The lands surrounding the Black Sea share a colourful past. Though in recent decades they have experienced ethnic conflict, economic collapse, and interstate rivalry, their common heritage and common interests go deep. Now, as a region at the meeting point of the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East, the Black Sea is more important than ever. In this lively and entertaining book, which is based on extensive research in multiple languages, Charles King investigates the myriad connections that have made the Black Sea more of a bridge than a boundary, linking religious communities, linguistic groups, empires, and later, nations and states.

This volume assembles a wide range of studies that together provide—through their interdisciplinary range, international scope, and historical emphases—an original scholarly exploration of one of the most important topics in recent nineteenth-century studies: the emergence in the nineteenth century of forms of global experience that have developed more recently into rapidly expanding processes of globalization and their attendant collisions of race, religion, ethnicity, population groups, natural environments, national will and power. Emphasizing such links between global networks past and present, the essays in this volume engage with the latest work in postcolonial, cosmopolitan, and globalization theory while speaking directly to the most pressing concerns of contemporary geopolitics. Each essay examines specific cultural and historical circumstances in the formation of nineteenth-century worlds from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including economics, political history, natural history, philosophy, the history of medicine and disease, religious studies, literary criticism, art history, and colonial studies. Detailed in their particular modes of analysis yet integrated into a collective conversation about the nineteenth century’s profound impact on our present worlds, these inquiries also explore the economic, political, and cultural determinants on nineteenth-century types of transnational experience as interweaving forces creating new material frameworks and conceptual models for comprehending major human categories—such as race, gender, subjectivity, and national identity—in global terms. As nineteenth-century global intersections differ in important ways from the shapes of globalization today, however, the essays in this volume generate new ways of understanding emergent patterns of worldwide experience in the age of imperialism and thereby stimulate fresh insights into the dynamics of global formations and conflicts today.

Until its emancipation from the Ottoman yoke, Bulgaria always occupied an unprivileged and unfavourable position in British imagination, from the very first mention of the country in Western travelogues. However, since the late eighteenth century, the Bulgarian nation has been subjected to the scrutiny of the British traveller owing to its proximity to other nations whose national struggles received more prominence, and consequently overshadowed the Bulgarians’ National Renaissance, such as Serbia and Greece. This volume concerns all the depictions of Bulgaria as a dystopian land from the eighteenth century until the country’s emergence as an important military power after its Liberation movement in 1878. In these travel narratives, the notion of the Bulgarian nationhood is described as an antithesis to idea of the civilised British, but also as a threat to the stability of the Ottoman Empire. With the rapid decline of the latter, from a mere Ottoman province, Bulgaria gradually transforms into a nation whose National Revival efforts come to the fore to question the British and Ottoman depictions of the Bulgarian nation as subaltern and uncultivated.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.