After a decade of concentration on the collapse of the Second Yugoslavia and western intervention, scholarly criticism has turned to the First Yugoslavia and its origins before and during WWI. Innovative new work has focused more broadly on western perceptions of southeastern Europe, starting with the condescending Balkanism identified by Maria Todorova and Larry Wolff. Samuel Foster's Introduction usefully reviews this literature. For Britain, he adds to Balkan backwardness a series of further perceptions about the Serbian and Yugoslav rural peasantry. His narrative is grounded in the new global history. Nationalist ideologies and national politics are downplayed as the province of urban elites. The western model of modernization is suspect. His search for transnational social change and cultural imagination leads to how a several-sided British image of peasants changed over time.

Foster explores peasant predominance first in a British-imagined Serbia from the pre-1914 decades, moving to what he calls the Anglo-British medical and military presence in WWI and then to interwar Yugoslavia. His eight chapters draw on the full range of recent western scholarship and selective choices from the region. He has mined the previously neglected private papers of the British men and women actually involved in events on the ground and also the collected papers of the two most renowned scholarly specialists, R. W. Seton Watson and Mary Edith Durham. He is however hard on both of them as “self-mythologizing” experts (142), harder on Seton Watson for his initial support of Belgrade's interwar regime than on Durham for championing Albania and Montenegro against Serbia. He looks to a wider range of sources to track the changing role of the rural peasantry in the British imagination.

The first two chapters move from the Victorian image of the Balkan peasant as an Ottoman victim, publicized by Prime Minster William Gladstone in 1878 as the Bulgarian Horrors, to British anxiety in the uncertain Edwardian era that followed the Boer War. Some reformers saw the model of Serbian peasant small holdings as a healthy alternative for an English working class trapped in urban poverty and burdened by physical deficiencies seen in army volunteers. The third chapter reports sympathy for the Serbian peasantry as victims in the tariff war with Austria-Hungary, 1906–11. Passing over British reaction to the Serbian King's assassination in 1903, Foster confines the public and press stereotype of endemic Balkan violence to Ottoman Macedonia.

The next three chapters convincingly cover the high point of Serbia's reputation during WWI. Blaming the Balkan Wars on urban officials and military elites, Foster moves quickly to detail the renewed British sympathy for Serbia as a wartime ally. The large number of female volunteer nurses, the sestre, working in Serbia to 1915 and again at the Salonika Front from 1917 were widely reported to a public united in an Anglo-British war effort, the Irish question temporarily set aside. The heroic survival and later advance of Serbia's peasant soldiers set the stage for postwar hopes from Seton Watson and public opinion that a set of South Slav peasants could be combined into a single Yugoslavia.

Two final chapters address the 1920s and the 1930s. We see the settlement with the Irish Free State in 1922 turning British opinion inward, feeding public indifference to Yugoslavia. The high hopes that Seton Watson and The New Europe journal held for supporting the new state went unnoticed. Foster notes renewed rural nostalgia to relieve British urban crowding and poverty with village resettlement but cites no interest in a Yugoslav model (121). The British public was caught up instead in the “spread of consumerism as standard social practice” (126). Opinion on Yugoslavia was left to a Foreign Office that initially approved of King Aleksandar's royal dictatorship in 1929 as ending parliamentary chaos. The last chapter pays little attention to rising criticism of the dictatorship from Seton Watson and others, noting Aleksandar's assassination in 1934 only in passing. Foster focuses instead on the rise of large middle-class tourism to the Dalmatian coast. From their upscale hotels, they often toured the inland villages, receiving images of past peasant traditions only as consumers already settled in the suburban sprawl surrounding London and other British cities. Foster places Rebecca West's pro-Serbian travels, recorded from the late 1930s in her popular 1941 book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in the same condescending category of peasant tourism. Foregrounding the peasantry in the British imagination of Yugoslavia, his dismissal of Seton Watson and West aside, remains a valuable addition to our understanding of how cultural perceptions change over time.