Becoming Metropolitan

Nathaniel Wood’s fascinating book is one of the latest in a series of publications on Galicia and on the lands of the former Habsburg Monarchy that are recasting the field of Central and Eastern European history. In the past few years, scholars of this region have searched for, and found, fruitful approaches that do not assume the success of nationalists in nationalising the masses or that nationalism doomed the dynastic state to inevitable dissolution. In doing so, they have pursued new lines of inquiry, discovered little-known sources, and offered fresh insights into cultural, economic, environmental, intellectual, and social history that have attracted the attention of scholars whose principal geographical interests are far removed from these ‘backward’ lands. Becoming Metropolitan is not another exercise in describing Cracow as the nationalist ‘Polish Athens’ or situating this city within a Habsburg Galicia defined as a ‘Polish Piedmont’. Instead, Wood traces how the writers and readers of Cracow’s new mass boulevard press adapted to modern urban life in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. He argues convincingly that urban concerns and identities were often far more vital and important than nationalism to the inhabitants of this city environment, which was at this time undergoing a jarring process of expansion and modernisation—a process Wood explores with humour and nuance

Archaeology · Economic history · Metropolitan area · Modernization theory · Monarchy · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law