The first full-length history in English of the clash between the Habsburg occupiers of Bosnia-Herzegovina and their Serb, Croat, and Muslim subjects, from 1878 to the fateful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

Concentrating on the politics of the Habsburg Monarchy's self-proclaimed 'cultural mission' in occupied Bosnia in the period from 1878 to the outbreak of war in 1914, Taming Balkan Nationalism addresses two related issues: the impact of 'Europeanization' in a backward society and the crystallization of the identities which have since dominated Bosnian life. On the basis of wide reading in the Austrian, Hungarian, and south Slav sources, including the Hungarian-language papers of the two leading administrators of Bosnia, Benjamin von Kállay and István Burián, Robin Okey provides fresh and wide-ranging perspectives on a whole range of issues, including the 'Orientalist' assumptions of Austrian policy, the struggle of administrators for the moral high ground with nascent Serb and Croat intelligentsias, Kállay's controversial policy of the 'Bosnian nation', and the strategy and personality of the intriguing Burián. He also opens up the hitherto unexplored background to student terrorism in the secondary schools of pre-1914 Bosnia, from which the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to emerge. Beyond this immediate historical context, the book also sheds much light on wider issues such as the construction of Serb and Croat nationhood in Bosnia, the beginnings of the Europeanization of Bosnian Muslims, and the new divisions created by the rapid pace of social, economic, and intellectual change as the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century.

A numerically small Jewish community helped their ethnically embattled neighbors in a neutral, humanitarian way to survive the longest modern siege, Sarajevo, in the early 1990s.

This book shows how current and future research on the social history of the Balkans can be integrated into a broader European framework. The contributions look at a range of methodological and empirical issues, and the theme that links the various studies is that of the contrasting, yet, at the same time, entangled ideas of the Balkans as a "mental map" and of Southeast Europe as an "historical region." (Series: Studies on South East Europe - Vol. 10)

The book The Balkans over Years: History and Politics is a collection of book reviews written over a period of almost two decades and published in various issues in the South Slav Journal. The books reviewed are multidisciplinary, covering economic, social, political, military, historical, linguistic, legal, literary, and even psychological and psychoanalitical facets of analysis of complex life in the Balkans. The aim of this book is to present a wide range of topics relevant to the Balkans with a view of bridging the gaps in opinions and arriving at conclusions, which will approach objective truth.

Germany’s 1941 seizure of Yugoslavia led to an insurgency as bloody as any in World War II. The Wehrmacht waged a brutal counter-insurgency campaign in response, and by 1943 German troops in Yugoslavia were engaged in operations that ranked among the largest of the entire European war. Their actions encompassed massive reprisal shootings, the destruction of entire villages, and huge mobile operations unleashed not just against insurgents but also against the civilian population believed to be aiding them. Terror in the Balkans explores the reasons behind the Wehrmacht’s extreme security measures in southern and eastern Europe. Ben Shepherd focuses his study not on the high-ranking generals who oversaw the campaign but on lower-level units and their officers, a disproportionate number of whom were of Austrian origin. He uses Austro-Hungarian army records to consider how the personal experiences of many Austrian officers during the Great War played a role in brutalizing their behavior in Yugoslavia. A comparison of Wehrmacht counter-insurgency divisions allows Shepherd to analyze how a range of midlevel commanders and their units conducted themselves in different parts of Yugoslavia, and why. Shepherd concludes that the Wehrmacht campaign’s violence was driven not just by National Socialist ideology but also by experience of the fratricidal infighting of Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups, by conditions on the ground, and by doctrines that had shaped the military mindsets of both Germany and Austria since the late nineteenth century. He also considers why different Wehrmacht units exhibited different degrees of ruthlessness and restraint during the campaign.

A sweeping history of southeastern Europe from antiquity to the present that reveals it to be a vibrant crossroads of trade, ideas, and religions. We often think of the Balkans as a region beset by turmoil and backwardness, but from late antiquity to the present it has been a dynamic meeting place of cultures and religions. Combining deep insight with narrative flair, The Great Cauldron invites us to reconsider the history of this intriguing, diverse region as essential to the story of global Europe. Marie-Janine Calic reveals the many ways in which southeastern Europe’s position at the crossroads of East and West shaped continental and global developments. The nascent merchant capitalism of the Mediterranean world helped the Balkan knights fight the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. The deep pull of nationalism led a young Serbian bookworm to spark the conflagration of World War I. The late twentieth century saw political Islam spread like wildfire in a region where Christians and Muslims had long lived side by side. Along with vivid snapshots of revealing moments in time, including Krujë in 1450 and Sarajevo in 1984, Calic introduces fascinating figures rarely found in standard European histories. We meet the Greek merchant and poet Rhigas Velestinlis, whose revolutionary pamphlet called for a general uprising against Ottoman tyranny in 1797. And the Croatian bishop Ivan Dominik Stratiko, who argued passionately for equality of the sexes and whose success with women astonished even his friend Casanova. Calic’s ambitious reappraisal expands and deepens our understanding of the ever-changing mixture of peoples, faiths, and civilizations in this much-neglected nexus of empire.