As Susan Zimmermann makes clear in the Introduction, “need-related policies” in Hungary during Habsburg rule “simultaneously entailed strategies of inclusion and exclusion” (3). The various forms of social provision pursued on a variety of levels thus reflected not simply a correspondence between need and welfare, but also officials' repression and control of, or ignorance toward, poverty.

The author stresses the “dark” side of this official attitude in contemporary Hungary by describing the poverty policy. Zimmermann, who has already published two German-language books on the same problem, argues that the poverty policy throughout the period 1848 to 1914 was characterized by officials' traditional behavior and attitudes toward beggars and other marginalized poor people. It meant that care of them was thus left to the localities, leaving municipalities the responsibility for those who had legal residence—“municipality of origin”—status there. This, however, was not a very effective practice. The police handled many anomalies following from it, and they exercised incessant surveillance over migrant impoverished migrants and prostitutes. These groups of people were neglected, persecuted, and frequently removed and relocated.

Zimmermann is the first historian stressing to this degree the close relationship between the poverty policy exercised as public poor relief and a gradually stronger policy of social control or even state repression. Her thesis on the “aggressive suppression of poverty” underlining “the restrictive character of Hungarian poverty policy” (31) is, however, only one side of the coin. What looks to have been the basic characteristic of poverty policy was not an attribute or constitutive element of other public policies on child protection, housing, unemployment, the labor market, and not least insurance. Social reforms introduced in Hungary in the late nineteenth century (compulsory social insurance) and the early twentieth century (intervention in the operation of the housing and labor markets and creation of a child protection system) also count as noteworthy developments here.

The most elaborate and conceptually and empirically plausible parts of the book are the ones in which the author discusses the process of establishing a compulsory social insurance system, including health insurance (1891) and then accident insurance (1907). Both of these were available exclusively to industrial laborers. These steps were taken, Zimmermann maintains, in order to strengthen the internal integration of Hungarian society. Not even the latter insurance, however, was entirely devoid of some kind of exclusion. Therefore, she does her best to identify the occupational groups and lower social strata (agrarian wage earners) who failed to join the system. In addition, the compulsory social insurance reforms greatly contributed, as was the intention, to the creation or preservation of patriarchal family relations, with the end goal of sustaining social stability. In spite of all this, Zimmermann insists that such social reforms in Hungary between 1900 and 1914 were at once pioneering in a European context and increasing the internal cohesion of Hungarian society.

The most important new findings in Zimmermann's book lie in the detailed and careful description of the organizational makeup and the daily operation of the new compulsory social insurance system set up in the 1900s. One of the most interesting implications of this development has been the great influence that the Social Democrats and some other representatives of the workers' interests gained in the process. In a country where the political representation of the wage-earning society of whatever kind (industrial, commercial, or agrarian) was totally unknown, this development seems to have been remarkable indeed. It meant, among other things, that the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions managed to achieve parity in the representation of the self-governing bodies of the insured. The result was that following 1907, employers and employees now paid equal shares of insurance contributions.

Zimmermann makes extensive use of primary sources, although she favors published materials (reports from state, charities and other organizations, laws, and additional local materials). Archival sources are also used in a few cases. The main weakness of the approach is the restricted spatial focus of the study, since local source material on the countryside is discussed only in passing and in an arbitrary way. One also has to mention the highly selective use of Hungarian historical literature available today. Without acknowledging the studies, especially of Béla Tomka, Laura Umbrai, Péter Hámori, Balázs Dömsödi, and Julianne Brandt, just to name a few historians, it is hard to produce an up-to-date monograph in the field. Finally, in the absence of even a sketch of the social history of contemporary Hungary, it is also difficult, almost impossible, to assess adequately the precise meaning and the relative importance of the weight and the function of such a past social provision.

Overall, Susan Zimmermann's book reconstructs the unique path that fin-de-siècle Hungary took in slowly becoming a welfare state and greatly helps us to reconsider the main trajectory of Hungary's history.