Stefano Petrungaro’s excellent new book Working at the Margins in Interwar Yugoslavia is a study of the peripheries of labor that gives us a direct lens into the core of interwar Yugoslavia’s evolving socioeconomic history. The work that state officials and middle-class leaders of civil society considered “somewhat weird” (ix) ultimately had a central role in defining Yugoslavia’s mainstream discourses, policies, and laws about labor. Not only that, but Petrungaro argues that people at the social margins had an active role in defining the parameters of collective health, morality, and modernity in interwar Yugoslavia. “So-called marginals,” he writes, “were not marginal at all but instead triggered many academic debates, parliamentary discussions, ministerial work, municipal and local strategies, and public and private initiatives” (xi).

Working at the Margins in Interwar Yugoslavia is divided into several chapters that examine people who had precarious social, economic, and legal status in Yugoslavia’s interwar society, including prostitutes, peddlers and itinerant performers, midwives and folk healers, beggars, and the jobless. Petrungaro classifies their work as “nonwork,” a category located between socially and legally recognized labor and crime. Nonwork was often unformalized, only partially recognized and tolerated, and perceived to be low on the social hierarchy. It attracted the attention of state authorities who responded to it with varying attempts at social disciplining and engineering via criminalization, repression, and pragmatic support. It also attracted the attention of the middle classes, including politicians, feminists, social reformers, and philanthropic groups, who saw it as a challenge to their visions of social order. The active engagement of Yugoslavia’s dominant classes with labor on the margins effectively made it central to interwar society. “By disciplining the borders of work,” Petrungaro explains, “Yugoslavia’s middle and political classes aimed at shaping a new society” (xi). Their vision of that new society was of course aligned with European trends and bourgeois values.

Yet, while Working at the Margins in Interwar Yugoslavia aptly examines how state and middle-class leaders attempted to manage work and nonwork, it also extends agency to the marginalized themselves. In doing so, Petrungaro takes the reader into the vibrant worlds that existed alongside the mainstream ones. He shows the nuances of these communities that created internal hierarchies and debates. He also shows how individuals negotiated with the state, opposed regulations, and participated in protests, compromises, and resistance. Aside from the chapter on prostitution, in which sex workers are primarily discussed by others, Petrungaro gives ample voice to the individuals who worked at the margins. We hear, for instance, from street performers, midwives, and peddler associations. This rich cacophony of voices from below adds an important lens into the multifaceted negotiation of the terms and status of labor in interwar Yugoslavia.

Another important contribution of Petrungaro’s book is the study of work across Yugoslav spaces. He focuses his study on three urban case studies—Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo—that highlight regional differences and the impact of postimperial legacies. The management of prostitution and welfare, for instance, varied in prewar Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as in the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro. Interwar Yugoslavia grappled with unifying many competing inheritances, and the perspectives on work on the margins was indeed one of them. Interestingly, Petrungaro shows that class concerns took priority but that they were at times also folded into ethno-national stereotypes, such as with concerns over “Bosnian syphilis” and the assumed backwardness of practices in former Ottoman spaces. Petrungaro effectively reminds us that the study of interwar Yugoslavia must include a much wider scope than just ethnic or national tensions. “Not only for the socially marginal people were the ethnonational distinctions not the priority in their everyday lives,” he writes, “but it seems that even the members of the middle and upper classes—otherwise involved in many ethnically driven conflicts—were prone to be aligned when it was about social engineering” (xxvi). Additionally, Working at the Margins in Interwar Yugoslavia takes a close look at the different practices of disciplining public as well as private places, and its focus on spaces like brothels, homes, streets, soup kitchens, and hostels for the jobless adds an important complexity to our understanding of interwar Yugoslavia.

Working at the Margins in Interwar Yugoslavia is a valuable addition to the study of interwar Europe, Yugoslavia, and labor history. It pushes forward the study of the Balkans as a veritable part of global history, showing that “Yugoslavia was actually modern when it came to the disciplining of social marginals and the efforts of shaping society made of good working citizens” (xx). Although the text is weighed down by repetitive signposting of the author’s focus and arguments that make the narrative somewhat clunky, Petrungaro offers us a dynamic depiction of the discourse between the state, civil society, and the people on the margins in interwar Yugoslavia. The book is a recommended text for students and scholars alike.