Drawing upon previously unpublished commercial ledgers and correspondence, this study offers a collective social biography of three generations of Balkan merchants. Personal accounts humanize multiethnic networks that navigated multiple social systems – supporting and opposing various aspects of nationalist ideologies.

"The book contains a presentation and critical consideration of the ideas of historians on the major problems, processes, events, and personalities of the era of the Bulgarian (national) Revival. It is dominated by the effort to understand how the Bulgarian Revival has been conceived of and imagined while keeping a certain distance from the various views presented, whether critical, ironic, or simply that inherent in the presentation of another person's view."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In contrast to research on elites or “history from below,” this study offers an approach that can be called “mesohistory” – a collective social biography of the Balkan merchants. In foregrounding the voices of traders, this study sheds fresh light on multiethnic networks of social actors navigating multiple social, political, and economic systems – supporting and opposing various aspects of nationalist ideologies. Personal accounts humanize features of these “faceless” socially mediating groups. Merchants’ generation-specific perspectives on the economy, society, and state, both in times of war and peace, are analyzed against the backdrop of Balkan, Ottoman, and European history. The study captures a dialogue between primary and secondary sources and the major debates regarding nationalism, modernity, and the Ottoman legacy.

Examines the origins of political violence in the Balkans since the 19th century, while treating the region as an integral part of modern European history, reminding us that political violence and ethnic cleansing are hardly unique to this region.

The emergence of the Balkan national states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has long been viewed through an Orientalist lens, and their birth and evolution traditionally seen by scholars as the effect of the Ottoman Empire's decline. As a result, the role played by the great European revolutions, wars and intellectual developments is often neglected. Rejecting these traditional Orientalist narratives, this work examines Balkan nationalist movements within their broader European historical contexts. Drawing on a range of unused archival research and ranging from the Napoleonic era to the Bolshevik Revolution, contributors variously consider the complex roles played by Europe's internal geo-political ruptures in forming the Balkan states, and demonstrate how the Balkan intelligentsia drew inspiration from, and interacted with, contemporary European thought. Shedding light onto the strong intellectual, political and military interconnections between the regions, this is essential reading for all those studying Balkan and European history, as well as anyone interested in the question of national identity. Published in Association with the British Institute at Ankara

This volume approaches the topic of mobility in Southeast Europe by offering the first detailed historical study of the land route connecting Istanbul with Belgrade. After this route that diagonally crosses Southeast Europe had been established in Roman times, it was as important for the Byzantines as the Ottomans to rule their Balkan territories. In the nineteenth century, the road was upgraded to a railroad and, most recently, to a motorway. The contributions in this volume focus on the period from the Middle Ages to the present day. They explore the various transformations of the route as well as its transformative role for the cities and regions along its course. This not only concerns the political function of the route to project the power of the successive empires. Also the historical actors such as merchants, travelling diplomats, Turkish guest workers or Middle Eastern refugees together with the various social, economic and cultural effects of their mobility are in the focus of attention. The overall aim is to gain a deeper understanding of Southeast Europe by foregrounding historical continuities and disruptions from a long-term perspective and by bringing into dialogue different national and regional approaches.

The ‘Greek genius’ appears as the combination of two stereotypes with a long pedigree: Homer’s ingenious Odysseus, triumphing with tricks over his foes, and Virgil’s ‘deceitful Odysseus’, the impostor Greek. Adamantios Korais, the leading scholar who almost single-handedly refashioned the Greek nation, fully appreciated the importance of Greek shipping and commerce, and the wealth they generated for the spread of Enlightenment ideas and the quest for political emancipation in the Greek lands. In this context, the ‘genius’ and the consequent economic success have long been considered the essential prerequisites for the spreading of Greek education and, ultimately, national revival. Reversely, Greek education and consciousness-building via economic success are taken as proof of the immanent ‘Greek genius’. As a popular myth of redemption, this stereotype persists in a country of rather limited resources and uncertain prospects. This volume seeks to identify both the content and the ways that the ‘Greek genius’ has long worked at the political, social and economic level. Based on a collective research project, it offers an original contribution to the broader discussion generated by the current Greek national bicentenary. This book will appeal to all those interested in the idea of the Greek 'national character’ as well as international perceptions of Greek culture, education, and society during the modern era.

Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

Wealth in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Balkans demonstrates the economic and social transformations wrought by wars, state centralization, European expansion and the gradual Ottoman withdrawal from the Balkans. As a new middle class emerged, and the power of religion faded, Ottoman and post-Ottoman social, economic and cultural norms changed rapidly across the region. This book illustrates not only how markers of wealth accumulation and poverty were socially defined across the region, but also the ways inequality was experienced, revealing the relationships between the state, economy, society, modernity in the context of Balkan, Ottoman and European development. Evguenia Davidova marshals a compendium of thirteen contributions wherein new archival data and various case studies frame a comparative social portrayal of the modern Balkans, offering new truths to the major discourses about nationalism, modernity, and the Ottoman legacy in the respective Balkan national historiographies.

The historiography of death, memory, and testamentary practices is already abundant in Western Europe and a fairly large number of extra-European regions. For East-Central Europe there are many short studies in various regional languages, mainly on anthropological/ethnographic aspects of the funeral rituals. This is an edited collection of studies by international scholars on the interlocking themes of attitudes and discourses on death, commemorative practices, and inheritance/testamentary strategies in the Balkans and East-Central Europe. These and other related themes are addressed comparatively and cover areas including Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and areas of the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria from the perspective of imperial – Ottoman and Habsburg – legacies. Pro refrigerio animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe contributes to this subject by: linking anthropological/religious/cultural approaches to death to the legal/economic aspects of inheritance/commemoration; adding a still absent East-Central European and Habsburg, Balkan, and Ottoman dimension to the study of death, memorialization, and testaments; and presenting an abundant primary and secondary material in English translation and thus placing research on death and testaments by East-Central and Greek scholars within the international scholarly circuit.