Jakub S.Beneš. 2025. The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth‐Century Eastern Europe. Princeton University Press, 400 pp. £35.00 (hbk).

In The Last Peasant War, Jakub S. Beneš advances a compelling reinterpretation of revolutionary violence in twentieth-century Eastern Europe by centring the political agency of peasants and, in particular, the transformative impact of the First World War on rural societies. The book's core argument is that World War I constituted not merely a backdrop to postwar revolutions but a decisive rupture that radicalised peasant political consciousness, reshaped moral economies and legitimised new forms of collective action. By tracing how wartime experiences destabilised long-standing hierarchies and norms, Beneš reframes the origins of revolutionary upheaval as deeply rooted in the countryside. The book focuses on East-Central Europe, with particular attention to the former Habsburg lands and neighbouring regions, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Beneš argues that the war irreversibly altered peasant-state relations through mass mobilisation, requisitioning, displacement and the erosion of imperial authority. These processes, he suggests, produced a generation of rural actors who had learned to articulate grievances in political terms and who increasingly viewed violence as a legitimate means of enforcing justice. In this sense, the ‘last peasant war’ was not a residual premodern revolt but a distinctly modern phenomenon forged in the crucible of total war. Methodologically, Beneš combines comparative history with close-grained archival research. He draws on court records, petitions, rural newspapers and local administrative files to reconstruct how peasants interpreted wartime hardship and postwar uncertainty. A key strength of the book lies in its attention to peasant language and symbolism: Rather than treating violence as spontaneous or irrational, Beneš situates it within shared moral frameworks shaped by wartime suffering. The First World War, he shows, disrupted traditional expectations of protection and reciprocity, convincing many peasants that the social contract had been irrevocably broken. Beneš places particular emphasis on the continuity between wartime practices and postwar revolutions. Demobilised soldiers returned to villages with weapons, organisational experience and heightened expectations of entitlement, blurring the boundary between civilian and combatant. Land seizures, attacks on officials and resistance to taxation are interpreted as extensions of wartime survival strategies rather than sudden ideological awakenings. Nationalist and socialist movements, while important, often entered rural spaces already shaped by these wartime transformations. The book is aimed at scholars of nationalism, revolution and modern European history, but its focus on war-induced social change gives it broader relevance for those studying political violence and mass mobilisation. This is evident in the frequent references to Eric Wolf's classic Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, which the author uses as a key point of reference for his own book. Beneš writes with clarity, offering readers unfamiliar with the regional historiography sufficient contextual scaffolding to follow the argument while maintaining a tightly focused analytical frame. The book's strongest contribution lies in its sustained demonstration that World War I was a formative experience for rural political radicalisation. Beneš convincingly challenges narratives that treat post-1918 revolutions primarily as ideological or urban phenomena. By foregrounding the countryside, he shows how the war eroded deference to state authority and normalised coercion as a political tool. This perspective is particularly valuable for nationalism studies, as it reveals how national projects intersected with, rather than simply mobilised, wartime agrarian grievances. Peasants did not merely adopt nationalist rhetoric; they reshaped it to reflect local understandings of justice forged during the war. The book is also innovative in its treatment of violence. Rather than portraying peasant violence as chaotic or reactionary, Beneš situates it within a moral economy profoundly altered by wartime deprivation. This approach allows him to bridge cultural and political history, offering a nuanced account of how legitimacy was redefined after 1918. His comparative framework further strengthens the argument, demonstrating that similar wartime disruptions produced varied outcomes depending on local social structures and state responses. Some limitations nonetheless remain. While the emphasis on World War I is analytically productive, the book occasionally underplays longer term prewar continuities in rural politics, which might have complicated the claim of wartime rupture. Additionally, Beneš's focus on peasant agency can obscure the extent to which coercive pressures from emerging states and armed movements shaped postwar violence. Greater engagement with how elites instrumentalised wartime grievances might have sharpened the analysis of power relations in the revolutionary moment. Despite these minor reservations, The Last Peasant War stands out as an analytically sophisticated and empirically rich contribution. It pushes scholars to rethink conventional genealogies of nationalism and revolutionary politics by demonstrating how profoundly agrarian societies shaped the contours of 20th-century state formation. By placing World War I at the centre of rural political transformation, Beneš offers a fresh lens through which to understand revolution, nationalism and violence in Eastern Europe.