collectivization. Chapter seven evaluates the successes and limitations of the “Hungarian agricultural miracle” in the wider context. In the conclusion, Varga synthesizes the central insights of her study.

Using a rich body of macro-, meso- and micro-level sources (official documents, international press, oral interviews, etc.), Varga explains the shifting route of Hungarian agriculture between the onset of land collectivization in 1949 and its definite abandonment in 1989 within the framework of “transnational comparison” (i.e., the combination of comparative and entangled approaches). She highlights two transsystemic transfers of politico-economic institutions, technology, and knowledge to Hungary: first, the “Eastern transfer,” which transplanted the Stalinist system of socialist agriculture, regarded as an “inner colony” for industrialization, into a pre-socialist mode of farming built on private property and market orientation; second, the “Western transfer,” which transplanted a capitalist production system into a socialist agriculture based on the Soviet model. Varga argues that Americanization was one sort of solution to performance problems caused by Sovietization in the 1960s. By the 1970s, a “hybrid agriculture” had emerged in Hungary that applied the latest Western agricultural technology on state farms and producer cooperatives created on the basis of the Soviet model. The end of food shortages and the growth of agricultural surpluses were labeled as the “Hungarian agricultural miracle.”

Varga clearly shows that the Hungarian agricultural transformation during the Cold War was not a well-paved path but, rather, a rocky road. Waves of state-led collectivization according to the Soviet model were interrupted by phases of de-collectivization that reflected the destabilization of the socialist regime, mediation by its agrarian lobby, and peasant agitation. While the Soviet model was implemented, negotiated, and adapted top-down by the Hungarian state apparatus, the adoption of Western technology and knowledge emerged bottom-up through partnerships of state farms and producer cooperatives with private companies from beyond the Iron Curtain. The resulting division of labor involved large-scale state and collective farms specializing in capital-intensive arable production as well as small private household plots specializing in labor-intensive vegetable, fruit, and livestock production. The study shows institutional and technological transfer between countries with different political and economic systems can increase agricultural performance, provided that actors at sub-national levels gain agency to mediate between systemic imperatives and everyday priorities.

Although Varga does not refer to James Scott’s notion of “high-modernism,” her monograph contributes to the debate on state-led agrarian change in the twentieth century. The emergence of a both Sovietized and Americanized mode of farming in Hungary highlights the limits of top-down development schemes by authoritarian nation states and their technocratic planners as well as the potentials of bottom-up initiatives from the countryside. Rather than state-enforced “high modernism,” the emergence of a Hungarian “hybrid agriculture” indicates a case of “low modernism” that shifts national economic performance through informal and formal institutionalization of sub-national grassroots activities. The creative adaptation of state-imposed collectivization by local actors – which was quite risky, as indicated by show trials against cooperative leaders – is framed in terms of a “successful alternative” to the Soviet model. From the prevailing socioeconomic perspective, this conclusion seems reasonable. However, doubts arise concerning the “successful” and “alternative” character of the “Hungarian agricultural miracle” when one shifts to a socio-natural view. The Western technoscientific package adopted by Hungarian state farms and producer cooperatives as well as the state-enforced Soviet model they struggled with rested on similar agro-industrial imperatives: the replacement of muscle power by machinery and agrochemicals based on fossil energy, the dissolution of the symbiotic relationship between arable and livestock farming, and the shift of both land and labor productivity according to the needs of industrial society. Seen from a socio-natural angle, the transnationally induced modernization of Hungarian agriculture during the Cold War might appear much “higher” (in Scott’s terms) than from a purely socioeconomic view.

This critical comment should not cast a poor light on the rich evidence provided by the monograph, but rather indicates a direction for future research on the “Hungarian agricultural miracle.” The well-researched and well-narrated account of the Hungarian agricultural transformation will be of great value not only for scholars of rural and agricultural history, but also for anyone interested in the international and transnational history of Communist Europe during the Cold War.

Ernst Langthaler
Johannes Kepler University, Linz
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