For many, if not most, nineteenth-century Bohemian aristocrats, England was their favorite country, in the abstract at least. They spent their holidays on the Cote d'Azur, but they built castles in Windsor Gothic style and admired the way the English landed elite had preserved their position in society and politics, despite industrialism and liberalism, following an evolutionary path that avoided any of the late unpleasantness associated with dates like 1789 or 1848. In turn, some English writers have been happy to chart an English “Sonderweg” of benign paternalism, “tempered by common law and ancient liberties.” Tatjana Tönsmeyer in her Habilitationsschrift takes a few subtle stabs at this particular form of exceptionalism when comparing the experience of English and Bohemian aristocratic great landowners in the cozy and rosy world of “ante bellum” Europe.

In both England and Bohemia, close to a quarter of the land belonged to a few hundred aristocrats. That percentage did not change significantly between the 1850s and the 1900s. English society prided itself on the fluidity of its social structures; continentals on their age-old traditions and roots. But in practice, Tönsmeyer finds little difference between them. Being the biggest entrepreneur in town (or rather, in the village), obviously opened possibilities to exert patronage of all sorts, from livings for priests to jobs for the boys. The big difference was, English grandees dealt with tenant farmers, Bohemians with peasants who had definitely become “owner occupiers” after 1848. Farm hands and agricultural workers formed a bigger part of the population in England than in Bohemia. As a result, the fight against incipient trade unionism was more of a worry for the English upper class, as was religious dissent that formed a seedbed of opposition. Bohemia may have been the least enthusiastically Catholic Crownland of Austria, but prior to 1914 at least, there were few rival denominations to raise their potentially subversive heads in the countryside.

Obviously, pictures of a rural idyll devoid of conflict fall short of reality in both cases. Tönsmeyer does find that people fought over different causes, though: in Bohemia, conflicts centered on the time-hallowed rights of the village poor to gather wood or use pastures; in England, they had to do with poaching above all. (There were more gamekeepers than policemen in the English countryside.) Partly for that reason, conflicts tended to be more violent in Merry Old England than in supposedly feudal Bohemia. On the other hand, respect for local self-government belonged to the English post-1688 tradition rather than to the bureaucratic Austrian post-1748 reformism. Thus, the state proved to be more of an intruder in Bohemia. In Britain, reform of local government had to wait until 1888. Partly because of this pressure from above, heightened as it was by disputes about states’ rights, Bohemian aristocrats proved to be more willing and more adept at “renegotiating” their position with their former subjects (aushandeln is the term Tönsmeyer uses). They also made far more use of the associational network that mushroomed after the 1860s. To do so, of course, meant they had to be physically present in the countryside, at least part of the time; thus, post-1848 conditions militated against absentee landlords.

If class was the stumbling block for rural harmony in England, Bohemians faced the challenge of nationalism. Tönsmeyer argues that aristocrats generally discouraged nationalism and points to the easy-going bilingualism in the family archives she has consulted. That finding might perhaps have to be qualified if the focus were enlarged beyond the few biggest magnates whose estates straddled the language border. During the 1860s and 1870s, conservatives like Clams and Schwarzenbergs (junior branch) certainly promoted Czech nationalism; during the last few years of the monarchy, aristocrats in general drew closer to German nationalism. At any rate, in terms of nationalism, aristocrats faced a choice (even if they did not find it an appetizing one at all times); in terms of class, they had none (but might still profit politically from middle-class fears of proletarian aspirations).

Tönsmeyer also had to make a choice: among a wealth of possible research venues, enough to keep a scholar busy for a lifetime, she had to pick a few great families like the Russells, Talbots, and Londonderrys or the Schwarzenbergs, Czernins, and Waldsteins. Their archives have provided her with a great number of telling stories and anecdotes. Fortunately, she does not indulge too much in the sort of philosophical musings beloved by most German academic writers. However, it is worth looking at some of her concluding remarks where she exhibits a certain kind of skepticism about the very term “Moderne” she uses in her title. “Modernity” was not a deterministic one-way street. Big structural processes that looked inevitable with hindsight often seemed to consist of fairly contingent events from the view of local everyday life (327). Tönsmeyer approvingly quotes a writer who advanced the idea of “multiple modernities.” Happily, given a few more of the infamous “turns” of historiography, we might dispense with the term altogether.