[T]his superb volume by Benes takes a decidedly bottom-up approach to Austria, providing a fascinating account of the emergence of Czech and German socialism, a topic bizarrely neglected in English-language scholarship....Highly recommended. * R.J. Goldstein, CHOICE * Benes's...research is highly illuminating. * Mike Macnair, Weekly Worker * Deeply researched and clearly written, this book is a major contribution to the literature on nationalism in modem Central and Eastern Europe. * Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University * Workers and Nationalism is a much needed original intervention that will compel scholars to see the Austrian Social Democrats - both Germans and Czechs - at the centre of nationalizing post-1890 Austrian politics. * Ke-chin Hsia, Indiana University Bloomington, German History * Benes' monograph is as important to our understanding of the Central European labour movement as it is to a reassessment of the nationality question in the Habsburg Empire. He presents us with a very welcome challenge to simplistic accounts of nationalism in the region. More studies of this kind are needed. * Axel Koerner, University College London, EHR * [A] well-researched and richly-annotated monograph * J. Guy Lalande, St. Francis Xavier University, Labour/Le Travail * [an] innovative study ... Workers and Nationalism provides captivating insights into the influence of nationalism on late Habsburg working-class culture. * Peter Thaler, Austrian History Yearbook * an important book * Slavic Review * This compelling study, which began as a dissertation in history at the University of California, Davis, explores how industrial workers in imperial Austria came to embrace nationalist forms of politics in the decades before the Great War... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Benes is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the
historical literature. * Jeremy King (Mount Holyoke College), European History Quarterly Vol. 48.1 * From start to finish, Benes demonstrates a nuanced and dispassionate appreciation for how asymmetries between the German and Czech national movements played out among socialists of both tongues ... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Benes is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the historical literature. * Jeremy King, European History Quarterly * [Benes] directs our attention, rather, to the grass roots, where a transnational, socialist movement fighting exclusion from political society on class grounds gradually switched focus, once the vote had been won, to a struggle against exclusion on the grounds of national minority status. In the process, social democracy split along ethnic lines, because neither side understood the concerns of the other. As Benes insists and illustrates, with copious and
vivid evidence from Czech and German memoirs, newspapers, pamphlets and popular literature, this distinctly working-class variant of nationalism was, by the time of the First World War, a mass movement; the opinions of party leaders were irrelevant. * Comments by the jury of the BASEES George Blazyca Prize 2016 * [an] inspiring study ... Benes highlights the autonomy of ordinary workers to form their own views on nationhood, class relations, and political means and aspirations. He does so by analyzing a rich collection of sources, ranging from proletarian prose and poetry to speeches, essays, diaries, and memoirs of rank and file workers and party activists. * Peter Bugge, Hungarian Historical Review *