This is the first comparative study of early modern cities in East Central Europe in English and, indeed, the first of substance in any language. The focus of the book is on the cities of Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, and the Bohemian Crownlands, although there is also plenty here on urban developments in Germany and, indeed, farther afield. The book is highly structured and so framed as to constitute almost a single extended essay. Nevertheless, the author is alert to regional divergences—Silesia and Royal Prussia frequently occur as the exceptions to trends—and so the organization of the text proves in no way a straitjacket.

Jaroslav Miller's thesis may be summed as follows. In the sixteenth century, the idea of the city as a “closed and harmonious community” (237) was challenged by in-migration, often led by nobles from the countryside. These, along with other, older “outgroups,” principally Jews, proved hard to digest. Only partly assimilated, the newcomers disturbed the homogeneity of the burgher corporation. In parts of the region, moreover, the nobility took over trading operations, exploiting monopolies and founding their own private cities that soon came to rival older urban establishments. The Reformation exacerbated tensions already present between social segments in the cities, whereas “confessionalization” provided a means whereby the “state” might impose its power over the cities. As it was, the cities remained largely outside the developing Ständestaat, avoiding attendance at the diets (lest they be called on to contribute to subsidies) or, as in Bohemia after 1547, being deliberately marginalized.

By the later seventeenth century, an upswing in the number of people seeking citizenship rights in some cities indicated a limited recovery. But by this point, many cities in the region had become heavily agrarianized and their institutions of civic self-government etiolated. Even those centers that, through the manufacture of linen and glassware, provided for the world market found their trade in the hands of others. Miller's account is supported by an extensive reading of the secondary literature in all the relevant languages, a grasp of the original sources that permits his account to be enlivened with some telling examples, and a perusal of unpublished manuscripts upon which he rests his study (and accompanying tables) of grants of citizenship rights.

In any book of this scope and detail, one is bound to have quibbles. The extent to which the Reformation reinforced notions of community and hence strengthened the cities' republican forms is skirted over in just a few pages. Miller's estimates for population sizes look at times implausibly high. Buda and Pest are hence most unlikely to have had a combined strength of 15,000–25,000 inhabitants in the early sixteenth century: half this figure would seem more appropriate. Moreover, in an unrestrained second chapter, Miller puts the level of urbanization of the population at 27–35 percent of Bohemia circa 1600, at 15–18 percent in pre-Mohács Hungary, and at about the same level in sixteenth-century Poland. This not only guts Miller's argument as to the underdevelopment of the region, but also indicates a dangerous disregard for definition. It is unhelpful to state that Bohemia had on the eve of White Mountain “approximately 1,000 urban centres” (14), unless we mean by “urban centres” villages where goods were exchanged. In this case, we may as well say that most people lived at that time in urban centers.

Additionally, Miller consistently contrasts the cities of early modern East Central Europe with their medieval counterparts, but he shows little understanding of these earlier cities or, indeed, of the relevant literature. Instead, he is content to define them in terms of Gemeinschaft, contrasting their social organization with the supposedly more structured Gesellschaft of the early modern period. Miller's source for this would appear to be Karl Popper (3) on account of which he pretentiously entitles his introduction on medieval cities, “The Closed Society and Its Enemies.” Likewise, Miller's account of the weakening of civic institutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is given in a chapter called, with a sideways nod to Hobbes, “Building a Leviathan.” But as Miller shows, it was not so much the “state” as the strengthening of noble republicanism and the power of the noble estates that undermined urban autonomies in large parts of the region.

In short, this is an ambitious book that fulfills its purpose, but at times the ambition of the author to make a point exceeds both his material and his own argument.