The great development of historians' interest in the middle classes and the nobility in recent decades has created a quite favorable framework for the study of elites, those ruling groups in European societies which, at least in the nineteenth century, were largely constituted by the upper social strata. The present volume fills a significant gap in the literature on the history of elites in Europe. General overviews as well as detailed studies on Central as well as South East Europe are rather scarce.
The purpose of the volume is to explore elites in East Central and South East Europe during the long nineteenth century as social entities entangled in social networks of various kinds and as groups unified by a common spirit that formed or framed elite attitudes and decisions. The volume is quite representative of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in that it approaches the history of elites at the local and regional as well as central-imperial levels, including contributions covering several regions in both the Austrian and the Hungarian parts of the Dual Monarchy. Τhe three studies concerning Serbia, Bulgaria, and Bessarabia enrich the Southeastern European geographical orientation of the volume.
Most of the chapters refer to the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, a period during which significant political transformations (such as the administrative and constitutional reforms resulting from the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 or the formation of national states in the Balkans) took place in East Central and South East Europe, creating an increased demand for administrative and political elites. The authors draw on the rich theoretical approaches on elites by sociologists and, to a lesser extent, historians. Within this context, they examine the relations between elite groups from two perspectives: relations within a single milieu (family, upper echelons of political parties, representative institutions, etc.), as well as relations between members of different elite groups pertaining to the various areas of the public sphere that were interconnected through political, economic, or social networks.
The introduction is well structured and informative, offering particularly useful theoretical as well as methodological insights into the topic along with a very helpful critical overview of the volume's individual contributions. These contributions are arranged in a manner that allows the reader a comparative overview of the book's contents. Each contribution includes an introduction to theory, concepts, and methods and proceeds with a delineation of the historical background as well as a concise presentation of research findings. The book's enlightening footnotes aptly complement its main text.
Most of the contributions argue that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period in which old and new elite formation practices coexisted and intermingled, a period in which traditional family (marriage and kinship), as well as professional-patronage networks, merged, reconciled, and intertwined with new networks based on education, professional identity, and sociality. For example, relations between students at the booming universities led to lifelong friendships and the creation of new, modern networks.
The first two parts of the volume (“Functional and Administrative Elites” and “Marriage, Kinship and Elite Formation”) reveal, beyond similarities, important differences in elite formation and networking between the Austrian and the Hungarian halves of the Habsburg Empire. The renewal of the political elites with members of middle-class and non-German origin seems to have been stronger in the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy due to the gradual democratization of the political system and the rise of nationalisms, as shown by the occupation of the position of district captain in Bohemia by young Czech lawyers at the beginning of the twentieth century or by the promotion of ethnic homogamy (among Slovenes) in the local elite of Ljubljana. On the contrary, in the Hungarian regions, where the lower and lower-middle classes were excluded by the electoral system until the end of World War I, cohesion, endurance, and stability of the political elite were stronger mainly due to the survival of family and kinship ties, as shown by the chapters on the multipositional elite in Kolozsvár/Cluj, the local council members in Eger, or the members of the Lower Hungarian Parliament who came from Transylvania and Eastern Hungary and were elected there.
The establishment of autonomous-independent nation states in Southeastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century created great opportunities for social advancement and the formation of new administrative, commercial, and political elites with a high degree of social inbreeding and strong networks within them, as the volume's chapters on Serbia and Bulgaria show.
In the third part (“Political Elites and Networks”), the chapters highlight the existence of geographically extensive networks that reinforce the functioning of political elites and facilitate their initiatives both in the center and the periphery of Austria-Hungary, as well as beyond.
To conclude, this is a coherent, comprehensive, theoretically informed, well-researched, and indeed path-breaking volume that sheds new light on the history of European elites. It addresses not only scholars and students interested in the history of Central and South East Europe or working on the history of nobility and the middle classes, but a broader audience as well.
