This edited volume provides a transnational perspective on the making of modern popular culture, looking beyond the familiar histories of Western metropoles. It draws on existing research that has underscored how the increasing mobilities of people and (cultural) goods in the late nineteenth century came to boost the development of entertainment businesses in urban places. At the same time, the book shifts geographical focus away from the axes of Paris–London and Berlin–Vienna to explore important transformation processes of popular culture in northern, southern and east-central Europe. In particular, a focus on east-central Europe – a region marked by shifting political orders and nation-building processes – provides new insights into the political importance that social elites and cultural entrepreneurs attributed to urban popular culture.

The volume is made up of 10 relatively long chapters that deal with a wide array of cultural products, ranging from variety entertainment, early cinema and popular theatre, chanson and jazz music. It covers a broad range of geographical regions including Sweden and Iceland, north-western Russia, Habsburgian Central Europe and Spain as well as inter-war Yugoslavia, Poland and Turkey. The first of the volume’s two parts has its emphasis on mediators, actors and networks of cultural exchange and on the making and changing of repertoires at urban entertainment venues. The second part delves into the (conflictual) cultural appropriation processes on the local and national level and analyses the endeavours by authorities and social elites to regulate cultural productions. The first section, studying transnational biographical trajectories of artists and cultural entrepreneurs, focuses mainly on the long turn of the century, whereas the second section, carving out the hybrid character of ‘national cultures’, mainly deals with the inter-war period.

The book insists on the close imbrication between popular culture and changing political and social orders. Many of these socio-political shifts are linked to imperial transformations, shifting diasporic connections and nation-building processes. The chapter by Ivana Vesić on popular culture in inter-war Yugoslavia and Anna G. Piotrowska’s study on popular music in inter-war Poland, for example, demonstrate that the hybrid character of cultural products, which may have gone through several transfer processes, emerges at the very same time as their supposedly national character. There is no chronological order to the forging of ‘national culture’ and ‘transnational entertainment’ but these are closely imbricated processes as becomes most evident in the case of jazz music. Jazz, the central theme of G. Carole Woodall’s chapter on inter-war Istanbul and Ólafur Rastrick’s on Icelandic nation-building, appears as a telling example for how a cultural practice was formed via multidirectional movement that diffusion theories supposing a centrum and a periphery entirely fail to grasp. The volume productively challenges the narrative that cultural innovations emerged in Western metropoles before travelling to the rest of Europe and beyond. Rather, cultural exchange with (Western) metropolises was interlinked with sub-regional networks and specific, often previously imperial, connections. Cultural products would travel along the routes of mass migration from the Austro-Hungarian empire to the United States, as demonstrated by Susanne Korbel in her chapter on mobilities and national indifference among Habsburgian entertainers, or between the Nordic countries, the Baltic region and north-western Russia, as laid out by Nuppu Koivisto-Kaasik and Saijaleena Rantanen in their chapter on the cosmopolitan music scene in the small Finnish city of Vyborg. Eliza Anna Delveroudi analyses how cinema travelled to Athens via trade routes that had linked the region’s commercial centres with Central and Western Europe since the distant past. Delveroudi’s chapter, as well as Rikard Hoogland’s chapter dealing with a turn-of-the-century Swedish ‘theatre king’, also engages with the commercialization of popular culture, which intersected in different ways with the transnational circulation, national integration and urban manifestation of cultural products.

The chapters deal with very different localities: a small port city in the Russian–Finnish borderland, transforming capitals of newly founded nation-states such as Istanbul as well as long-standing but transforming capitals such as Madrid. Some chapters’ narrative is anchored in a specific urban context whereas others do not deal with a particular urban space at all. This diversity in spatial approaches is appealing but it also embraces a certain analytical weakness. The term ‘urban’, which figures prominently in the book title, remains somewhat under-conceptualized, both in the introduction and in the chapters. As the chapters study urban places so different as, for example, Vyborg and Istanbul, one may have wished for a more active engagement with the concept of ‘urbanity’ and its significance for our understanding of popular culture. All chapters are based on extensive archival research. The authors develop highly detailed accounts of, for example, artists’ mobility patterns and their reception in particular national contexts or the development of certain entertainment practices and places. This empirical saturation gives substance to the sometimes-abstract notion of ‘cultural transfer’. However, in some chapters, the wealth of detailed information on trajectories and personal connections would have benefited from a firmer analytical framework. Together with a slightly more condensed format (some chapters count more than 30 pages), methodological transparency, for example concerning the selection and handling of source material, would have allowed the reader to better engage with the chapters’ thick empirical descriptions. Notwithstanding, the volume makes for a compelling reading for scholars of urban history and popular culture alike.