Disrupting and Reshaping

The papers collected in this book discuss and compare four cases of transition from the Ottoman imperial regime to the nation-state polity and legitimacy (Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey) in the Balkans between XIX and XX century.

The authors are European historians of different school, age and provenance (from West to East: Edinburgh, Turin, Trieste, Belgrade, Sofia, Athens, Ankara). Among the topics they approach in these pages, the reader will find: wars and "disorder", as a prologue to disruption of Ottoman authority and eventual secession; traditional political culture and new political elites; agrarian conditions, modernising policies and peasant sepa-rateness; legitimising ideologies and conflicting political loyalties in the new nation-states.
 
Political upheaval and subsequent state-centered activities and trends (constitutionalism, history writing, enlarged enfranchisement...), rather than ethno-cultural heritages, are here proposed as relevant factors in the shaping of national identities.