This is an impressive book, complex and challenging, but also well-crafted, compellingly written, and extensively researched. It is probably the most important text to have been published on this subject in the English language. The reader is soon drawn into the polemical world of Bosnian identity and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although the approach taken by the author is not strictly chronological, there is certainly a sense of change and development. Starting in 1840, Edin Hajdarpašić looks at the Ottoman experience in Bosnia and Hercegovina and the role of significant and important as well as less well-known texts. Through careful selection, he captures the timbre of other languages through sensitive translation. In the introduction, entitled “Whose Bosnia?,” Hajdarpašić places his work with the existing historiography on nationalism. He introduces his concept of the “(br)other,” who has the potential to be both “brother” and “other” in order to discuss the difficulties of overcoming the confessional and historical divides between people who shared a single language. The book contains several marvelous illustrations, including copious newspapers and a front cover which features the Allegory of Bosnia and Hercegovina by the Czech Art Nouveau stylist Alphonse Mucha, who had designed the tapestry after a research visit to Bosnia in 1899. In 1900, at the Exposition Universelle, a huge world fair which also hosted the Olympic Games in Paris, each country financed a pavilion to showcase local art, and Mucha's beautiful piece aimed to represent the folklore and traditions of all the people.

In the first chapter Hajdarpašić considers the theme of the people by examining the writing of Vuk Karadžić in the context of the “discovery” of Hercegovina. Many contemporaries were spurred on by this “discovery” and wrote about or visited the region. The Croat Matija Mažuranić visited in 1839–40, publishing his account Pogled u Bosnu (Glance at Bosnia) a couple of years later. For him, his neighbours were near to his own culture and mode of speech, but also remote and different with their Turkish words and worldviews. In 1837, his contemporary Stefan Herkalović remembered “a special feeling came over me at the site of the Bosnian mountains, from where our forefathers came to the present place since the fifth or sixth century” (40).

Karadžić studied the language of “honest, hardy folk” and codified their culture through collecting poems and publishing a dictionary. He also made this region a central part of the nation, but these folk evidently also faced a challenge from their br/others. Ivan Mažuranić, brother of Matija, had crafted a literary image of Ottoman cruelty through poems such as the 1845 Smrt Smail age Čengića. The repetition of similar tropes in later literary works made it almost impossible to present the centuries of domination by the Ottomans in a positive light. From the early nineteenth century onwards, Bosnian and non-Bosnian writers contemplated the predicament of the raja, the poor and politically unrepresented people, the non-Muslims and poverty stricken Muslims in the countryside. Chapter 2 on “the land of suffering” develops the literary theme of “sad Bosnia” (tužna Bosna). As Hajdarpašić argues, “. . . Bosnia was also the land where impoverished Christian peasants suffered and called out to their brothers to take action against the Turks (and later the Austrians)” (98). Contemporaries compared their fate to that of American slaves, others to gender emancipation struggles. Hajdarpašić quotes Emmeline Pankhurst's 1913 speech about women's rights to reinforce a point about how widespread sympathy for oppressed peoples was: “You are full of sympathy with nations that rise against the domination of the Turk . . . How is it, then, that some of you have nothing but ridicule and contempt . . . for women who are fighting for exactly the same thing?” (55) Government (whether de jure or de facto) by the Habsburg Monarchy was presented by nationalists as a continuation of the Turkish yoke, but even more pervasive and threatening to the soul. For Mita Živković “the Turks killed the body, but the Austrians kill the soul” (79). This anti-Habsburg frustration was articulated by fictional characters such as David Štrbac in Petar Kočić’s hilarious but subversive Jazavac pred sudom (A Badger in the Courtroom), published in 1907. The previous year, Radovan Perović-Tunguz had presented Bosnia and Hercegovina as a “land of wailing” where the “foreigner” ruled everything: “. . . the forests in the hills, and the birds in the forests, . . . and the fish in the stream, and the ox and the plough, and the seed in the furrow, and the wheat in its ear, and the shepherd with his flock, and the flute in his mouth, and the wind in the caves . . .” (85-86).

“Nationalism and its Discontents” is the subject of Chapter 3, and broadly covers the 1870s and the transition from Ottoman to Habsburg rule. In Chapter 4, entitled “Year X, or 1914,” Hajdarpašić discusses the notion of heroism (junaštvo) and the growth of Mlada Bosna, which led to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in the fateful June of 1914 in Sarajevo. For contemporaries, heroic examples came not only from attempted assassinations of Habsburg officials (such as the bungled attempt to kill Governor Marijan Varešanin by the young student Bogdan Žerajić in 1910), but also from Serbia's participation in the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and the symbolic expulsion of the Turks from most of the Balkans. For modern youth poet Vladimir Čerina, Serbia's conquests in those wars “were a miracle for the whole world. An entire unseen and unheard of people was suddenly seen and heard, like some awesome announcement from heaven” (158). The chapter that follows, Chapter 5, provocatively entitled “Another Problem,” looks at Muslim identity formation with a particular focus on Benjamin von Kállay, Imperial Minister of Finance and Chief Secretary for Bosnia from 1882 until his death in 1903.

A real achievement of the book is its linking the pre- and post-Ottoman periods almost seamlessly. In this respect, the author's concentration on textual analyses really works well. One small curiosity for those interested in the events of the First World War is the fact that the main narrative of the book ends in 1914, when Habsburg rule itself only ended in 1918. Surely, the last four years were crucial and particularly damaging to the South Slav identity and national projects? This is a small quibble over what is undoubtedly a magnificent achievement. Hajdarpašić reintroduces familiar intellectuals and activists such as Ivo Andrić while moving easily to less well-known Habsburg, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian Muslim sources. He has resurrected voices that reflect the ardor, enthusiasms, and fluid identities of the era.