The idea for this book, which forms part of the Columbia University Press series of Eastern European Monographs, arose from a symposium held in Warsaw on the role of the city in the development of interwar Poland. The approach to the subject is specific, as Wynot treats Warsaw as the capital of a ‘developing’ and ‘emerging’ nation, following the colonial rule of Russia, Prussia and Austria. He uses models of post-colonial capitals in the Third World as his comparative framework. He tries to discover within this scheme how Warsaw coped with its new role as capital of an independent nation. He asks to what extent the city was an integrating factor in interwar Poland in relation to its influence on the social, political, economic and cultural development of the country; he is also concerned to discover whether it was past pre-independence forces or future trends which had the most impact on the city's evolution.

After an introductory chapter, providing a brief summary of the city's history from the Middle Ages, Wynot deals with the economy, society, politics and urbanization of inter-war Warsaw, the city's operational and human (as he describes them) municipal services, and its cultural and intellectual life. There were many good and also many bad features to life in Warsaw between the wars. In his survey, Wynot stresses the way in which the capital matured and developed in these years, though it remained strongly under the control of the central government which intervened continually in its affairs. As a result, as he demonstrates, Warsaw did not nessarily reflect national political trends and voting patterns. It was a town with many civil servants and people linked with the government, and, as a consequence, the pro-government BBWR (nonparty bloc for cooperation with the government) did better here than in other Polish cities, while both the right and the left were weaker. Wynot describes the interesting beginnings of urban planning in the city, and the evolution of the capital as the Polish centre of national culture.

Of particular interest is the attention paid to the Jewish aspect of the city and the details provided. This emphasis is more than justified due to the numerical preponderance and economic role of the Jews in the city: in 1921 the Jews constituted 33.1 per cent of the total population, falling to 29.1 per cent in 1939.