Overview

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state. As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia's mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grounds for competing Polish national visions. By the eve of World War II, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union growing in strength, schemes to ensure the loyalty of Jews and Ukrainians by offering them a conditional place in the nation were replaced by increasingly aggressive calls for Jewish emigration and the assimilation of non-Polish Slavs.Drawing on research in local and national archives across four countries and utilizing a vast range of written and visual sources that bring Volhynia to life, On Civilization's Edge offers a highly intimate story of nation-building from the ground up. We eavesdrop on peasant rumors at the Polish-Soviet border, read ethnographic descriptions of isolated marshlands, and scrutinize staged photographs of everyday life. But the book's central questions transcend the Polish case, inviting us to consider how fears of national weakness and competitions for local power affect the treatment of national minorities, how more inclusive definitions of the nation are themselves based on exclusions, and how the very distinction between empires and nation-states is not always clear-cut.

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9780190067458

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Reviews

This important book explores the ethnic complexity of the interwar Polish republic by focusing on the relation of the state to the border province of Volhynia. Ciancia's research illuminates in new ways our understanding of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish history, and offers valuable insight into the ideological meaning of 'civilization' in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. This is one of the most stimulating studies of interwar Poland that I have read in recent years. * Larry Wolff, author of Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe * On Civilization's Edge is an extraordinary contribution to the history of Europe, nationalism, and empire. Based on sources in five languages from fourteen archives, Kathryn Ciancia has written a local history that is firmly grounded in a global context. Her argument situates the Polish civilizing mission in Volhynia in the global framework of European colonial and imperial projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and should be of interest to scholars interested in the entangled histories of empire and nationalism in Europe and beyond. * Tara Zahra, Livingston Professor of East European History, University of Chicago * Does Volhynia matter? Kathryn Ciancia's elegant study of this remote outpost of interwar Poland, and of the micropolitics of the new state's claims to sovereignty in the region, shows us that it does. Focusing on an army of experts, teachers, settlers and border guards and their efforts to measure, inculcate, and patrol Volhynian spaces and populations, Ciancia effortlessly connects the local and the global, positioning Volhynia against a broader panorama of twentieth-century modernity. * Dr. Katherine Lebow, Associate Professor of History, Oxford University *

Does Volhynia matter? Kathryn Ciancia's elegant study of this remote outpost of interwar Poland, and of the micropolitics of the new state's claims to sovereignty in the region, shows us that it does. Focusing on an army of experts, teachers, settlers and border guards and their efforts to measure, inculcate, and patrol Volhynian spaces and populations, Ciancia effortlessly connects the local and the global, positioning Volhynia against a broader panorama of twentieth-century modernity. * Dr. Katherine Lebow, Associate Professor of History, Oxford University * On Civilization's Edge is an extraordinary contribution to the history of Europe, nationalism, and empire. Based on sources in five languages from fourteen archives, Kathryn Ciancia has written a local history that is firmly grounded in a global context. Her argument situates the Polish civilizing mission in Volhynia in the global framework of European colonial and imperial projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and should be of interest to scholars interested in the entangled histories of empire and nationalism in Europe and beyond. * Tara Zahra, Livingston Professor of East European History, University of Chicago * This important book explores the ethnic complexity of the interwar Polish republic by focusing on the relation of the state to the border province of Volhynia. Ciancia's research illuminates in new ways our understanding of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish history, and offers valuable insight into the ideological meaning of 'civilization' in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. This is one of the most stimulating studies of interwar Poland that I have read in recent years. * Larry Wolff, author of Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe *

Does Volhynia matter? Kathryn Ciancia's elegant study of this remote outpost of interwar Poland, and of the micropolitics of the new state's claims to sovereignty in the region, shows us that it does. Focusing on an army of experts, teachers, settlers and border guards and their efforts to measure, inculcate, and patrol Volhynian spaces and populations, Ciancia effortlessly connects the local and the global, positioning Volhynia against a broader panorama of twentieth-century modernity. -- Dr. Katherine Lebow, Associate Professor of History, Oxford University On Civilization's Edge is an extraordinary contribution to the history of Europe, nationalism, and empire. Based on sources in five languages from fourteen archives, Kathryn Ciancia has written a local history that is firmly grounded in a global context. Her argument situates the Polish civilizing mission in Volhynia in the global framework of European colonial and imperial projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and should be of interest to scholars interested in the entangled histories of empire and nationalism in Europe and beyond. -- Tara Zahra, Livingston Professor of East European History, University of Chicago This important book explores the ethnic complexity of the interwar Polish republic by focusing on the relation of the state to the border province of Volhynia. Ciancia's research illuminates in new ways our understanding of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish history, and offers valuable insight into the ideological meaning of 'civilization' in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. This is one of the most stimulating studies of interwar Poland that I have read in recent years. -- Larry Wolff, author of Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe

Author Information

Kathryn Ciancia is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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