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Three powerful empires - the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian - spent the 18th and the first third of the 19th centuries fighting each other for power and influence in the Balkans. This is not, however, the only significant aspect of the complicated history of the European Southeast. The intellectual and economic currents that turned the 18th century into a key event in human civilisation were refracted through the prism of Balkan regionalism. The 130 years between Karlowitz and Adrianople were able to steer the Southeast back onto the rails of a "Common European History". The volume contains the proceedings of an international conference hosted by the Sofia University Faculty of History in October 2009.
The 'Balkan space' in the 19th century fell into a zone of limited modernization, which led to an unbalanced economic development. Therefore, the complexity of the circumstances requires research into the process by putting it into a European-wide and Balkan-regional context. International scholars have seen the 19th-century Bulgarian economy as a local phenomenon resulting in very few extensive and detailed works. Accordingly, the editors hope the present study volume will contribute to filling that gap. The case study of the broad and diverse network of people and ventures of the brothers Evlogi and Hristo Georgievi took the 'central stage' of the book as an illustration of the evolution of the Bulgarian society and elite in the 19th century.
Social Networking in South-Eastern Europe in the 15th19th centuries exhibits specific characteristics: the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, for example, each have their pattern of building and using social networks, with the Third South-Eastern Europe, i.e., the vassal principalities in the Balkans and the re-created national states, staying closer in the Ottoman pattern. It seems that the Muslim-Oriental social traditions established in the Balkans during Ottoman rule had a clear impact on the building of networks and the exercising of social influence. The specific regional practices, once established, were very hard to overcome or to replace by other patterns of social networking. Th...
Recent research has demonstrated that early modern slavery was much more widespread than the traditional concentration on plantation slavery in the context of European colonial expansion would suggest. Slavery and slave trading, though little researched, were common across wide stretches of Eurasia, and a slave economy played a vital part in the political and cultural contacts between Russia and its Eurasian neighbours. This volume concentrates on captivity, slavery, ransom and abolition in the vicinity of the Eurasian steppe from the early modern period to recent developments and explores their legacy and relevance down to the modern times. The contributions centre on the Russian Empire, wh...
The seventeenth-century French diplomat François de Callières once wrote that "an ambassador resembles in some way an actor exposed on the stage to the eyes of the public in order to play great roles." The comparison of the diplomat to an actor became commonplace as the practice of diplomacy took hold in early modern Europe. More than an abstract metaphor, it reflected the rich culture of spectacular entertainment that was a backdrop to emissaries' day-to-day lives. Royal courts routinely honored visiting diplomats or celebrated treaty negotiations by staging grandiose performances incorporating dance, music, theater, poetry, and pageantry. These entertainments—allegorical ballets, masqu...
When the scientific study of the Black Sea Region began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, initially commissioned by adjacent powers such as the Habsburg and the Russian empires, this terra incognita was not yet considered part of Europe. The eighteen chapters of this volume show a broad range of thematic foci and theoretical approaches - the result of the enormous richness of the European macrocosm and the BSR. The microcosms of the many different case studies under scrutiny, however, demonstrate the historical dimension of exchange between the allegedly opposite poles of `East' and `West' and underscore the importance of mutual influences in the development of Europe and the BSR.
Controversial scholarly debates around the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire in the last century are not only rooted in the scarcity or heterogeneity of sources, but also in the mentalities and ideologies that canonised thought paradigms. This book uses an interdisciplinary approach at the interface between Ottoman, Byzantine, Mediterranean and Southeast European studies. Unusual sources such as Western Anatolian numismatics and predominantly European documents met innovative methods from the study of violence and power networks. Making a case study around the military aḳıncı institution, the author re-evaluates the emergence of the Ottoman polity in dealing with various warlords and across multiple identities and political affiliations.
The authoritative account of Islam's schism that for centuries has shaped events in the Middle East and the Islamic world. In 632, soon after the Prophet Muhammad died, a struggle broke out among his followers as to who would succeed him. Most Muslims argued that the leader of Islam should be elected by the community's elite and rule as Caliph. They would later become the Sunnis. Others—who would become known as the Shia—believed that Muhammad had designated his cousin and son-in-law Ali as his successor, and that henceforth Ali's offspring should lead as Imams. This dispute over who should guide Muslims, the Caliph or the Imam, marks the origin of the Sunni-Shii split in Islam. Toby Mat...
The father of the legendary Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, Selim I ("The Grim") set the stage for centuries of Ottoman supremacy by doubling the size of the empire. Conquering Eastern Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt, Selim promoted a politicized Sunni Ottoman* identity against the Shiite Safavids of Iran, thus shaping the early modern Middle East. Analyzing a wide array of sources in Ottoman-Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, H. Erdem Cipa offers a fascinating revisionist reading of Selim's rise to power and the subsequent reworking and mythologizing of his persona in 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman historiography. In death, Selim continued to serve the empire, becoming represented in ways that reinforced an idealized image of Muslim sovereignty in the early modern Eurasian world.
The Treaties of Carlowitz (1699) includes recent studies on the Lega Sacra War of 1683-1699 against the Ottoman Empire, the Peace treaties of Carlowitz (1699), and on the general impact of the conflict upon Modern Europe and the Balkans. With its contributions written by well-known international specialists in the field, the volume demonstrates that sometimes important conflicts tend to be forgotten with time, overshadowed by more spectacular wars, peace congresses or diplomatic alliances. The “Long War” of 1683-1699 is a case in point. By re-thinking and re-writing the history of the conflict and the subsequent peacemaking between a Christian alliance and the Ottoman state at the end of the 17th century, new perspectives, stretching into the present era, for the history of Europe, the Balkans and the Near East are brought into discussion. Contributors are: Tatjana Bazarova, Maurits van den Boogert, John Paul Ghobrial, Abdullah Güllüoğlu, Zoltan Györe, Colin Heywood, Lothar Höbelt, Erica Ianiro, Charles Ingrao, Dzheni Ivanova, Kirill Kochegarov, Dariusz Kołodziejzcyk, Hans Georg Majer, Ivan Parvev, Arno Strohmeier.