The six excellent chapters of this slim volume can each adorn academic journals as separate articles within diverse thematic frameworks beyond the region. What brings them together is that they were part of workshop initiatives between 2011 and 2014 at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna to “consider politics rather than discourse, and actors in the Balkans as forward-looking agents rather than as subjects of retrospective discussions” (2). The decoupling of politics and discourse is questionable as most of the chapters deal with the discursive side of politics, but giving agency to Balkan players is laudable and has been altogether successful.

The attractiveness of the chapters stems chiefly from the fact that most are the fruit of completed or ongoing large monographic projects and not simply ad hoc papers. Dessislava Lilova's superb contribution is the result of long-term engagement with the Bulgarian press, publications, and educational system during the so-called Revival period. What transpires is an idiosyncratic twist in nation-building through education that stands out from the overall European model by not privileging history in school curricula. The reason was competition with Greece, which had an edge in utilizing ancient history as territorial argument. Instead, the Bulgarians harnessed the symbolic value of geography and demography as a political tool, and the prioritization of geography was decisive from the 1830s. While the territories inhabited by Bulgarians was presented as an indelible part of Europe, it is interesting that an early anticipation of a quasicolonial positionality vis-à-vis Europe had emerged by the mid-1870s. Similarly, Ulf Brunnbauer's chapter summarizes aspects of his pioneering book Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late Nineteenth Century (Lanham, 2016). The work upends the usual privileging of immigration by using the politics of emigration as a lens for analyzing how elites conceptualized the state. While the promotion of immigration and the restriction of emigration is a natural strategy of the territorializing state, Brunnbauer shows the differential attitude of Balkan elites based on their distinct historical record and different understandings of nationhood, whereby the Greeks stood out as conceiving their nation as diasporic (or global). The modern state adapted very quickly to the social realities of population movements and managed to fuse its territorializing impulse to its transnational reach in accommodating the imagined national community. An economic historian and veteran researcher of Austrian-Balkan relations, Roumiana Preshlenova's contribution concentrates on the relative place of political economy in the Bulgarian national project. Considering the educational structure and writings of the political elite within the specific political conjuncture after 1878, when autonomous Bulgaria inherited restrictive provisions from the Ottoman Empire, she convincingly demonstrates that economic concerns gave way to the urge for complete sovereignty and passionate irredentist yearnings. Only in the first decade of the twentieth century did the economy become the center of national development, and yet Bulgaria, like the other Balkan countries, continued to allocate a disproportionate amount of its budget to military purposes. It is useful, however, to compare this with the overall militarization in Europe at the time. These three chapters constitute the “European” contribution to the volume, and they have a distinct historiographical flavor of deep research and careful conclusions.

By contrast, the chapters by U.K. and U.S. authors are characterized by the desire to reach overarching frameworks and daring models. Here, politics is approached using different scales. On the one end, Holly Case—who is boldly reconsidering international affairs, most recently with The Age of Questions (Princeton, 2018)—takes on the reconfiguration of the consular system and its move from strictly economic issues to social policy and the ethnicization of its activities and cadres, especially in the Ottoman Empire, a move she calls “the quiet revolution.” It is a thesis to be debated but one certainly deserving attention, not least because of its ambitious pan-European depiction. Luckily, it does not share the conclusion of the editor that “the Balkan nation-states can themselves be seen as the product of this consular revolution” (5). On the other end, the two case studies of Dominique Reill shed charming light on mid-century Dalmatian elites. Adopting the Algerian Solution in their quest for reciprocity with the Viennese metropole should look less shocking, as the Algerian reciprocal trade agreement was initiated by the ethnically French colonists/citizens—with the obvious analog being the former American colonies vis-à-vis Britain, not India and other overseas colonies. One would have liked to hear more about the technical side of Pangrafia and the reasons why it was not embraced, given the dozens of similar artificial language projects in this era. It is no surprise that peripheral elites can think macro and globally; it is also no surprise that their visions are not implemented. The primacy of the military may have reached its culmination in Serbia with the contribution of John Paul Newman, a historian of Yugoslavia who focuses on war and violence. Newman punctures the historiographical myth of a democratic Golden Age (1903‒14) by highlighting the deep-seated rivalries between the military and civilian institutions. Aiming “to keep Serbia and the Balkans at the heart of the story of the origins of the First World War” (140) and painting a longue durée continuity of militarism from 1804, he approaches a rigid determinism but still shies away from the explicitly causal assertion of the introduction that “when in 1914, Serbia turned against the Habsburgs, all of Europe went to war” (2). It was the Habsburgs who turned against Serbia, as Newman shows (152), and casus belli is not cause.

Which brings us to the framing of the volume by the editor Timothy. It might seem petty to point out that Montenegro—and not Macedonia, as the editor claims—was made part of the Balkan League in 1912 (7), but imprecision and carelessness pose doubts about overgeneralizing expertise. Positioning the Balkans at the center of observation and focusing on agency is welcome, but it should not license a distorted vision and forgetting about power asymmetries. An imagined primacy and “forwardness” (the posited invention of the nation-state and anticolonialism) is a weak antidote to “backwardness.”