The title of this book might suggest a variety of approaches. The table of contents brings more clarity, revealing an intention to study a range of types of elite across an equally diverse set of regions, including Bohemia, Hungary, Transylvania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Bessarabia, as well as in urban milieux such as Eger, Ljubljana, Dubrovnik and Cluj. The term “long nineteenth century” is justified by one paper on the first half of the eighteenth, and one on the situation after the First World War; but the core focus of the volume is on the period 1850–1914.
The book is divided into three parts, respectively, on functional and administrative elites; marriage, kinship and elite formation; and political elites and networks. Each part showcases three or four case studies. In Part I, Sabine Jesner writes about the Habsburg military and economic administrators operating in the Banat of Temesvar in the first half of the eighteenth century; Klára Hulíková Tesárková, Martin Klečacký, and Alice Velková about the district captains of Bohemia from 1875 to 1910; and Szilárd Ferenczi about the municipal elite of Kolozsvár/Cluj in roughly the same period. In Part II, Irena Selišnik and Ana Cergol Paradiž investigate marriage patterns in late nineteenth-century Laibach/Ljubljana; Aleksandra Vuletić analyzes marriage and family structure in Serbia, with an eye to broader social dynamics; Anita Berecz looks at the kinship ties of local council members in Eger, Hungary; while Judit Pál and Vlad Popovici consider the links between family ties and parliamentary elections in Transylvania. In Part III, Jonathan Kwan provides a new analysis on the formation of the Constitutional Party in Austria; Oliver Panichi on Catholic Serbs in Austrian Dubrovnik; and Dobrinka Parusheva on power networks in turn-of-the-century Bulgaria. Svetlana Suveica's chapter concludes this part with an analysis of Bessarabian Russian networks in post-Versailles Europe.
All the contributions are based on thorough research, often using new archival sources, and many are original reconstructions of elite circles, parties and networks hitherto little known to scholars. Of particular interest is the relation between the parts—for example, how emerging urban social hierarchies relate to kinship practices and strategies, and how in turn this affected the formation of political groupings.
The volume is to be admired for its regional diversity. The reader is left genuinely impressed with the various and detailed reconstructions of elite activity in different municipalities, principalities, and provinces. In general, the focus is on middle-ranking elites at the province or city level: we do not encounter too many archdukes, generals, or archbishops. This is true of locations too: there is hardly anything on the big cities of the region, whether Vienna, Budapest, or Istanbul. I would have been interested to read more about the dissemination of models of politics, administration, and family structures across the different spaces covered in this book. The opening study by Jesner gives a good understanding of center-periphery power relations in the early eighteenth-century Habsburg Banat; and the closing one by Suveica shows a transnational network of Bessarabian elites making a case for their province in Versailles and elsewhere in 1919 and after. But I wondered in other cases whether there was a similar dynamic at play, or whether the various case studies do not lend themselves to generalization on this point. It could also have been useful to include some analysis of smaller spaces, be they distribution of elites in urban or rural districts or even organization of domestic space within elite households, at a time when the public/private divide was configured differently and had consequences for access to power and class relations. Gender issues receive strong attention in the chapter by Selišnik and Paradiž, but are not really taken into consideration elsewhere. Otherwise, the volume is a fine example of painstaking research clearly expounded, and shows well the links between social history and political dynamics in modern central and eastern Europe.
