This book is a laudable effort to write a European history of a region that has so far been narrated as either an outdated imperial land or through a national perspective. Bringing together in this attempt scholars representing historiographies (Romanian, Serb, Hungarian) usually seen as rivals add to this feat. The main argument—summed up by the editor already in the introduction and stubbornly recurring in the conclusions of the individual chapters—claims that since its reestablishment in 1716, the Banat of Timișoara was an inherently central European region, following the lead of Europe, always on its heels in terms of introducing modernity. First, it was a manifestation of European enlightenment, where multiculturalism and multi-religiosity was traditional and welcome, and a laboratory of progressive reforms of Eugene of Savoy, Maria Theresia, and Joseph II. In this period, colonization with multiple ethnicities reinforced its central European character, while economic efforts set it apart from the other parts of the Lands of St. Stephen's Crown in terms of social composition (lack of nobility, existence of entrepreneurial groups, and so on). Later, modern nationalism was detrimental to this balance, as demonstrated during 1848 and by the inability of dualist Hungary to accommodate its minorities, sometimes leading to irreparable losses, like the disappearance of Jews. But even with these negatives, the tradition of a specific central European cultural code, based on the experiences of ethnic and religious coexistence before the emergence of nationalism, makes the region European today.

The chapters analyze a broad range of topics starting with essay-like texts on enlightenment and intellectual history of the eighteenth century, written in a vein resembling the classics of Geistesgeschichte. They later meander through the practical workings of the imperial regional administration between 1770 and 1772, architecture and spatial development in urban and rural areas, education before 1918, the conflict in 1848, nationalities politics in dualist Hungary, the German language media, the division of the region in 1918, the interwar intellectual spirit and efforts to establish a civil society during communism (as an underlying reason for the uprising in 1989) towards a conclusion that repeats the argument of the introduction about central European cultural codes and a tradition of vigorous economic modernity still shaping the Banat.

The chapters do not cover the history of the region in a monographic sense, and they are disparate in their approach and depth. Victor Neumann's texts are like essays, with much less detail than the ones on education based on a rich statistical data, or the ones dedicated to architecture and art history, which offer elaborate descriptions of buildings and artworks, a method that becomes burdensome for the reader without any illustration. Thus, the coverage of history is uneven, but the reader can pick up the basics of administrative or economic history from multiple chapters where this information is scattered piecemeal. The post-WWI period is almost absent, even though arguably it was the era what reconfigured the Banat most, much to the detriment of its cherished modernity and regionalism.

The main weakness of the book, however, is more of its political goal of identity building and less its historiographical shortcomings. Neumann pushes an idea that legitimizes a regionalist political current today, and while the argument offers some important points to take seriously, in this effort it does not engage with alternative arguments and rival narratives that contradict its claims, even though some of those alternatives define most of the scholarship on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most important missing reference is to Larry Wolff, whose eastern Europe invented as the exotic and backward alterity of the west entails the Banat, just as much as the idea of an exotic Balkans, a world ripe for discovery did in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for many travelers, often with academic backgrounds. There are alternatives to the positioning of the province within eighteenth century Habsburg Empire too, interpreting it as a kind of colony, where deviant persons from other provinces were permitted and where multi-religiosity was not mutually acceptable but rather marked by the reluctant tolerance of non-Catholics, who were still discriminated against. For example, they were not accepted as public servants, as is mentioned in the book. Finally, national historiographies produced a rich corpus of texts, mainly articles and collective volumes, which offer an incredible amount of detail on the history of the early modern and modern province. These are obviously not uncontestable interpretations and have attracted much well-founded criticism too. But presenting a radically new interpretation of this story could not happen without a thorough scrutiny of and meticulous engagement with these alternative views. However sympathetic the idea of a European, tolerant Banat driven by entrepreneurial spirit in a European Union is, to claim that it is an inherent characteristic of the region and its inhabitants needs and deserves more than stylistic flair and sometimes hollow-ringing claims of a similar past.