This book investigates the implications and effects of changing borders and rules of states on the economic, political, cultural, and social development of the city of Sandomierz in Lesser Poland between 1772 and 1844. The city at the junction of the Vistula and San rivers had been an important locality in medieval and early modern Poland as the seat of princes and voivods and as a trade hub. During the first partition of Poland in 1772, Sandomierz became a border town when Austria annexed the territories south of the Vistula and San and renamed them the “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.” The third partition of Poland in 1795 brought another change of borders and political rule during which Sandomierz came under Habsburg rule as part of so-called “New Galicia.” This new change removed Sandomierz from its position as a border town, but only for a short period, because the next change quickly followed in 1809. In that year Sandomierz and the Austrian “New Galicia” were attached to the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw. In 1815, after the French emperor's defeat and the Congress of Vienna, Sandomierz became part of the kingdom of Poland and was thus under the Tsar's rule. Sandomierz became a border town again—this time at the border between the tsarist and Habsburg empires. The city remained part of the empire until World War I. While the reason for commencing the book in 1772 is obvious, the decision to end the book in 1844 is less apparent because that year was only a caesura for the city's history. In that year, Sandomierz lost its function as the seat of the province's administration after the merger of the Kielce and Sandomierz provinces. The author considers this to be a consequence of the city's decline because of its peripheral position as a border town in the previous decades.

The book has four major chapters. The first chapter describes the city's position in the administrative systems of the different states. The next chapter analyzes the economic changes and the population's occupational and social structure. Sandomierz lost its previous position as a major trade hub on the Vistula after the first partition and even more so after a strong increase in duties as part of protective economic policies in the tsarist and Habsburg empire after the 1820s. Most obviously, the decline in the economic sphere was the result of the new borders. Here and at other places the author also discusses the relationship between the Christian and Jewish populations. Jews had a share of nearly a quarter of the city's inhabitants. The city's economic decline increased competition between Christian and Jewish traders and artisans and there are some hints that this resulted in growing tensions between the Christian and Jewish populations.

The following chapter analyzes spaces and places within Sandomierz. The author shows that despite the city's peripheral position and economic decline, new social phenomena that were part of the modern transformation of European societies during the nineteenth century also made their appearance in Sandomierz, including a theater, an association for its support, and coffeehouses. The last major chapter then deals with the city's health and educational institutions. From the early modern period onward, the city had been home to a number of important hospitals and institutions of higher learning. Despite its move to the periphery and relative decline in other areas, Sandomierz continued to be home to important health and educational institutions. The most important change that Christoph Augustynowicz describes here is that, while in earlier times these institutions had been largely in the domain of the religious communities, the states now engaged more strongly in improving and regulating health care and education.

Overall, Augustynowicz's study analyzes changes in society, culture, and the economy from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries on a micro-level. By centering on the problem of frequent changes of rule and peripherization due to changes in political borders, the author sheds light on a specific feature of the modern political, social, and economic transformation in the Polish territories, but the question of the impact of changing borders on local and regional development may also be of wider interest.