Romania's nation-building process, which started in the nineteenth century, was prompted by a series of modern reforms inspired by western Europe and the conservative construction of a state as a constitutional monarchy. In this book, Călin Cotoi explores the social and political effects of nation building with the help of ingenious and original methods, drawn from a range of fields, including local science medicine and hygiene studies (launched in the 1830s by cholera waves), and an analysis of primary sources dating from the middle to the second half of the nineteenth century and dealing with the origins of communism. Both the cholera waves and initial communism constituted interconnected representations of local modernity (3). According to Cotoi, modern Romania emerged as a quarantine outpost placed at the intersection of the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires at the time when classical quarantine policies were radically questioned given the advance of cholera (99).

In first chapter Cotoi examines the main transformations started in the Romanian principalities after the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29 and the Adrianople Peace Treaty of 1829, with an emphasis on the remarkable individuals from inside and outside of Romania who made a contribution to nation-building in the late nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. On their return home, these individuals brought from Paris, Berlin, and Vienna new sanitary models, statistical methods, expertise, surveillance techniques, medical and hygiene science diplomas, as well as technologies that radically changed Romania's social landscapes. Communism first appeared during the 1848 revolutionary movement in Wallachia. For example, in an article published in 1848, Ion Ionescu de la Brad talked about a social and political revolution focused on the emancipation of peasants and the change in land ownership (26).

Cotoi further explores the connections among key historical junctures: the failure of the 1848 revolution (in Moldova and Wallachia) led to a rise in the number of political exiles and the spread of communist ideas in the Principalities; the emergence in Romania of a Russian émigrés’ anarchist movement; the creation of a modern public health care system centered on boosting reproduction rates but also imbued with antisemitism and chauvinism; local debates between Orthodox Marxists and nationalists or the scientific representation of the social realities on the eve of the 1907 peasant revolt.

Chapter 1, “The Land is the Country! Romanian Revolutionaries, the ‘Specter of Communism,’ and the ‘Terrible Specter’ of Russia,” discusses the contribution of such revolutionaries as C.A. Rosetti, Alexandru Golescu-Negru, and Ion Ionescu de la Brad. Chapter 2, “Nicolae Codreanu. From Russian Anarchist to Romanian Christian Orthodox,” explores the activity in Romania of the Russian social revolutionaries in the 1870s and 1880s, and their search for dialogue partners. Codreanu, a theology graduate, decorated after the Independence War of 1877–78, led one of Romania's first socialist circles and “copied the Russian student communes” (52). Chapter 3, “the Wanderings of a Revolutionary Globetrotter, and the Metamorphosis of a Bakunist,” introduces Nicolae Russel and Zamfir Arbore, editors of Romania's first socialist publication, Basarabia, and organizers of the first general meeting of Romanian revolutionary circles in October 1879 in Botoşani (69–71). In Chapter 4, “Cholera, Health for All and Nation Building,” Cotoi argues that the waves that swept over Romania until 1893 allowed for the local acceptance of the first western administrative practices, scientific discourses, and social technologies (13). Local medicine and hygiene were “nationalized” by importing French practices into Romania (104). Chapter 5, “Victor Babeş and the Cultures of Bacteriology,” deals with the emergence of bacteriology out of the crises of public health. Chapter 6, “Narodniks and Marxists in Romania: Constantin Dobrogeanu Gherea and Other Exotic Plants,” presents a coherent description of Romania's social question as “neo-serfdom,” which was the debate of local socialists in the first decade of twentieth century. Chapter 7, “The Nationalization of the Social Question: Constantin Stere,” presents “hybrid Marxian-Kantian” individuals whose progressive stance was different from western Europe (198). Lastly, Chapter 8, “The Romanian Association for the Advancement and Spread of the Sciences, The National Exhibition, and a Monstrous Yellow Bird,” focuses on how social sciences became, from marginal parts of public health reform work, a recognizable area.

This book of Călin Cotoi is a performing analysis in front of an audience, referring to topologies of social modernity in Romania in second half of nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries.