The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1914 by Keely Stauter-HalstedReview by: Raymond PearsonThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 564-565Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213769 .

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564 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003

and generally felicitous edition is a valuable addition to an area of Russian history under-represented in existing English-language literature.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies ROGER BARTLETT University College London

Stauter-Halsted, Keely. 7he Nation in the Village. 7he Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, I848-I914. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, and London, 200I. X + 272 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?3?.95.

STARTING with the annexation of Cracow, the last fragment of an independent Poland, by the Austrian Empire in I846 and the abolition of serfdom throughout Habsburg jurisdiction in I848, this meticulous scholarly investi- gation follows the social development of the peasantry over the next half- century, with the accent on the growth of a sense of 'Polishness' across 'Austrian Poland'. Coverage of 'high politics', as played out by peasant delegates to the Reichsrat in Vienna and the Sejm in L'viv, is subordinated to a detailed sociological, even ethnographic and occasionally anthropological examination of the transformation of the village and rural economy of a backward region which was fortunate to find itself within the relatively progressive Cisleithanian half of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary after I867. Perhaps the dominant overall theme is the accelerating impact of 'external' societal modernization, promoting a growing (if often one-sided) dialogue between the village and the town within Galicia itself, and an increasingly politicized civil awareness of the contextual setting of Galicia within both the Habsburg state and partitioned Poland.

The academic virtues of the volume, immaculately produced by Cornell University Press, are self-evident. Research has been based upon the enterprising and systematic exploration of previously unmined primary documentation from archives in Cracow, L'viv, Warsaw and Wroclaw. And not just literary documentation: a selection of contemporary illustrations from the Ethnographic Museum in Cracow both enhances and relieves a rich but often demanding text. The principal finding of the research is the recognition of an emergent peasant 6lite which, stimulated by consciousness-raising experiences of conscription and migration, crystallized through associational activities like membership of 'agricultural circles' and the operation of communal self-government. Increasingly explicit in the identification of this new stratum of assertive 'aristocratic peasants' is the author's scenario of a burgeoning engagement of the peasantry in national politics which owes little to the conventional notion of exploitative nationialist recruitment of the peasantry from above by a frustrated but manipulative gentry. While not endorsing either the populist or 'primordialist' v,iew of spontaneous mobiliza- tion from below, Stauter-Halsted posits the rapid development, often overtly anti-Semitic, of a 'critical mass' of upper peasants prepared to collaborate with the hitherto-despised lesser gentry. To express a sophisticated argument

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REVIEWS 565

simplistically, the societal dynamic of late nineteenth-century Polish national- ism, most certainly not bottom-up, was essentially a potent combination of the traditional top-down and what may be termed the new 'middle-up'.

What shortcomings are inherent in the study are all reflections of its monographic limitations. Even for an unapologetically specialist study, there is too much of the unreconstructed doctoral thesis, while opportunities for 'opening up' a sometimes hermetic text to improve reader accessibility have not been exploited. In terms of chronological scope, the emphasis is solidly on the last two decades of the nineteenth century, tantalizingly downplaying the crucial decade before the First World War. In terms of geographical range, the focus is not really on the entire crownland of Galicia but only western Galicia: Ruthenian-dominated eastern Galicia where Polish settlement was fundamentally diasporic gets short shrift. At the structural level, there is no way in which a broader contextual discussion, preferably drawing comparisons with the other two partitioned territories of 'Poland', can be satisfactorily accommodated in a 'Conclusion' of barely four pages. At the illustrative level, the sole map provided shows only the demography of Polish settlement within Galicia itself. Somewhat revealingly, there are no maps to illustrate either the geographical location of Galicia within the Habsburg Empire or the geopolit- ical relationship of Galicia within partitioned 'Poland'.

None of these reservations, predominantly concerning sins of omission rather than sins of commission, detracts from the demonstrable scholarship of the study. Indeed, within its monographic confines, 7he Nation in the Village prompts a generous run of intriguing questions pertinent to (and often challenging) the prevailing historiography of nationalism and the peasantry in Poland. At very least, at a time when late nineteeth-century Polish nationalism has been cast in a glaringly negative light, most notably in Brian Porter's recent When Nationalism Began to Hate (New York and Oxford, 2000), the appearance of an authoritative interpretation which serves as an histori- ographical alternative (or even corrective) by illuminating its more positive features must be enthusiastically welcomed.

Department of History RAYMOND PEARSON

University of Ulster at Coleraine

Frank, Tibor. Ethnicity, Propaganda, Myth-Making. Studies on Hungarian Connections to Britain and America, i848-I945. Akademiai Kiad6, Budapest, 2001. 39I pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. $78.oo.

THIS volume brings together papers written over a period of years covering a wide range of topics. The studies originally appeared in English-language publications in Hungary and Germany, and also in American and British publications. In the main they were written in English by the author until recently the Director of Anglo-American Studies at the Eotvos L6rant University, Budapest but some were translated from German, or from Hungarian by colleagues or by himself. Nonetheless, they show a remarkable unity of style.

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