One of the enduring questions tackled by both historians and political scientists interested in the structure of the state and its evolving, modernizing nineteenth-century iteration has been the comparative role of new social actors within it. Research into the nineteenth-century state inevitably takes on the question of concomitant social shifts that assume the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie and capitalist class and the related erosion of the place and power of the nobility. The development of the state in Central Europe has always complicated that narrative and led historians to question the role of old and new elites in the nineteenth century, both in the edifice of the state and in the challenges to traditional political affiliations and participation. Rudolf Kučera's important new volume of comparative history is an excellent addition to this long-standing historical debate, and its comparison of Silesia and Bohemia yields important insights into the social and political transformation of nineteenth-century Central Europe and the role of the state in it. As Kučera so ably demonstrates through prodigious research and careful analysis, ennoblement, education, and economic power were interrelated; and the state and local political culture were relevant to the experience of a new nobility.

One should start with the salience of the comparison that Kučera has undertaken and the temporal framework that he imposes on it. Kučera begins in the Napoleonic era, with its profound impact on imperial and inner-German political structures and the broad, if problematic, reform program in Prussia, and addresses the contours of that historical moment in two provinces with interesting common features and particular distinguishing characteristics. Kučera's initial chapters set up the problematic, examining both the fundamental question of the relationship between social stratification and state policy, as well as the stages on which these dynamics played out in Breslau and Prague. The end point of 1871 is similarly important, with not only Prussia's dominance in the establishment of the imperial German state, but also the end of a long period of political debate and experimentation in the Habsburg lands that yielded a Bohemia in particular that was simultaneously central in terms of economic development and peripheral in terms of political power. Kučera bookends the discussion for the last third of the century, arguing that ennoblement in both the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost its value in the face of embourgeoisement, worker politics, and the challenges of democratization and nationalization.

In Kučera's comparison and as he describes in his first chapter, Silesia and Bohemia were both historically economic powerhouses and both simultaneously peripheries. Kučera's argument is that the locale mattered—the political and social conditions of these regions are critical to understanding the emergence and impact of new nobility—and only moving beyond the dynamics of Berlin and Vienna allows us to weigh the state's “typical” role in creating and maintaining new social hierarchies. Kučera importantly links economic changes in these regions to shifts in social structure and practice, rather than drawing conclusions about the status of status, as it were, simply from the edifice of legal privileges, the experience of state capital cities, or the rise of the nontitled wealthy. What this work recognizes is that the nineteenth century, for all its seismic changes, was not a moment that saw the clear substitution of one elite with another in Central Europe, but a cross-fertilization of precedence, social competition, economic power, and professionalization that played out in the “arenas” of Prague and Breslau, for example, and that created new demand for ennoblement, broadened the pool of eligible candidates for it, and gave the state room to manipulate social structure. Breslau and Prague were, therefore, as Kučera shows, dynamic, growing urban centers whose institutional edifices of education, commerce, and government encouraged the regular Mischung of officials, officers, intellectuals, and landowners. The professionalization of service, industrial investment, notions of intellectual development and participation (i.e., civil society) all fed into an “immer längere und intensivere Ausbildungszeit” (21) that in turn changed the dynamics of these cities, the pool of potential nobles, the structure and identity of elites, and the role of the state in defining them. Despite the two provinces’ common conditions, Kučera demonstrates that there were significant differences between them in terms of those who achieved ennoblement. Not unexpectedly, in Silesia, civil servants and landowners had almost a lock on noble titles, whereas Bohemia's noble hopefuls derived from a broader range of claimants participating in a wide diversity of social, cultural, and political activities.

The comparison of the provinces of the two great German powers is a natural one, but the missing “third Germany” is obvious if the argument is to take on our larger historical formulations on the relationship between social stratification and politics in the era of modern nation-state formation. Kučera makes a compelling case for relying on the context of Prussia and Austria, as well as on the problematic notion of the state as a historical actor. Indeed, he is in some ways making a historical case for why and in what ways we can productively think about the state as autonomous and interventionist in particular social and cultural questions.

This volume is a must-read for scholars interested in the interplay of status, modernization (for all the problems associated with the term), and state building; the long history of durable social hierarchies in Central Europe; the shifting nature of what we understand by center and periphery; and the dynamics of nineteenth-century politics more broadly. It is a volume that moves beyond our standard narratives of elites (or noble decline), of state policies, and the role of the state in Prussia and Austria, and importantly decenters the historical narrative away from Berlin and Vienna.