The book has eleven chapters, each made up of several numbered sub-sections. Apart from the book's introduction and conclusion, the final sub-section of each chapter recapitulates the chapter as "Conclusions, " in which Blomqvist sometimes talks up his contribution in an unfitting way. Reading each chapter's entire text as a reviewer proved repetitive; researchers, however, can choose either to get the gist of a chapter from the mostly footnote-free conclusions, or to read the chapter's actual content and then skip its concluding sub-section. The chapters, in turn, are grouped into five larger parts: an introduction at the front, a conclusion at the end, and in the middle three chronologically-arranged parts on dualist Hungary (Chapters Two to Four), interwar Romania (Chapters Five to Eight), and the Second World War (Chapters Nine and Ten) Assimilationist policies dominate the first two-thirds of the narrative, which is admirably documented during the interwar period in particular. When Blomqvist reaches the Second World War, the level of detail declines, the Romanian-Hungarian conflict recedes, and the expropriation of Jews becomes the dominant issue. Some of the gaps in Blomqvist's final chapter, and particularly the laconic eighth sub-section on "Romanian Reciprocity" (378-379), incidentally, are covered in Holly Case's excellent 2009 study of wartime Transylvania, Between States - The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford University Press).--

Capitalism in Chaos explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe as the region became crucially important for German and subsequently French plans of economic and geopolitical expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on extensive research in sixteen archives, five languages, and four states, Máté Rigó demonstrates that wartime destruction and the birth of "war millionaires" were two sides of the same coin. Despite the recent centenaries of the Great War and the Versailles peace treaties, knowledge of the overall impact of war and border changes on business life remains sporadic, based on scant statistics and misleading national foci. Consequently, most histories remain wedded to the viewpoint of national governments and commercial connections across national borders. Capitalism in Chaos changes the static historical perspective by presenting Europe's East as the economic engine of the continent. Rigó accomplishes this paradigm shift by focusing on both supranational regions—including East-Central and Western Europe—as well as the eastern and western peripheries of Central Europe, Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania, from the 1870s until the 1920s. As a result, Capitalism in Chaos offers a concrete, lively history of economics during major world crises, with a contemporary consciousness toward inequality and disparity during a time of collapse.

This is a book about economics and racism: During World War I, the liberal global economic system, based on principles of free trade and most-favored nation treatment and negotiated in gold parities, collapsed for good. The disintegration and collapse of commerce eventually led to racist cleansing, expulsion and mass murder. Against this background, this book offers new perspectives on the racist fault-lines that appeared and deepened in European economies after the end of what was regarded as the Great War. At what point did people start to ostracize their neighbors economically because they thought they were of a different ethnic group? Who decided who was to be excluded? Where did the fault-lines open? Where did the boundaries lie? How were they defined – by law, or by common practice? How much extra time and money were people prepared to spend in order to do ostracize their neighbors? And what did that mean for the economy – and society – as such?

The volume discusses the integration of peasants into the nation building project of Greater Romania with a focus on social and cultural practices. Thus, it addresses one of the key questions of the new political system in post-imperial East Central and Southeast Europe. It advocates a shift from a multiple top-down perspective (capital – province, urban political elites – rural voters) to an analysis concentrating on regionally diverse rural societies with a special interest in the predominantly ethnic Romanian population.

This book is the first attempt to bridge the current divide between studies addressing "economic nationalism" as a deliberate ideology and movement of economic 'nation-building', and the literature concerned with more diffuse expressions of economic "nationness"—from national economic symbols and memories, to the "banal" world of product communication. The editors seeks to highlight the importance of economic issues for the study of nations and nationalism, and its findings point to the need to give economic phenomena a more prominent place in the field of nationalism studies. The authors of the essays come from disciplines as diverse as economic and cultural history, political science, business studies, as well as sociology and anthropology. Their chapters address the nationalism-economy nexus in a variety of realms, including trade, foreign investment, and national control over resources, as well as consumption, migration, and welfare state policies. Some of the case studies have a historical focus on nation-building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while others are concerned with contemporary developments. Several contributions provide in-depth analyses of single cases while others employ a comparative method. The geographical focus of the contributions vary widely, although, on balance, the majority of our authors deal with European countries.

Violence against Jews, Roma, and other persecuted minorities in the multiethnic borderlands of Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe. Includes: Anca Filipovici: The Rise of Antisemitism in the Multiethnic Borderland of Bukovina: Student Movements and Interethnic Clashes at the University of Cernăuți (1922-1938) Doris Bergen: Saving Christianity, Killing Jews: German Religious Campaigns and the Holocaust in the Borderlands Linda Margittai: Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and Jews in Wartime Vojvodina: Patterns of Attitudes and Behaviors towards Jews in a Multiethnic Border Region of Hungary Goran Miljan: The "Ideal Nation-State" for the "Ideal New Croat": The Ustasha Youth and the Aryanization of Jewish Property in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945 Svetlana Suveica: Appropriation of Jewish Property in the Borderlands: Local Public Employees in Bessarabia during the Romanian Holocaust Anna Wylegała: Listening to Contradictory Voices: Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian Narratives on Jewish Property in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Galicia Miriam Schulz: Gornisht oyser verter?!: The Yiddish Language as a Mirror of Interethnic Relations and Dynamics of Violence in German-Occupied Eastern Europe

This study explores the little-known history of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-style territorial autonomy that was granted in Romania on Stalin’s personal advice to the Hungarian Székely community in the summer of 1952. Since 1945, a complex mechanism of ethnic balance and power-sharing helped the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) to strengthen—with Soviet assistance—its political legitimacy among different national and social groups. The communist national policy followed an integrative approach toward most minority communities, with the relevant exception of Germans, who were declared collectively responsible for the German occupation and were denied political and even civil rights until 1948. The Hungarians of Transylvania were provided with full civil, political, cultural, and linguistic rights to encourage political integration. The ideological premises of the Hungarian Autonomous Region followed the Bolshevik pattern of territorial autonomy elaborated by Lenin and Stalin in the early 1920s. The Hungarians of Székely Land would become a “titular nationality” provided with extensive cultural rights. Yet, on the other hand, the Romanian central power used the region as an instrument of political and social integration for the Hungarian minority into the communist state. The management of ethnic conflicts increased the ability of the PCR to control the territory and, at the same time, provided the ruling party with a useful precedent for the far larger “nationalization” of the Romanian communist regime which, starting from the late 1950s, resulted in “ethnicized” communism, an aim achieved without making use of pre-war nationalist discourse. After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, repression affected a great number of Hungarian individuals accused of nationalism and irredentism. In 1960 the HAR also suffered territorial reshaping, its Hungarian-born political leadership being replaced by ethnic Romanian cadres. The decisive shift from a class dictatorship toward an ethnicized totalitarian regime was the product of the Gheorghiu-Dej era and, as such, it represented the logical outcome of a long-standing ideological fouling of Romanian communism and more traditional state-building ideologies.