This useful volume should become an important reference for the field. Organized thematically (resulting in some predictable repetition from chapter to chapter), it offers insights by American and east central European historians that respond both to important historiographical trends and to profound issues within the region.
Irina Livezeanu and Arpad von Klimo's introduction grounds the book in flux, as it were. They note that the contributors’ geographical definitions of east central Europe shift over time, sometimes including Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia, sometimes seeking influence and interconnectedness as far abroad as France and Britain, or even the Americas (3). Similarly, 1700 is a suggestive origin date for most of the book's chapters, not a fixed one—especially for any discussion of politics in the region—that need to reach back to the fifteenth century or earlier. In other words, the basic historical questions of when and where have to be answered contextually, emphasizing contingency. More than simply opening the volume, this essay would be a helpful standalone introduction to the region for undergraduates.
The first chapter tries to create a spatially-informed overview of east central Europe, relying on a theory about “regimes of territoriality,” and repeating the concept of “right-sizing” political units. Yet it reads much like a standard political history of the region, albeit one that pays slightly greater attention to regionalism and the “re-redrawing of maps” (60). The authors claim that 1860 opened a century of “simplifying sovereignty,” offering a new periodization of territoriality, but they do not adequately explain the date's significance (34). The chapter's somewhat over simplistic concluding sentence is that “regimes of territoriality may shift, but they do not cease to matter” (67). Perhaps the authors are still responding to the post-Cold-War conceit that the nation-state would fade in significance compared to regional or transnational organizations? Similarly, the second chapter, “Rural and Urban Worlds,” is in fact a thorough, excellent economic history—a valuable reference, certainly, but it does not offer a new way of understanding the region, nor does it focus in particular on the relationship between rural and urban collectivities, as its title claims.
Later chapters offer more of interest. Theodora Dragostinova and David Gerlach's chapter proposes an intriguing analysis of east central Europe in terms of movement, taking migration as a constant rather than an exception, from the labor-based migratory flows of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the “ethnic unmixing” that dominated much of the twentieth. The authors are sensitive to the disparate pressures that drove movement for different populations in the area, from the allure of greater economic opportunity to wars, persecution, and other political pressures. The history of migration reappears as a theme in various other chapters.
Joel Brady and Edin Hajdarpasić, in “Religion and Ethnicity,” offer an excellent overview of the most recent scholarship on identity formation, the legacy of empires, and lived experience, summarized without reducing complexity. Their quotation of Mary Neuburger noting complexity in Ottoman society in Bulgaria might serve as an overall epigraph for this chapter: “[A]lthough religion was a key defining feature of status within Ottoman society, distinctions between cultures and peoples were often blurred on the local level.” The authors focus on that blur, which they define later on that same page as “mutual borrowings, coexistence, and heterodox observance of religion” (183). However, their discussion of religion in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Habsburg realms and Poland-Lithuania leans more toward a discussion of royal power and its effect on religious groupings than lived experience/social history. Their treatment of the nineteenth century is impressive, folding in the complexity of nationalism, state-creation, migration, and the allure of socialism, noting the way they helped spur internal divisions within and among the region's religious groups.
In a wide-ranging chapter on high culture, focused primarily on literature, Irina Livezeanu, Thomas Ort, and Alex Drace-Francis address the interrelationship of literary cultures and a long list of social or political developments: empires, revolutionary movements, modernization, democratization, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. They take as their departure Andrew Wachtel's definition of eastern Europe as “that part of the world where serious literature and those who produce it have traditionally been overvalued,” (217) and ask themselves whether that is the case. Their answer is grounded in the political efforts to rework the relationship between power and the people, dating back to the eighteenth century's absolutist experiments; in the growing significance of national languages and national states in the region; and, in the presence of authoritarian regimes, society's efforts to speak back to official culture.
Krassimira Daskalova and Susan Zimmermann's chapter on women's and gender history focuses thematically rather than chronologically on topics like education, work and social politics, law and citizenship, empire and nation, gender mythologies, and women's activism. In particular, with regard to the history of everyday life, but also in denaturalizing hierarchies and highlighting cultural exchange between eastern and western Europe, as well as the region's ongoing poverty, the authors shape a persuasive argument that the history of women and gender is central, not peripheral, to understanding the region.
The book ends with various politically-focused chapters on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: ideologies and movements, communism and its legacy, the post-communist period, and the political uses of the past, a deft treatment of historical memory across the region. These are generally excellent, like so much of this volume.
Scholars of the field and their graduate students will want this book on their office shelves. It is a pleasure to read a synopsis of the region that tries to de-essentialize east central Europe by appropriately highlighting constant change and development.
