The title of this book can be taken literally. Capitalism in Chaos with the subtitle How the Business Elites in Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War means that capitalism was a stabilizing element within an era characterized by war, ethnic rivalry, imperialist ambition, ideological upheaval. This admirable book by Máté Rigó takes you to two of the most troubled geographical spots of roughly the first quarter of the twentieth century: Alsace-Lorraine on the border between France and Germany, shifting nationality from German to French after World War I, and Transylvania, part of Hungary (itself part of Austria-Hungary) until the end of the war, and then shifting nationality to Romanian.

Rigó has written an ambitious book about multi-ethnic societies with rich natural resources that are consciously exploited by entrepreneurs, established industrialists, and local, regional, and imperial politicians. The regions find themselves on either geographical side within the Central Powers during World War I, leading to quite different experiences. The German-French rivalry of Alsace-Lorraine, pushed by German authorities, created a rather substandard business climate giving rise to a number of difficult situations in the West. In the east the various promotional incentives by the Hungarian authorities facilitated newcomers and ethnic minorities to create important industrial corporations. A core element of the book is the insights emerging from the peace settlements of 1919. Referring to Charles Maier’s classic book Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the decade after World War I, Rigó sums up these differences:

The French prioritized the French: in Alsace-Lorraine immediately after the war the French population forced, coerced, or threatened German business to sell property at the cheap, and once the French authorities had collected themselves a more thorough expropriation began. In Eastern-Central Europe, however, the French attitude was motivated by protecting private businesses from nationalizations on the part of the new nation states, as well as against the possible spread of the Russian Revolution. The French were also looking for French opportunities in the occupied territories that free corporations might provide.

Both in Alsace-Lorraine and in Eastern-Central Europe fortunes and properties were in a flux, in the latter region the establishment – that in many instances had established themselves during the war – could preserve their positions in fledgling nation-states through nimble actions. This transition of the business elites in Transylvania from being Hungarian to becoming Romanian was, however, a precarious one.

The best part of the book, which must have been the most difficult part to write, is the analysis of what happened “on the ground” in the fleeting and volatile situation after the end of the Great War in 1918 and the signing of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Here we hear about French opportunism in Alsace-Lorraine, and clever balancing acts in Transylvania. For this reader the long narrative of roughly 100 pages including the Great War could have been shortened.

This reader – not very knowledgeable about either location – had some difficulties following some of the general comparison. On the one hand, the Transylvanian story is convincing and showing that what was established in Austria-Hungary and continued in Romania, was the starting point of economic growth and development that had deserved another destiny than falling under Soviet communism. Nationalism in the West at critical times brutally disregarded private property. Yet, on the other hand, elements are left out of the story that also matter for the reflection about this comparison: we hear about the modern steel plants of Alsace-Lorraine, but not so much about the industrial culture that created them, the inventive engineers, the skilled labor working there, the sophisticated corporate law applied, etc., that made Alsace-Lorraine emerge as an industrial center during an international competitive economy in the nineteenth century. The period under study here, for reasons clearly delineated in the book, was difficult for Alsace-Lorraine, but hardly represented the kind of setback that would have made the “infant industry” corporations from Transylvania competitive within this period. Did Transylvanian capitalism really prosper in the strictest sense of the word, by being resistant to international competition?

The book is not so operative about business at the micro-level, so we do not really know the full picture of how businesses experienced the war period. We learn about business-politics relations but little about business relationships within these regions. Basically, the text is dominated by a macro framework and individual cases, and this reader sometimes wondered how representative those cases are. Several of the cases seemed, too, to be written up as more or less complete cases with superfluous information for the overarching argument.

The best example of how macro and micro was not so well integrated, is the story of two German emigrants, both in the leather business, destined for Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania respectively, that we are introduced to early on. We are led to believe they will represent a comparative micro core of the book. We do meet them again, and especially the Transylvanian case has a significant place in the latter part of the book, but they generally occur scattered sparingly around the book and are situated within a lot of other cases. I do not think they are compared explicitly. Shortening the pre-1918 story would have made the cases stand more out.

When all is said and done, though, the author is to be congratulated for completing a serious undertaking. No one should doubt the complexity of his task and the achievement of completion in an intellectually convincing way. This is a deeply researched book with an impressive list of literature that is also visibly utilized in the text. The book conveys insights from empirical research enriched by secondary literature. The author is learned and with a good understanding of the general picture and thorough analytical skills to create his own narrative. The book gives compelling insights into important regions in Europe.