Economic nationalizing in the ethnic borderlands of Hungary and Romania

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).--