Writing a book about pre-Dualist Hungarian nationalism during a decade (the 2010s) when interest in the field shifted from the study of nationalism to that of national indifference could be a challenging enterprise, of which Alexander Maxwell himself is aware. The outcome, however, validates the effort. Maxwell’s work is an important piece of scholarship, which, by looking at how national fantasies were expressed in Hungary from the 1780s to the 1860s, is both innovative and inspiring in that it shifts the former focus of studies of nationalism away from ideology and political practice to the examination of its manifestations in everyday life.Taking his cue from Michael Billig’s work on “banal nationalism,” Maxwell sets out to explore how the consumption of commodities such as tobacco and wine, preferences for a certain type of facial hair (or the lack of thereof), sexuality and marriage choices, and ways of dressing were used as metonyms for expressions of everyday nationalism. As the author of a previous book on the making of Slovak identity in nineteenth-century Hungary, and another one on the Europe-wide nationalist resistance against novel fashion trends, Maxwell is well positioned to write about these topics not only from a Magyar and a non-Magyar perspective, but a European one as well. Indeed, the range of his primary sources includes works published in Latin, German, Slovak, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, and Ukrainian, not to mention French, English, and even Spanish. Due to this remarkable linguistic reach, he can work with a very rich corpus of evidence, including often overlooked pieces of information in nineteenth-century books and the press, which vividly revive the period.Before proceeding to the examination of his above-mentioned topics, Maxwell adopts in his introduction and the book’s first two chapters a broader focus whose aim is to contextualize Hungary’s early nineteenth-century national awakening and discuss it from the perspective of the use of the self-referential linguistic endonym “Magyar” (which Magyars used to describe themselves), and its equivalent exonym “Hungarian,” used by non-Magyars to refer to Magyars. At the same time, Magyars also used this exonym to stand for Magyar in locally produced foreign-language dictionaries and language textbooks and in relation to the name of the country, Hungary. This dual use, however, created room for nationalistic competition, as Slovaks, Serbs, Romanians, and other nationalizing ethnic groups living in Hungary also laid claim to the Hungarian exonym, without seeing themselves as linguistically and ethnically Magyar, while Magyars started insisting from the 1820s on a complete overlap between their endonym and exonym.As the next chapter details, this ethnic competition gave birth to a semantic distinction introduced by Magyar intellectuals, politicians, and legislators between the concepts of nation and nationality. While Magyars saw themselves as members of a full-fledged nation, other ethnic groups living in Hungary were subsumed under the much more fluid and less defined category of people who belonged to an “almost-but-not quite” nation, enshrined in Hungarian law under the concept of nationality. Although, in Hungarian usage, the nation initially included only members of the nobility, in the 1830s and 1840s the concept came to include all Magyars, but not those living in Hungary who belonged to different ethnic groups and spoke non-Magyar languages. This led many members of the latter to distinguish between a “political nation” and a “linguistic nation” and lay claim to Hungarian citizenship on different linguistic and ethnic grounds.As the author shows in the remainder of his book, these competing nationalisms, given birth by nineteenth-century national terminologies and language, influenced everyday practices related to consumption, personal grooming, marriage, and self-presentation. Maxwell is especially interested in shedding light on how nationalist linguistic categorizations came to be filled with content in the sphere of everyday life among both Magyars and non-Magyars. Instead of a neat transition from nationalist categories to nationalist practices, however, what he finds is that on the ground level the rising ideology of nationalism was combined with a variety of economic, cultural, and gender concerns.Thus, in the case of Hungarian tobacco, the high prices that this product fetched on Central European markets during the American revolution (an event that disrupted the supply of Virginia tobacco to Europe) turned it into a prized export product within the confines of the Hungarian economy. The prohibitive export taxes that the Apaldo, the Austrian tobacco monopoly, placed on this product throughout the first half of the nineteenth century led to an economic conflict between Austria and Hungary that was picked out by Magyar nationalists in the 1830s and 1840s, who used it to fuel anti-Austrian sentiment in Hungary. Although during the 1848 revolution Lajos Kossuth closed the offices of Apaldo in Pest, the defeat of the Hungarian revolution and the ensuing Austrian military occupation of Hungary reestablished the monopoly’s prohibitive policies. It was only after the