On a number of accounts, Hugh LeCaine Agnew's The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown is a masterful example of narrative history. Its economy of language (only 330 pages of text), accessibility, judicious selection of events and personalities, and fairness in the interpretation of contentious issues testify to the authorial presence of a confident and skilled historian in command of his sources. One can easily imagine that this book will justly find its way to many a course syllabus. Above all, the strength of its twentieth-century coverage—extending to the challenges of integration into the European Union—makes this work a very suitable text for undergraduate courses in international and European studies as well as in history.

The book is marred somewhat by idiosyncrasies, insufficiently examined assumptions, and a certain historiographical conservatism. Its very title, in fact, carries echoes of a claim made more explicitly by Wayne S. Vucinich—editor of the series Studies of Nationalities in which this book appears—in his foreword of this work: that the book is about a people and its land (xv). Implicit in even such a hazy conception as this is the teleological assumption that the Czechs are a nation who has played out its destiny within geopolitical boundaries and that they are the nation destined to do so. In fairness, I should add that Agnew's narrative in many places militates against the limitations of its announced subject, detailing the often conflict-ridden interactions between Czech-speakers and German-speakers over the centuries, the separate fates and identities of Jews in the Crownlands, and—for the twentieth century, at least—the irreconcilable differences that prevented Czechs and Slovaks from consummating a permanent union of their two peoples. And Vucinich, at a later point in his foreword, even suggests that one of the themes of the book is that the idea of a nation-state was ill suited to the Czech lands for reasons of “history, geography, and linguistic variety” (xvii).

Perhaps, but the fact remains that the subject of Agnew's survey is not the peoples of the Bohemian Lands; nor is it the Bohemian Lands per se. Rather, it is the cultural and political history of a nationality in its territory. The book is structured, moreover, along rather traditional lines, beginning with the movements of Slavic and Germanic tribes (and even their Celtic predecessors) before the ninth century and progressing steadily in time up to the present. Agnew, also the author of Origins of the Czech National Renascence (Pittsburgh, 1993), an important study of the Czech national renaissance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, does not deny the modernity of national political programs, but he does assume the long-term stability of ethnic and language groups. Nowhere does he remark on or otherwise critically engage recent scholarship that challenges belief in the existence of stable ethnic categories in Central Europe. See Pieter M. Judson's “Nationalizing Rural Landscapes in Cisleithania, 1880–1914,” in Nancy M. Wingfield's Creating the Other (New York, 2003, 127–48); Jeremy King's Budweisers into Czechs and Germans (Princeton, 2002); and Rogers Brubaker's, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, 2004). Judson's Guardians of the Nation (Cambridge, 2006) has appeared in the years following Agnew's work. One can certainly be skeptical—as I am—of the more extreme claims of the constructivist school of ethnicity and nationalism. But it would be more historically sound, I think, to point out that the connections between Palacký and Václav II, or Masaryk and Hus, were ones of elective affinity rather than to appear to be making a case for identification based on ethnic and historical continuity.

And yet, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown is not an ethnographic study. For the most part it is a history of political events that transpired on this patch of Europe and, in this sense, is old-fashioned in its conception. And political histories from Adam to the atom tend to be slow going. To my mind, the early chapters have little spark. It is only when Agnew reaches the nineteenth century that the narrative really becomes compelling, and the most dramatic tellings are reserved for the twentieth century. Finally, the need to accommodate both comprehensiveness and relative brevity has meant that no single issue or problem can be reviewed in depth. Such is the cost one pays for a longitudinal political narrative. The opposing model is an edited collection, such as Bohemia in History, edited by Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge, 1998), which sacrifices comprehensiveness and narrative flow for close studies of individual topics that can be analytically insightful. For graduate students, I would probably recommend the latter.

Linear, chronological histories do not lend themselves well to conclusions—unless the author is theologically inclined—and Agnew's final chapter is appropriately modest: part epilogue, part summation. It suggests that the Czech Republic's current configuration as a small, tenuously achieved, uninational state constitutes a fitting, if ironic, end to a story that has featured painful dominations by imperial powers and a stubborn disinclination to imagine an inclusive, polyglot identity. The possibility of Europe is still open to the Czechs should they choose to embrace it.