In Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800–1870, James Brophy provides us a widely sourced analysis of the interaction between the publishing industry and the censorship regimes in German-speaking Central Europe during the first seven decades of the nineteenth century. In this analysis, Brophy juxtaposes the work of the publishing industry, driven by the exigencies of print capitalism, with the efforts of the late absolutist state to maintain its “information order,” a term which encapsulates the state’s interest in “policing ideas and knowledge” (9). The publishers’ successful efforts to enlarge their market resulted in an expanding conception of the public sphere, wherein individuals engaged in the formation of opinions regarding public matters. In defense of their interests, the states, meanwhile, maintained censorship measures, attempting to define what they indeed considered the proper perception of public affairs. Brophy’s book acts as an important conduit, revealing the workings of the German-language publishing industry and the workings of the contemporary censorship regimes. However, in doing so, it opens the door to further questions about the framing of German-language publishing in its relationship to the non- or semi-German-speaking populations of Central Europe and the complicating nationalist and linguistic factors confronting both publishers and censorship officials in the Habsburg Monarchy. The book is at its best when discussing the German Confederation and Prussia, with the greater complexities of the Habsburg public sphere existing substantially beyond its scope. While monographs by nature struggle to limit their topics to manageable scales, these considerations are particularly important in the Habsburg monarchy and can only be properly treated within a book that can draw upon the wider variety of sources available in all of its former lands.

In the first two chapters, Brophy establishes the economic and social developments that shaped the “strategy and behavior” of the publishers as well as an introduction to the variety of dissent presented (29). Beginning during the late Enlightenment and Napoleonic period, publishing expanded dramatically, constituting a second print revolution, a consumer revolution, and indeed a reading revolution as reading materials were increasingly designed for “easier accessibility and comprehension” (82). Collectively, these developments broadened the public sphere, with the very act of reading serving to “sharpen social consciousness” (29). These developments would then continue through the end of the book’s period of study.

Chapter three focuses on censorship, correctly reflecting the interconnected worlds of the publishers and censors, the various means by which publishers circumvented censorship, and the importance of rejecting “the black-and-white dichotomy of authoritarian censor versus heroic free-expressing author” (152). It also recognizes the practice of self-censorship. Here as elsewhere, Brophy wrestles with the difficult question of how far publishers might have gone to produce radical, democratic works had censorship not limited that market.

Chapters four and five discuss the broad and successful translation and transfer of ideas to German-speaking Central Europe from Britain and France along with the development of bookstores as “fundamental nodal points for political communication” (279). Together, they expanded the mental horizons of Central European readers with German-language readers exposed to the notion of a “cosmopolitan neo-humanism,” (192) the works of British authors such as “Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo,” (193) and both “reportage and reference works” that provided the German reader with a “discerning, multifaceted portrait of the [French] revolution” (196). Brophy successfully contends that “a cultural shift beginning in the late eighteenth century reached its numerical apogee in the 1840s,” resulting in the Revolutions of 1848 as a “common European phenomenon” (235–36).

The final two chapters focus on the developments of democratic dissent before and after the Revolutions of 1848, respectively. Brophy argues that during the Vormärz, “the capacity of state power to repress left-wing thought retains paramount importance for interpreting both breakthroughs and barriers in Vormärz political culture” (339). That fact notwithstanding, Brophy also emphasizes the agency of the publishers who possessed their own political leanings:

During the Nachmärz, this tendency expanded as liberalism’s “backlash against revolution erected an information order that once again pushed democratic and social-democratic debate to the peripheries” (340). The tendency of liberals to “distance themselves from democratic tenets” (371) was then complimented by the censorship regimes’ enactment of “a more flexible, collaborative and systematic approach to the press and more broadly to the problem of public opinion” (385). Thus, a larger, albeit predominantly liberal space, expanded for the expression of opposition opinion.

Brophy’s monograph certainly provides an impressively detailed account of the role of the publishing industry in “transforming [German-speaking] Central Europe’s political culture” and of its success in “undermining the social contract of absolutism” (402). It delves into questions of the publishers’ own political perspectives and poses the difficult question of just how differently the public sphere might have developed without heavy censorship. What it does not do, however, is explore how its conclusions interacted with the entangled issues of nationalist thought and language usage in the Habsburg monarchy. For readers of this journal, whose primary interest is in the lands of the erstwhile Habsburg monarchy, Brophy’s monograph provides useful food for thought and a comparative framework regarding Prussia and the German Confederation as we, its readers, delve more deeply into these complicating aspects of publishing and censorship in this part of Central Europe.