The question of whether nationalism fatally undermined the Habsburg Empire has long occupied scholars. Catherine Horel suggests, however, that in recent years, many urban historians have turned away from the study of nationalism and national conflicts. In this book, she looks closely at twelve cities that had religiously and linguistically diverse populations—and by extension, noisy national activists and competing national movements. By analyzing schools, newspapers, local governments, and other urban institutions, Horel attempts to measure “the functioning of a multicultural society” across the late Habsburg Empire. This approach allows her to document the many sources and sites of conflict that emerged between 1880 and 1914, but also to push back against “the teleological view of Austria-Hungary as doomed by the national contest” (16–17). This is a sensible if not surprising conclusion. The originality of this book lies instead in its comparisons of cities seldom examined together.

The comparisons rest on research that is both wide and deep. The book focuses on mid-sized cities of 50,000 to 200,000 inhabitants, and they include four from the Austrian half of the empire, ranging from Trieste on the Adriatic to Chernivtsi in today's Ukraine. Horel rightly observes that urban historians rarely look at both halves of the monarchy, and she remedies this by bringing in seven Hungarian cities; some of them (Bratislava, Rijeka) are comparatively well-studied, others (Arad, Oradea, Subotica) rarely make it into empire-wide studies. Finally, she also examines Sarajevo, the largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Austria–Hungary occupied in 1878 and annexed in 1908. Each of the book's eight chapters examines the cities from a different perspective. The early chapters (on language use and religion) make good use of Austria's and Hungary's official statistics, whereas later chapters (especially those on education, cultural institutions, and city politics) draw on local newspapers in at least a half dozen languages. Throughout Horel is very attentive to the development of urban public space and to how cities represented themselves through maps, postcards, and other visual media. The book also contains fascinating sections on street signs, monuments, parks, and museums.

Across nearly 500 pages, Horel deftly analyzes and compares developments in all parts of the empire. Some chapters proceed city by city, covering all twelve locations, whereas others carefully examine a handful to draw out larger themes. The chapter on education, for example, explores (among other topics) the emergence of parallel German- and Czech-language gymnasia in Brno, the growing number of Muslim girls attending Sarajevo's schools, and the competition among Hungarian cities to be awarded the kingdom's third university (joining those in Budapest and Cluj-Napoca). These diverse episodes allow Horel to demonstrate how tensions over schooling could divide individual families, religious communities, linguistic groups, and entire regions. But conflict is not the only story told here, and other sections point to moments when cities fostered mixing and local pride. The residents of Timișoara, for instance, seem to have been highly musical, and there were separate choirs for Hungarian Roman Catholics, Romanian Greek Catholics, typographers, industrial workers, and firemen, to name just a few. Although this list indicates some of the fault lines running through local society, Horel also draws attention to the festivals that brought all the choirs together, seeing in these gatherings “a moment of real multiculturalism” (249). The book examines many such episodes, from the 1894 provincial exhibition in Lviv to the inauguration in 1913 of Arad's Palace of Culture.

At times, this mass of information can be overwhelming. Part of this effect comes from how the book is structured. The introduction suggests multiple ways of thinking about cities, including the “spatial turn,” urban biography, centers and peripheries, and the city as a palimpsest. Yet few of these concepts consistently inform the chapters that follow; similarly, “imagined communities” appears in the title but is not meaningfully discussed or analyzed in the text itself. It does not help that the book has long chapters—the one on cultural institutions is close to 100 pages—with short conclusions, usually of just one paragraph. More significantly, because Horel devotes so much space to the reconstruction and analysis of national conflicts and claims, she tends to assert quickly rather than explain convincingly that nationalism in fact did not determine the actions and outlooks of many urban-dwellers—the parents who were pragmatic in choosing their children's schools and the residents who took pride in their city's new park, no matter whose statue was in the center. Nationalists may have been the most outspoken, but they don't always deserve the final word.

What emerges most clearly from this study, however, is how much is gained by looking at the empire as a whole and not just one part of it. By moving so easily from one city to another, Horel paints a compelling portrait of the Habsburg Empire, one that is both finely detailed and vibrantly colored. Although the book clearly shows the powerful forces of competition and conflict, it also displays the great creativity and experimentation that characterized urban life in the years before 1914.