The formation of national identities in the Habsburg province of Galicia in the nineteenth century has been a recurrent topic in recent years, as the works of Keely Stauter-Halsted, Kai Struve, and Andriy Zayarnyuk have demonstrated. While these and other works address mass movements and large groups (such as peasants) among the ethnically mixed population of the northeastern region of the Habsburg monarchy, the current book proposes a different perspective. Instead of writing on social movements, it presents an intellectual history of Polish and Ruthenian historians in Habsburg Galicia and their nation-building strategies, embedded in historical narratives of wide—transnational or European—scope. Resting on a solid reconstruction of historians’ environments between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reader learns how Polish and Ruthenian historians designed narratives on their nations’ history in order to place their imagined national communities in a European context. Here the author argues that the aim history writers—understood in an ample sense—pursued was to reinforce the national framework that often served to construct political legitimacy for an independent Polish and Ukrainian state respectively.

This argument is put forward according to three different fields of analysis. First, Burkhard Wöller examines narratives of “progress” that pointed out to what degree the evolution of both nations corresponded to European-wide developments. Second, the author analyzes civilizing missions, basically focusing on the historical legitimacy of Poland's expansion eastward following the unions of Krewo (in 1386) and Lublin (in 1569). Last, he explores bulwark myths of both Polish and Ruthenian provenience, focusing, in particular, on how historians of both groups argued that their nation was part of Europe due to the defense against the Mongols or the Ottoman Empire (e.g., 263, 280–81, 304). The last chapter breaks with the narration and examines the change of national historical narratives during the First World War, stating that during the war, history was increasingly manipulated and instrumentalized to argue for the establishment of independent nation-states after the end of the war. Historical discussion here became increasingly politicized and polarized between historians of both national communities. The main feature of all the analyzed discourses is their mutual entanglement, not only between Polish and Ruthenian historians responding to each other's claims so that the latter, for instance, either questioned the benefits of the Polish civilizing mission or rejected the concept of “Westernization” right away (e.g., 207, 219–23). Other discourses also influenced Polish-Ruthenian discussions, most importantly German and Russian historiographic concepts, but also Czech and German-Austrian ones. It is an achievement of this book to take into account all these different discourses and make their mutual impact, including transfers of concepts, visible. Thus, the Polish civilizing mission toward Lithuanians and in particular Ruthenians can be deconstructed as a reaction to German concepts of eastward expansion (“Drang nach Osten”) and a copy of corresponding civilizing discourses of German authors and historians that claimed superiority toward Poland (168, 208, 251).

Another important point is that “East” and “West” are treated here with great care as socio-spatial and political-spatial constructs rather than as categories of analysis. This is one of the study's strongest points aimed at spreading awareness of how historians used these categories to construct corresponding national histories either by inclusion into or exclusion from the West. Similarly, the author treats the category of “Europe” in this constructivist way, examining to what degree it was used by historians to structure narratives in which references were largely indirect and not explicit, as the author admits (255). However, one wishes to learn more about the social and political role individual historians had and the embeddedness of their discourses in other contexts, such as the author points out in the case of Henryk Schmitt (212) or Ukrainian historians during the First World War (328). Furthermore, it is questionable that “civilizing missions” were an invention of the nineteenth century, rather than an earlier construct (163). In sum, this is a learned and sophisticated book that makes use of an ample body of sources deriving from different linguistic, national, and political contexts, including not only works from academically established historians but also from other authors, such as teachers or journalists.