Balkan Transitions to Modernity and Nation-States PDF Download

Author: Evguenia Davidova
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004236414
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Drawing upon previously unpublished commercial ledgers and correspondence, this study offers a collective social biography of three generations of Balkan merchants.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.

Author: Evguenia Davidova
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004236635
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
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.

Author: ????? ????????
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639241831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
"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

Author: Dimitris Stamatopoulos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755603273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
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

Author: Mark Biondich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199299056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
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.

Author: Florian Riedler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110618567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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.

Author: Basil C. Gounaris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000683923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
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.

Author: Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900435509X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
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.

Author: Evguenia Davidova
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857726056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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.

Author: Diana Mishkova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351236369
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
In recent years, western discourse about the Balkans, or “balkanism,” has risen in prominence. Characteristically, this strand of research sidelines the academic input in the production of western representations and Balkan self-understanding. Looking at the Balkans from the vantage point of “balkanism” has therefore contributed to its further marginalization as an object of research and the evisceration of its agency. This book reverses the perspective and looks at the Balkans primarily inside-out, from within the Balkans towards its “self” and the outside world, where the west is important but not the sole referent. The book unravels attempts at regional identity-building and construction of regional discourses across various generations and academic subcultures, with the aim of reconstructing the conceptualizations of the Balkans that have emerged from academically embedded discursive practices and political usages. It thus seeks to reinstate the subjectivity of “the Balkans” and the responsibility of the Balkan intellectual elites for the concept and the images it conveys. The book then looks beyond the Balkans, inviting us to rethink the relationship between national and transnational (self-)representation and the communication between local and exogenous – Western, Central and Eastern European – concepts and definitions more generally. It thus contributes to the ongoing debates related to the creation of space and historical regions, which feed into rethinking the premises of the “new area studies.” Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making will interest researchers and students of transnationalism, politics, historical geography, border and area studies.