Contested Frontiers In The Balkans: Ottoman And Habsburg Rivalries In Eastern Europe Hardcover

Irina Marin

From the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia, Eastern Europe has been a battleground between the East and the West and a region of fluid frontiers. In Contested Frontiers in the Balkans Irina Marin follows the history of the Banat of Temesvar, a province situated on the edges of these competing empires and currently divided among Romania, Serbia and Hungary. The history of the Banat is, on a small scale, the history of Central and Eastern Europe as a whole - with its overlapping imperial rules, redrawing of boundaries, composite identities, Procrustean nation-states straddling multi-ethnic regions, the legacy of Communism and its vagaries, and the resuscitation of regionalism within the framework of the European Union. It is also the place where the Romanian Revolution of 1989 started which brought Ceau escu's Communist dictatorship to an end. The first history of its kind, this is an important study of Serbian and Romanian ethnicity, culture and influence explored through archival documents and a transnational historical approach, and provides new insights into the major empires of history and their relationship with the Balkan lands.

1780761058

9.78178E+12

English

I.B.Tauris And Co. Ltd.

12/11/2012

256

Irina Marin gained her PhD at the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies (SSEES) at University College London.

Few works analyse more clearly the multi-layered, multi-ethnic history of Central Europe than this penetrating study of the Banat. Not only does it offer a transnational history of this province, with a focus on the impact and legacy of successive types of imperial rule on a multi-ethnic borderland, but it proposes a different way of looking at the history of the region as a synthesis of converfing political and social influences, going beyond the narrow framework of national histories. Based on an impressive familiarity with a wide range of sources, Irina Marin's book represents a significant intellectual achievement.' Dennis Deletant, Visiting Ion Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC.