The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe is a remarkable history of Bosnia Herzegovina and its Muslim communities between 1878 and World War I. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular focuses on Ottoman continuities and legacies and responses of Muslim communities to life under Habsburg rule.

The book is grounded in extensive research in archives in Sarajevo and Istanbul and newspapers published in the late Ottoman and Habsburg empires. By drawing on a range of historical sources like petitions, periodicals, pamphlets, and scholarly treatises, Amzi-Erdoğdular demonstrates the richness and diversity of the Muslim experience under Habsburg rule. Muslim subjects sought to better their situation by writing petitions to Istanbul and Vienna, emigrating or threatening to emigrate, and advocating for their religious and civil rights. Amzi-Erdoğdular also convincingly shows that the Ottoman government gave up on restoring control over Bosnia Herzegovina shortly after 1878, even if its loss was acutely felt by many Ottoman subjects; after all, as one Ottoman judge noted, this core province “was Ottoman before Istanbul itself” (178). The Ottoman government skillfully used the ambiguity of the legal status of the occupied province to extend its influence in Sarajevo and Vienna.

Amzi-Erdoğdular adds a new trans-imperial dimension to the history of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina by foregrounding Ottoman and Bosnian Muslim perspectives. She demonstrates the extent of Ottoman presence in the lives of its former subjects and challenges the traditional view of 1878—towering over Balkan historiography—as a rupture. The book further contributes to the study of nationalism in the Balkans by interrogating the category of Muslimness and Muslim identity. Amzi-Erdoğdular shows that identifying as Muslims encompassed more than faith but also “cultural, historical, and regional features” (199). Muslimness became a tool to carve out spaces within the Habsburg imperial order and helped to define Bosnian Muslims’ relations with the Ottoman empire.

Amzi-Erdoğdular’s careful framework—focusing on how Bosnian Muslims “navigated their Habsburg and Ottoman loyalties” (3)—lends to a solid structure and a clear narrative. The book is divided into six chapters and an epilogue. Ch. 1 examines what led to the Habsburg occupation, and not outright annexation, of Bosnia Herzegovina in 1878. Because of its tenuous position within the Dual Monarchy, without belonging to either the Austrian or Hungarian parts, Bosnians’ rights were limited. Chs. 2 and 3 examine Bosnian Muslims’ emigration: during Habsburg rule, anywhere between 80,000 and 180,000 Bosnians left for the Ottoman empire (76). Amzi-Erdoğdular shows how contentious the debate over emigration was, within both Bosnia Herzegovina and the Ottoman empire. While many advocated the necessity of hijra (Muslim emigration), usually on religious grounds, others urged Bosnians to stay put because emigration would harm Bosnia Herzegovina’s Muslim community.

In the following chapters, Amzi-Erdoğdular tells a critically important history in the Balkans — how Bosnia Herzegovina preserved its pluralistic ethno-religious composition, especially its Muslim population under Habsburg rule. Ch. 4 investigates the Habsburg integration of Bosnia Herzegovina into the empire and Ottoman extraterritorial claims through the protection of Muslims. Ch. 5 explores Bosnian Muslims’ petitions to both the Ottomans and the Habsburgs and the making of the Islamic Community, a partially autonomous Habsburg institution that survives as an independent institution today. Ch. 6 examines the aftermath of the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina in 1908, capitalizing on Ottoman weakness after the Young Turk Revolution, and the first elections of the provincial assembly in 1910. Amzi-Erdoğdular finds that, while the Ottoman empire’s influence endured, especially the popular appeal of its regained constitutionalism, many Bosnian Muslims recognized that the Habsburg monarchy presented a better alternative than neighboring Slavic nation-states, which openly expelled, dispossessed, or massacred their native Muslims.

The epilogue recaps the entire period of Habsburg rule by exploring the idea of Muslim modernity, or “alternative Muslim modernities,” as imagined by several Bosnian Muslim intellectuals. Amzi-Erdoğdular compellingly situates post-Ottoman Bosnia Herzegovina within Islamic intellectual history, making the book an important contribution to scholarship on Muslim Europe and eastern Europe as part of the Muslim world.

The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe is a beautifully written, richly detailed, and complex history of Bosnian Muslims and their world-making between Istanbul and Vienna. It should be essential reading for historians of the late Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and anyone interested in histories of nation-making and empire in the Balkans.