In the well-established research field of science and nationalism, this volume edited by Mitchell Ash and Jan Surman is a welcome addition. Most studies in this area ask how certain scientific practices have contributed to ‘build’ a nation. The political unity in question, a nation, already existed or was about to come into being. Yet The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848–1918 looks at a presumably premodern political unity; not at a nation, but at a multiethnic empire that ceased to exist in 1918. The narrative which one may expect – and is suggested by the title – is a narrative of budding Czech physicists and Croatian chemists forming national communities. The authors of this volume have a more complex story to tell. Their approach is in tune with recent historiography on the Austro-Hungarian Empire that tries to avoid any kind of teleology according to which this Vielvölkerreich was doomed to collapse under the onslaught of rising nationalisms.

As Jan Surman and Soňa Štrbáňová show in their chapters, nationalism and science were not fully commensurable. What language, for example, were Polish or Czech chemists supposed to publish in? German, the lingua franca at the time, was at odds with their own nationalist agenda. But writing in the vernacular would limit their readership substantially, risking self-inflicted marginalization. What is more, chemists in particular were only about to develop a specialist terminology in their own language. Who would decide which specific terms should be used? The way to a national nomenclature was marked by disagreements and littered with linguistic schemes that failed. Trying to cater for both of their communities, national and international, Polish and Czech scientists resorted to a double rhetoric that was – as contradictory as it may sound – both nationalist and universal. This focus on the use of scientific language neatly shows that nationalization and internationalization in science were simultaneous.

In these cases science was a resource to strengthen one's national consciousness and to ‘build’ the nation through a specific scientific terminology, but also with national journals and associations. We may label this the nationalist–emancipatory agenda articulated from the ‘periphery’. Yet the Habsburg Empire also allowed for the reverse case – what we may label the imperialist–conservative agenda articulated from the ‘centre’. Recent historiography suggests understanding the Habsburg Empire as a colonial power with ‘proximate colonies’ that were not overseas, but at the margins of a vast territory. (In 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Empire was second only to Russia in size.) It is possibly the greatest forte of this volume to address this ‘colonial’ question from the perspective of the history of science. The editors and authors use the model of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, always in quotation marks in order to indicate that these categories are historically constructed and need to be applied with caution. As regards this ‘imperial science’ the chapters of Deborah Coen and Marianne Klemun are most pertinent. They analyse attempts to use sciences such as cartography, meteorology and geology in order to strengthen the unity of the Habsburg Empire as such. They describe the challenge of collecting data in the different regions of the monarchy and feeding it into a standardized regime of knowledge. Klemun's case is the making of the ‘Geological Survey Map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’, which took nearly twenty years to produce and was eventually published in 1867 by a Viennese-based imperial institution, the Geologische Reichsanstalt. This stratigraphic map ‘was both a record of nature and, at the same time, profoundly political’ (p. 97), displaying both the diversity and the unity of the empire after 1848. Yet the geological recording was understood – in an archetypical imperial manner – as a ‘civilizing mission’ (p. 89).

Coen's chapter on ‘Earthquake science’ is situated at the very end of the nineteenth century and details in a highly instructive manner the complex relationship between ‘periphery’ and ‘centre’. The imperial Earthquake Commission was the stage of ‘a struggle between proponents of centralization and decentralization’ (p. 172). Seismology was dependent on on-site observers and needed to strike a fine balance between local sensitivities and scholarship and the imperative of standardizing (also linguistically) the incoming information. Yet despite these inherent tensions the commission was able to be quite inclusive and to form functioning multilingual networks of observers. As Coen shows, this kind of imperial science, claiming to serve all the people of the empire, was possible despite the growing nationalisms.

Given the political complexity of the Habsburg Empire the book cannot cover the entire ground. The regions of the Far East (Galicia, Bukovina etc.) and the South (Croatia, Bosnia) hardly figure. The case of Hungary is well represented with three chapters out of nine. Marius Turda, for example, gives an instructive overview of the debate on eugenics in Hungary. He details the disagreements of Hungarian scholars on the role of nature and nurture. The spectrum also includes critiques and sceptics of the dominant eugenic agenda. Tibor Frank introduces us to the influential Eötvös family to tell the story of science education in Hungary. Yet overall the Hungarian chapters are less in tune with the general questions raised by the volume, making it a little uneven. Since the formation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary in 1867, Hungary was, with respect to internal politics, an autonomous state. Maybe this specific situation of Hungary should have been reflected more. True, Gábor Palló notes that Hungarian science ‘was distinctively nationalistic in its style’ and ‘worked on the periphery of German world-science’ (p. 110). Yet there are few indications in the book whether the concept of ‘inner colonies’ and the centre–periphery issues that come with it are useful for the Hungarian half of the empire too.

However, this is a minor criticism. The overall picture provided is rich and detailed. This volume contributes significantly to the ongoing discussion about science and nationalism, in particular with respect to the issue of ‘inner colonialism’, and hopefully will encourage more research on this intriguing mix of science and politics in the Habsburg Empire.