The Balkans in World History
The Balkans in World History

Author: Andrew Baruch Wachtel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-11-05

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0199882738

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In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large as a somewhat frightening and ill-defined space, often seen negatively as a region of small and spiteful peoples, racked by racial and ethnic hatred, always ready to burst into violent conflict. The Balkans in World History re-defines this space in positive terms, taking as a starting point the cultural, historical, and social threads that allow us to see this region as a coherent if complex whole. Eminent historian Andrew Wachtel here depicts the Balkans as that borderland geographical space in which four of the world's greatest civilizations have overlapped in a sustained and meaningful way to produce a complex, dynamic, sometimes combustible, multi-layered local civilization. It is the space in which the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, of Byzantium, of Ottoman Turkey, and of Roman Catholic Europe met, clashed and sometimes combined. The history of the Balkans is thus a history of creative borrowing by local people of the various civilizations that have nominally conquered the region. Encompassing Bulgaria, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, and European Turkey, the Balkans have absorbed many voices and traditions, resulting in one of the most complex and interesting regions on earth.

Imagining the Balkans
Imagining the Balkans

Author: Maria Todorova

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-04-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0199889090

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"If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented" was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication, Europe. Over ten years ago, Maria Todorova traced the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belles-lettres in many languages, Imagining the Balkans explored the ontology of the Balkans from the sixteenth century to the present day, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is still being transmitted as discourse. Maria Todorova, who was raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject, and in a new afterword she reflects on recent developments in the study of the Balkans and political developments on the ground since the publication of Imagining the Balkans. The afterword explores the controversy over Todorova's coining of the term Balkanism. With this work, Todorova offers a timely, updated, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.

Imagining the Balkans
Imagining the Balkans

Author: Marii͡a Nikolaeva Todorova

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780195087512

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Starting in the 18th and 19th centuries and continuing up to the present, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years.

Endgame in the Balkans
Endgame in the Balkans

Author: Elizabeth Pond

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2007-08-29

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0815771614

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Can Europe tame the Balkans? That's the question veteran journalist Elizabeth Pond addresses in this timely and absorbing book. Starting with the wars of the Yugoslav succession, Endgame in the Balkans guides readers through the region's tumultuous recent history and explores both how the lure of European Union (EU) membership has affected the Balkans and how Balkan developments have shaped the EU. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, as well as decades of experience as a foreign correspondent, Pond moves deftly across the region, from Bulgaria to Romania, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia and Montenegro. She examines the many hurdles standing between these countries and EU membership—including poverty, corruption, and rabid chauvinism—as well as the hopes and problems that have led Balkan leaders to look to the West. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the challenges facing the region as it seeks to vault from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Already in its brief history, the European Union has forged a historic reconciliation between France and Germany and helped consolidate democracy in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. But in southeastern Europe, it faces one of its most difficult tasks yet. En dgame in the Balkans reveals the full extent of this challenge, as well as the grounds for hope. Rich in detail and penetrating analysis, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the future both of the region and of Europe as a whole.

The Rising Sun
The Rising Sun

Author: John Toland

Publisher: Modern Library

Published: 2014-11-26

Total Pages: 977

ISBN-13: 0804180954

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“[The Rising Sun] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”—Chicago Sun-Times This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.” In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” “Unbelievably rich . . . readable and exciting . . .The best parts of [Toland’s] book are not the battle scenes but the intimate view he gives of the highest reaches of Tokyo politics.”—Newsweek

Dystopian Depictions of Serbia in British Travel Literature
Dystopian Depictions of Serbia in British Travel Literature

Author: Dimitrios Kassis

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-11-03

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1527577058

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Without any doubt, one of the European regions that has never ceased to trouble the Westerner traveller is the Balkan Peninsula, which functioned as a terra incognita within the British travel canon, and served as the transit point to the Ottoman Empire or the Old Grecian world. At a time when Anglo-Saxonism occupied a prevalent position in British political discourse, the Balkan Peninsula came to epitomise all the negative qualities of the Orient that British travellers were anxious to apply to alien countries that were far removed from the nation-building agenda of the Empire. As such, classified as the fringe of the Orient, Serbia was persistently depicted as a politically unstable region, inhabited by primitive ethnic groups that could possibly threaten the viability of the British imperialist interests in European Turkey. In the light of the Serbian national struggle to promote the idea of a South-Slavic Union or forge an identity against the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, some British travellers undertook a journey to all the Balkan states where Serbians formed the majority of the population to demonise the War of Liberation of the Balkan states against the Ottoman yoke, treating it as visible evidence of Russian Expansionism. This book concentrates on dystopian British imagology of Serbia as a travel destination, including travel accounts produced from 1717 until 1911, a year prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The travel texts incorporated into this volume shed light on all the conceptualisations of the Balkans, addressing the sociopolitical conditions that sparked the national awakening of Serbia.

The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent
The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent

Author: Selçuk Esenbel

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13:

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Japanese perspectives of the Ottoman world / Selçuk Esenbel -- Ottoman Japanese relations in the late nineteenth century / Selim Deringil -- Japanese view of the Turks in the Meiji era, 1868-1912 / Shiraiwa Kazuhiko -- From Asianism to Pan-Turkism: the activities of Abdürreşid İbrahim in the Young Turk era and Japan / Nadir Özbek -- The first Japanese Hadji Yamaoka Kōtarō and Abdürreşid İbrahim / Sakamoto Tsutomu -- The question of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles during the Russo-Japanese War / Inaba Chiharu -- The Near East Trade Conference of 1926 / Ikei Masaru -- Inabata Katsutarō and non-governmental economic diplomacy between Japan and Turkey / Kimura Masato -- Ayaz İshaki and the Turco-Tatars in the Far East / Matsunaga Akira -- The Russians into the Mediterranean! Japan's proposals for a German-Soviet separate peace on Turkey's expense in 1943 / Gerhard Krebs -- Turkey's declaration of war on Japan at the end of the Second World War / Rona Aybay -- Municipal reforms in Japan and Turkey: the belediye system of the Tanzimat and municipal laws in Meiji Japan / Sahara Tetsuya -- A preliminary reading of Japan's paradigm crisis: implications for developing countries / İbrahim Öztürk.

Women in the Ottoman Balkans
Women in the Ottoman Balkans

Author: Amila Buturovic

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2007-09-26

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0857717987

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Women in the Ottoman Balkans were founders of pious endowments, organizers of labour and conspicuous consumers of western luxury goods; they were lovers, wives, castaways, divorcees, widows, the subjects of ballads and the narrators of folk tales, victims of communal oppression and protectors of their communities against supernatural forces. In their daily lives, they experienced oppression and self-denial in the face of frequently unsympathetic local customs, but also empowerment, self-affirmation, and acculturation. This volume not only deepens our understanding of the distinctive contributions that women have made to Balkan history but also re-evaluates this through a more inclusive and interdisciplinary analysis in which gender takes its place alongside other categories such as class, culture, religion, ethnicity and nationhood. This original and stimulating examination of the lives of Muslim, Christian and Jewish women in southeastern Europe during the centuries of Ottoman rule focuses especially on those social relations that crossed ethnic and confessional intercommunal boundaries.