Cities of Dust and Mud vividly documents the modernization of two Balkan cities—Belgrade and Sofia—from the mid-nineteenth century into the interwar period. Jovanović centers on modernization's darker aspects, arguing that in the Balkans it represented a “bourgeois fantasy,” incompatible with material reality and causing painful social consequences for the nonelite residents of those cities. Jovanović applies the term “bourgeois fantasy” partly as a psychoanalytic concept, referring to the often-implausible visions of urban designers and managers who believed they could remake cities and control their inhabitants. In addition, however, he situates “bourgeois fantasy” within a Marxist context, arguing that the commodity exchange which defines capitalism is itself “fantastical.” (8) Jovanović then sets out to show just how fantastical these visions were by focusing on two cities that exposed the grim reality of life for nonelites in contrast to the psychological and capitalist fantasies of the urban middle classes. Indeed, the book's title, Cities of Dust and Mud, vividly represents how utterly dismal the urban fantasy of the bourgeoisie looked and felt to local residents, who frequently used those exact words to describe their daily lives.

Placing his argument on urbanization and bourgeois fantasy in the framework of global capitalism, Jovanović focuses on differences between the visibility of capitalism's social costs among regions rather than its reality. Capitalists in the global northwest, he explains, created surplus value/profit from labor, working with raw materials in factories, ideally without the need for open or state-sponsored violence at home. To the extent that they relied on coercion and violence to secure raw materials and labor, they did so in colonial regions, far from the view of their local constituents. In contrast, cities like Belgrade and Sofia, lacking urban labor, were forced to rely heavily on such “extracapitalist accumulation” at home, dispossessing local farmers of their land and driving them into the urban working classes, while also using unpaid reproductive and prison labor. Accordingly, the modernization that bourgeois elites imagined as a panacea for all ills came at the harsh and highly visible price of dispossession and violent state coercion among the local population.

Jovanović divides his book into three sections labeled “Space,” “People,” and “Time”. “Space” describes the chronological process of urbanization in each city. Chapter One covers the urbanization of Belgrade, first sparked by ethnic conflict in 1862, but more deeply rooted, according to Jovanović, in long-term struggles over space and urban control. Nonetheless, the process had catastrophic consequences for the deported Muslim population along with other minorities and migrant urban poor who were dispossessed, subject to forced labor, and ethnic manipulation. Yet, bourgeois fantasies for modernization remained just that since investment from abroad was insufficient, leaving the city “stuck in the mire of stagnation.” (50) Sofia’s urbanization, addressed in Chapter Two, seemingly had greater success or at least better timing as it conveniently followed close behind the 1873 crash of the Vienna Stock Exchange. European investors were thus free to seek other opportunities, and many soon arrived in Sofia, leading it to be dubbed the “Balkan Brussels”. Sofia indeed experienced enormously rapid growth accompanied, however, by the equally rapid growth of corruption. Jovanović provides fascinating examples detailing exactly how this corruption operated on a daily basis, who it benefited (political elites, financiers, and merchants), and who paid the price (taxpayers and poor urban residents). “In Sofia, brutal speculation and corruption shed a dimmer light on the magnitude of modernity. There the old had been destroyed to make way for dust.” (76)

Section Two—“People”—explains how particular groups among the nonelite population both contributed to and were affected by the bourgeois fantasies of urbanization. In Chapter Three, Jovanović describes two such fantasies regarding women. The first involved the creation of modern masculinity and commercialized erotic entertainment, while the second required regulatory control over sex workers. Noting that both fantasies degraded the lives of nonelite urban women, Jovanović argues that the elite control remained largely illusory. In Chapter Four, Jovanović turns to the efforts of the bourgeoisie to create scientific policing and prisons in response to the closer contact between the lower and upper classes in more modern cities. Just as the bourgeoisie dreamed of skillfully managing their factories, households, and prostitutes, they believed they could create model citizens out of ne'er-do-wells and prisoners by adopting the technology and methods of their northwestern counterparts like Sherlock Holmes and Alphonse Bertillon. Yet just as the women of Belgrade and Sofia often evaded medical and managerial attempts at control, so did the criminals, and ongoing corruption and incompetence meant that “the foundations of the carceral city were made of dust.” (137) Jovanović again provides strong evidence of both incompetence and corruption, yet it seems likely that the differences between how capitalism operated in northwestern cities and the Balkans was less meaningful regarding how most humans responded to bourgeois fantasies. Several previous scholars have also argued that women in other times and places could not be removed from the public sphere or their actions in it easily controlled. Nor were elite attempts to create model prisoners through racial measurements seen to be effective in more developed societies.

Section Three—“Time”—looks both backward to the past, envisioning what was lost in the process of urbanization, and forward to the present, drawing connections to current forms of modernization. Chapter Six introduces images of the two cities, focusing mainly on how residents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remembered and reflected on their Ottoman past. The section includes a beautiful collection of watercolors, photographs, and sketches that chronicle a disappearing imperial world, ruins reflecting displacement and loss, some nostalgia, but also the recognition of decay and urban poverty. According to Jovanović, these multiple visions did not so much represent a longing for the past as “a gesture of emancipatory fantasy that emphasized loss to liberate the present.” (165) Finally, Chapter Seven serves as an epilogue, inviting readers to consider analogies between past and present forms of modernization. While acknowledging important differences, Jovanović draws credible connections to postsocialist cities that are shifting accumulation to the extracapitalist sphere in new and old ways as they apply police state methods and criminalize nonelite and migrant populations. Moreover, just as the nostalgia expressed in the paintings and photographs of Ottoman cities did not represent a desire to return to the past, Jovanović argues that current expressions of nostalgia for Yugoslavia or socialism do not indicate true longing for those realities but mere disappointment with the failures of bourgeois fantasies.

Despite its occasionally abstruse Marxist analysis, Jovanović has written a surprisingly readable and valuable book that greatly expands our knowledge and understanding of this important and understudied topic. His use and knowledge of the available primary and secondary sources in Balkan history is exemplary. The work might, however, have benefited from additional discussion of exactly how capitalism really did function in those northwestern capitalist countries from which he claims distinction. Regardless, the work stands on its own as a source for understanding the process and social consequences of Balkan urbanization and an intriguing critique of capitalist modernization, past and present.