Insurrections Wars And The Eastern Crisis In The 1870s

In a new interpretation of the history of the Balkans during the Second World War, Alfred J. Rieber explores the tangled political rivalries, cultural clashes, and armed conflicts among the great powers and the indigenous people competing for influence and domination. The study takes an original approach to the region based on the geography, social conditions, and imperial rivalries that spans several centuries, culminating in three wars during the first half of the twentieth century. Against this background, Rieber focuses on leadership - personified by Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Tito - as the key to explaining events. For each one the Balkans represented a strategic prize vital for the fulfilment of their ambitious war aims. For the local forces the destabilization of the war offered the opportunity to reorder societies, expel ethnic minorities, and expand national borders. Storms over the Balkans during the Second World War illustrates how the leaders of the external powers were forced to improvise their tactics and compromise their ideologies under the pressure of war and the competing claims of their allies and clients. Neither the Axis nor the Allied camps were uniform blocs, and deep divisions ran through the ranks of the resistance and those collaborating with the occupying powers. These tensions contributed to the failure of all the participants in the struggle to achieve their aims. The complexities of the wartime experiences help to explain the persistence of memories and unfulfilled aspirations that continue to haunt the region. The study is based on extensive research in new sources in seven languages.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Now in its second edition, Bourgeois Europe, 1850–1914 is a general history of Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War, a successor to Revolutionary Europe: 1780–1850, also available from Routledge. The book offers wide geographic coverage of the European continent, from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Urals. Topical coverage is equally broad, including major trends and events in international relations and domestic politics, in social and gender structures, in the economy, and in the natural and social sciences, the humanities, religion and the arts. For this second edition, the text has been completely revised, the latest directions in historical research considered, the further reading brought up to date and special attention has been paid to Europe’s global interactions with the rest of the world and the structures and norms of gender relations. Tables, charts, maps and other explanatory features help students explore further in the areas that interest them. Written in sprightly, jargon-free clear prose, the book is ideal for use as a text in secondary school or university courses, as well as for general readers wishing to gain an overview of a crucial era of modern European history.

From the bestselling author of McMafia and DarkMarket comes this unique and lively history of Balkan geopolitics since the early nineteenth century which gives readers the essential historical background to more than one hundred years of events in this war-torn area. No other book covers the entire region, or offers such profound insights into the roots of Balkan violence, or explains so vividly the origins of modern Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Now updated to include the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, the capture of all indicted war criminals from the Yugoslav wars and each state's quest for legitimacy in the European Union, The Balkans explores the often catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and the Great Powers, raising some disturbing questions about Western intervention.

This innovative survey of European history from the middle of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War tells the story of an era of outward tranquillity that was also a period of economic growth, social transformation, political contention and scientific, and artistic innovation. During these years, the foundations of our present urban-industrial society were laid, the five Great Powers vied in peaceful and violent fashion for dominance in Europe and throughout the world, and the darker forces that were to dominate the twentieth century – violent nationalism, totalitarianism, racism, ethnic cleansing – began to make themselves felt. Jonathan Sperber sets out developments in this period across the entire European continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. To help students of European history grasp the main dynamics of the period, he divides the book into three overlapping sections covering the periods from 1850-75, 1871-95 and 1890-1914. In each period he identifies developments and tendencies that were common in varying degrees to the whole of Europe, while also pointing the unique qualities of specific regions and individual countries. Throughout, his argument is supported by illustrative material: tables, charts, case studies and other explanatory features, and there is a detailed bibliography to help students to explore further in those areas that interest them.

Nineteenth-century Serbia was an economically and socially backward country with an urban population of approximately 3 percent and a literacy rate in the countryside of less than 10 percent. Still, during that century it created a functioning democracy with a constitution, independent courts, political parties, and civil liberties. The Serbian experience challenges the view that political structures fundamentally depend on socioeconomic ones, since Serbia created a modern political system without developing economically. Politics as Development analyzes one aspect of that process, the emergence of political parties in the 1870s and the 1880s, especially the creation of the Serbian Radical Party under the leadership of Nikola Pasic. By mobilizing the peasantry through organizing the countryside, the Radicals proved themselves the most original nineteenth-century Balkan political movement. Based on thorough research of primary documents, Stokes's study supports the view that the state and its attending class constitute an independent variable in the developmental process.