Ágnes Deák teaches history at the University of Szeged and is chief editor of the excellent history journal Aetas, which recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Her publications in Hungarian include two monographs, one on the Austrian government's nationality policies in Hungary from 1849 to 1860 (2000) and the other a study on a police spy during the same period (2010). The work under review is no mere translation of these earlier works, though it builds on many years' research on related topics. The Hungarian original of the text has not itself been published.

This is a history of public policy and administration, in which the customary perspective in Hungarian historiography of resistance to Habsburg rule surfaces only occasionally. The author provides instead a thorough, methodical analysis of government in Hungary through remarkably extensive consultation of the published Protokolle des österreichischen Ministerrates and the related files in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna and the Országos Levéltár in Budapest.

The heavy reliance on this documentation reveals greater pluralism and disagreement within the neoabsolutist regime than appears in earlier accounts. At the center of the discussion was the autocratic Francis Joseph. The influence of individual civil servants rose and fell according to the views of the sovereign, but significant disagreement was possible within government councils on such issues as reprisals against the Hungarian rebels, the importation of civil servants into Hungary, and the use of the German language in administration and education. The extreme measures of General Haynau, for example, received imperial sanction only to a point, when, despite his military decorations, he was forced into retirement. The authorities did indeed recruit “Bach hussars” from other regions of the empire, but they never formed a majority of civil servants in Hungary because the insistence on relevant professional and linguistic qualifications prevailed. Minister of Culture Leo Thun and his deputy Alexander Helfert get good grades for their educational reforms, which raised standards and access. Despite occasional evidence of Austrian disdain for the Hungarian language, the author does not discount the rationale of efficiency that was offered for the increased use of German.

Perhaps most surprising is the author's suggestion that Austrian reforms in society, administration, justice, and the schools did more to modernize Hungarian society than did the peasant emancipation in 1848. Nor does she stamp as collaborators Hungarians such as the consistently centralist Ferenc Nádasdy, Minister of Justice through most of the 1850s and then Transylvanian Court Chancellor during the Schmerling Provisorium after 1861. The author instead provides a nuanced treatment of the policy differences between, on the one hand, Nádasdy and men like Antal Forgács and Móric Pálffy, and, on the other, the opposition leader Ferenc Deák and his journalist ally Zsigmond Kemény.

The chapters on nationality problems and the churches are strong, reflecting the author's long preoccupation with these topics. Officials took seriously the new regulations regarding access to government services in subjects' own language but nearly always rejected the nationalities' lobbying for ethnically based regional autonomy. Only the special status of Croatia and Voivodina and the granting of new church provinces for the Croats and Romanians constituted exceptions to the latter rule. Deák cites only a few works of Romanian and Slavic historians, however, and there are some errors of detail, like her identification of Greek Catholic canon Timotei Cipariu as an official working in Vienna (287). She makes no use of the primary sources in their languages, and despite the ostensible focus on policy-making at the center, she also discusses Hungarian culture, society, and politics in two chapters.

This is a major new work. The treatment of the period after 1859 is relatively brief (130 pages), and the book lacks a substantial conclusion. The voluminous endnotes (regrettably not footnotes) in each chapter and the solid bibliography at the end of the volume are excellent catalogs of the German and Austrian source material and recent research publications. The book concludes with a biographical glossary and a few selected documents and tables. There are substantial name and place indexes (places in Hungary are rendered in Hungarian throughout the text but translated in the index) but none for subjects.