Despite a noticeable tendency in the historiography to concentrate on the history and culture of the Habsburg crown land after 1867, Iryna Vushko's monograph focuses on the administration of Galicia under Austrian rule, from its beginnings through the introduction of autonomous administration following the Austria-Hungary Compromise. In the First Partition of Poland among Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1772, the southern Polish territories fell to Austria. During the following decades, German-language administration was introduced throughout this new Habsburg crown land of Galicia—the largest province of the Habsburg monarchy in terms of area and the number of inhabitants, which included Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews—and was coordinated by the central bureaucracy of the Landesgubernium (local government) in Lemberg, the capital of the province. Simultaneously, the school system was placed under state supervision and German became the official language of instruction. To enable the administration to carry out the plans of the government in Vienna, a large number of German-speaking civil servants from the other provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy and from German territories were sent to Galicia to man the newly established offices and schools. The book describes how these bureaucrats affected the development of the Austrian administration in Galicia over the course of one century, and how they acted in the face of different historical developments and at various turning points. The author draws upon both primary and secondary sources about the administration of the Habsburg Monarchy in general, and of Galicia in particular, drawing upon research from the archives in Lemberg (now Lviv), Cracow, and Vienna, as well as in Paris and Trieste.

In the book's first two chapters, Vushko deals with the propagation of Enlightenment ideas by the Austrian bureaucracy by taking a close look at the administrative work in the early 1770s of the first governor, Johann Anton von Pergen, as well as at that of the third governor, Joseph Karl von Brigido, in the 1780s and 1790s. The book's third and fourth chapters address military conflicts between Austria and France, as well as the 1809 reconquest by Polish military units of territory annexed by Austria in 1795: so-called West Galicia or New Galicia. In addition, she discusses diplomatic relations among Prussia, Austria, and Russia, from the Congress of Vienna to the suppression of the November Uprising in 1831. Her foci here are the policies carried out by the governor, Prince August Longin von Lobkowitz, who, during his term of office (1826–1832) demonstrated a considerable degree of sympathy for the interests of the Poles and had very close relations with the Polish aristocracy. Vushko repeatedly emphasizes that the prince, “while remaining an Austrian patriot, decided to become a Pole” (106). One may question this thesis, however, especially because the author does not offer concrete evidence to prove the prince's alleged choice. There is nevertheless evidence in support of another one of Vushko's theses: Austrian functionaries were loyal to the monarchy, and, at the same time—as a result of their manifold social contacts—they were influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the indigenous elites, above all by Polish aristocratic families, whose culture clearly set the tone in Galicia.

In the sixth chapter, “Literature, Politics, and Galician Ruthenians,” Vushko focuses on the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, born in 1836 in Lemberg. The English-language literature—most recently Larry Wolff's The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010)—has already demonstrated the writer's empathy with the Ruthenians. The author might have used this chapter to pinpoint specific connections between bureaucratic circles and Ruthenian families; such an approach would have offered a significantly new interpretation of their multicultural coexistence. Documents about a German-Austrian family with connections to Ruthenian circles—besides the Ostermann family of German-Austrian functionaries whom the author invokes again and again—may have been unavailable in the archives of former East Galicia. The connections of German-Austrian civil servant families with Ruthenian circles nevertheless remain a desideratum in the scholarly research.

As in the earlier chapters, in which Vushko focuses on German-Austrians, Poles, and Ruthenians, the author provides an overview in the seventh chapter of the efforts of the Viennese government, beginning in the 1780s (very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment), and then again in the 1840s, to win over the Jews of Galicia to cultural integration by establishing German-Jewish schools. Vushko discusses in her final chapter the reaction of German-Austrian functionaries to the 1846 uprising, when Galician peasants slaughtered a large number of noblemen. Finally, she discusses the changing relations between Poles and Ruthenians after the revolution of 1848 and the attitude of German-Austrian functionaries toward these two ethnic groups, elucidating the feeling of uncertainty that the revolution evoked among German-Austrian functionaries. Here she uses the Ostermann family as an example (even if she mistakes the father for the son): its members remained connected with Galicia for a lifetime and did not leave Galicia even after Georg Benjamin, who had been closely connected with the city of Stanislau (Stanisławów, Stanislaviv, today Ivano-Frankivsk) and local Ruthenian circles since 1848, ended his career as district governor there in 1867.

On the whole, Vushko provides a fairly comprehensive overview of the German-speaking administration in Galicia. She rightly emphasizes that the Viennese government expected its officials “to impose supranational uniformity via Germanophone culture, administration, and education,” but that “Austrian bureaucrats failed to impose German culture” (3). For the emperor and the provincial governors, it was not just a matter of using only German-speaking functionaries from other territories to administer Galicia: from the beginning, the intention had been to employ local staff—as long as these bureaucrats had sufficient knowledge of German, a prerequisite that few were able to fulfill in 1772. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Galicia had a large number of local functionaries (the majority Poles, but also Ruthenians) who had attended German-language schools and then, in most cases, studied law at the University of Lemberg. National origin was not decisive for the employment of an official; the government considered an official's unfailing loyalty toward the Habsburg dynasty and his political trustworthiness to be much more important.