constitutional reforms introduced in the 1860s, which empowered the domestic opposition and led to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, that the Apaldo started to offer higher prices for Hungarian tobacco, which led to a reconciliation between it and Hungarian tobacco growers.Throughout the different phases of this mostly economic conflict, however, the tobacco grown in Hungary became associated with what Maxwell calls the “culture of Hungarian tobacco patriotism” (76). The practice of smoking was so widespread in Hungary that foreign travelers described it as an exception from the European norm. But it was mostly the writers of the Hungarian reform era who turned tobacco smoking into a patriotic virtue, which they also equated with being an authentic Magyar. As Maxwell astutely points out, because tobacco smoking was so widespread, and an everyday habit among both the rich and poor, smoking came to “transcend . . . class divisions” (90). At the same time, the widespread practice of smoking was gendered, creating a masculine culture of socializing that excluded women.Along with tobacco, wine became another signifier of Magyarness. It was not just the quality of Hungarian wine but its extolling by poets like Mihály Vörösmarty and Sándor Petőfi that conferred patriotic qualities to it. Among Hungarian wines, the Tokaji was the one that wore the crown. The quality of Tokaji, also recognized internationally, made Hungarian reformers want to export this product. But the disinterest of the Habsburg authorities in the issue along with the mediocre quality of other Hungarian wines, constantly hampered such efforts. While ultimately Hungarian wine exports did not take off, in the public cultural discourse fashioned by a variety of Magyar and non-Magyar writers drinking wine became what distinguished Magyars from beer-drinking Germans, and the Slavs and Romanians who supposedly preferred fermented spirits. According to the author, “these ethnic stereotypes were promoted especially by the ‘liberal Magyar nobility,’” which “nationalized wine as a form of collective self-glorification,” combined with the promotion of “the interests of their social estate.” (121) At the same time, while drinking wine was glorified by them, drinking spirits was condemned as a non-Magyar habit, engendering attitudes that bordered on “ethno-national chauvinism” (121). As Maxwell points out, such attitudes permeated other spheres of everyday life, extending from the nationalization in the Hungarian collective imaginary of the Magyar moustache, to the choice of ethnically same partners in marriage (a practice that was promoted by non-Magyars as well), and to the imagining of a specific national costume for every ethnic group in Hungary (a highly artificial and ideologized endeavor, given that dresses that people wore differed in every locality in Hungary, even in regions inhabited by a majority of members of the same ethnic group).While threading through these topics, the author makes the case that the gendered inflections of the Magyars’ glorification of male facial hair, and both Magyars’ and non-Magyars’ emphasis on ethnically endogamous marriages and sex partners, together with their emphasis on a distinct national dress (with the male costume taking precedence over the female one), validate Carole Pateman’s claim that nationalism was not so much about the establishment of a patriarchal order centered on a dominant father figure but rather the ideology of a band of brothers aiming to control their sisters and wives. Living up to this valuable observation, every chapter of the book engages with a rich corpus of secondary literature, with Maxwell emphasizing that out of the many writings on nationalism, the most inspirational for him as a scholar of Hungarian national fantasies expressed through commodity patriotism is Rogers Brubaker’s seminal work on nationalism, which encourages researchers to “study the nation as ‘practical category, as classificatory scheme, [and] as [a] cognitive frame’” (242). Indeed, true to this admonition, Maxwell concludes that during the period under study “Hungarians most frequently proclaimed national rights, or denied them to other[s], through the politics of categories; they chose and propounded definitions of ‘Hungary,’ or particular ethnonyms, or generalizable definitions of the ‘nation,’ that suited their needs.” However, “patriots from different ethnonational communities experienced the nation differently, and both ethnonyms and national definitions varied dramatically” (242).Overall, by looking at the experience of nationalism in nineteenth-century Hungarians’ everyday life, Maxwell urges a less customary approach, which privileges the study of the reception of nationalist ideas instead of a focus on the nationalist elites that expressed them in government and politics. In this, the book is extremely valuable, but it is a pity for such an ambitious work that the text and the book’s footnotes abound in typos and spelling errors. Yet the depth of Maxwell’s research, together with his antiquarian unearthing of often obscure yet relevant sources, together with the book’s theoretical acumen, makes this work one that every scholar of the topic should read.