As Andrea Bonoldi notes in his introduction to this collection of scholarly articles on wartime and peacetime inflation in Austria-Hungary and Italy, the economies of the two belligerents showed certain commonalities at the war's outset. Both countries had similar GDP per capita ratios, lacked a sophisticated tax system, and resorted heavily to borrowing and printing money to finance war. They had economies that were less developed than those of Germany, France, or Great Britain, implemented restrictions on currency exchange, and experienced higher rates of annual inflation. While a rigorous comparative study would have had to grapple with the innumerable and important ways in which these two belligerents also differed from each other, the papers collected for this book do not embrace the comparative method, instead presenting the reader with national case studies.

The articles, first presented at an international conference held at the University of Trento in 2016, take a look at financial mobilization and monetary inflation in both countries. Austria-Hungary failed to raise sufficient tax revenues to finance its warfare (nominal spending tripled during the war, but 1918 revenues covered only 20 percent of expenditures) and instead borrowed directly from the Austro-Hungarian Bank. Inflation, currency depreciation, and rising interest payments followed afoot, and by 1918, as Richard Lein points out, servicing Austrian or Hungarian war bonds consumed more than half of their respective tax revenues. The economy fared no better. In his chapter, Anatol Schmied-Kowarzik employs an innovative statistical study to uncover the railways’ collapse from 1916 onward. As coal production declined and idle trains blocked secondary lines, the major rails were exclusively reserved for transporting troops. Increasing theft of coal, attested to by the escalating number of train robberies in Austria (from 60 in 1914 to 2,334 in 1917), exacerbated the economic collapse. Thus by 1918, Austria-Hungary was not only militarily defeated but also economically and financially exhausted.

Plagued by falling exports and lacking raw material supplies, Italian industrialists in 1915 hoped that joining the conflagration would pull their economy out of recession. To mobilize industrial production for warfare, Eleonora Belloni writes, the Italian government took control of production and supplies—to the great benefit of particular industrial sectors. Following the war, the overblown steel sector consolidated into a number of conglomerates, leaving scores of workers unemployed. Money printing, government deficits, and a negative trade balance fueled depreciation and inflation following the Armistice, but as Andrea Leonardi argues, Italy evaded hyperinflation due to early help from the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve. In 1918 then, both countries had resorted to monetary expansion and faced widening trade deficits, but Austria's situation was far worse. It was, as Andrea Bonoldi argues, the supreme confidence that foreigners and Italians placed in Italy's economic future that helped Italy evade the chaos of hyperinflation. Unsurprisingly, these diverging trajectories produced varied if perhaps unexpected results. In Austria, hyperinflation bought social peace before the belated stabilization at the behest of the League of Nations further strengthened the young republic's parliamentary democracy. In Italy, the costs of early stabilization attempts galvanized labor unrest and agrarian strife, providing fertile ground for Mussolini's seizure of power.

While this book offers some interesting insights into the varied financial and economic consequences of war in Italy and Austria-Hungary, the most obvious and important disparity between the two countries goes unmentioned: whereas victorious Italy grew in size, the territory and economy of Austria were reduced to a fraction of their imperial dimensions. Scholars can expect to profit from some historical nuggets presented in these detailed case studies, but students will likely despair over some of the more poorly edited texts. The book thus reveals, perhaps, another lasting consequence of two devastating world wars: in terms of Italian and Austrian scholarship, the decline in global importance of their national tongues and the exaggerated value placed on publishing academic works in English, even if it harms their readability.