The Balkans in World History Hardcover

Andrew Baruch Wachtel

In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large as a somewhat frightening but ill-defined space. Most attempts at definition focus on geography (the actual mountain range that gives the area its name and the lands surrounding it) or, more recently, on the set of prejudices attached to the term by local and outside observers. There has been far less concern with attempting to define this space in positive terms, taking as a starting point not geography as such but rather the cultural, historical, and social threads that could allow us to see what might be merely contiguous places as a coherent, though complex, whole. The goal of this volume is to do precisely that. The Balkans should probably be defined as that borderland geographical space in

English

Oxford University Press, USA