A Concise History of Bosnia

‘This book is primarily intended for readers who currently know little about the history of an incredible and diverse European country.’ Stated in the preface, this perspective gives the book an approachable and engaging tone, well suited for scholars just entering the academic field, giving them an unbiased and critical overview of Bosnia throughout the centuries. Its detailed and extensive account of individual and collective agents makes it a stimulating read also for senior academics or professionals coming from other disciplines. The book is part of the series of ‘Cambridge Concise Histories’, placing it in a specific place in terms of production, distribution, and reception, and defining it also as a publication written in a genre and language suited to a target reader who is less familiar with the geography and histories of the topic. In relation to this, an important feature of the book is the author’s writing style, in which she combines an essayistic design of thick description with a scholarly focus on precise detail necessary to shape a comprehensive image. This has the advantage of strengthening the outlines of the genre itself, as well as the proposed expectations of the readership. Furthermore, it allows colourful and vivid digressions focusing on detail, while reserving analysis and comparison as structural components for the chronological narrative.

The book is divided into an essayistic introduction, five chapters following a chronological framework from the Middle Ages to current events, and a conclusion. The author perceives the history of Bosnia as a long, multilateral process of economic, political, and cultural development. She writes from a combined perspective of social, political, and literary history, anthropology, architecture, technological development, and—when discussing Bosnia after 1945—even popular and youth culture, film, and music. The book is rich with maps, photos, and pictures, helping the reader to sense the topography and temporality of the topic. Furthermore, it uses a vast array of primary and secondary sources from academic publications through fictional literature, autobiographies, memoirs, films, popular music, and documentaries. With this immersion in the topic, Carmichael is able to achieve the widest possible scope not only for arguments stretching across local and regional agency of individuals but also for the position of Bosnia in relation to, and within the larger political entities of, the Ottoman Empire (1463-1912) and Habsburg Empire (1875-1918). Carmichael moreover covers Bosnia in the interwar period, the Second World War (1918-45), as a part of socialist Yugoslavia and lastly as an independent state—marking also the five major chapters of the publication.

Carmichael does not precisely delineate the borders of the polity and imagined community she uses as the basis for her analysis. It is indicative, however, that she chooses to use Bosnia (instead of Bosnia and Herzegovina) in the book title, and that she states that she ‘would have preferred simply to use the word ‘Bosnian’. This, however, proves to be justified later on, as the notion of the state and its population changes within chapters from the Middle Ages onwards. Carmichael yet uses these alterations of the form and substance of her object of analysis to emphasise the dominant perspective of foreign policies from Belgrade, Istanbul, Vienna, or Zagreb, as well as the positions of the Bosnian elites throughout the centuries. With this liquid approach, Carmichael establishes a transhistoric position beyond methodological nationalism, addressing the centres of power, ethnicities, religions, and state-building projects influencing Bosnia. Omitting essentialism, the concept of the state is thus based on a dynamic model, granting Carmichael a critical, multifaceted, and non-partisan perspective throughout the ages by allowing her not only to focus on differing viewpoints, symbols, national narratives, and mythologies but also to deconstruct a collective identity along the book. The term ‘Bosnia’ and its meanings develop into a permanent vehicle for the narrative, being more than a sum total of ethnic or political components, and serving, moreover, both as a topographic metaphor of continuity and as a thread that leads the reader through the text.

The book puts Bosnian society in a broader framework of Central Europe and the Balkans or, when dealing with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the specific context of Habsburg and Ottoman rule. This scope somewhat narrows when describing Bosnia’s role within Yugoslavia, but repeatedly expands with the independent state and its position in the system of international relations during the 1990s. This analytical focus on interrelatedness is, however, characteristic not only for the representation of Bosnia in a wider transnational context but also in describing interethnic ties within the region itself. The author’s perspective on complementary cohabitation is one of the most distinctive features of the publication, where ethnicities, historical regions, and political affiliations are perceived as an inner cohesive force for Bosnia. In comparison, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century arguments of partition and exclusion are identified as negative developments, going against and wrecking these autochthonous dynamics and continuities. With this reach beyond the agendas and retrospective reasoning of nationalism, Carmichael occupies a multicultural and interethnic position, focusing not only on the convergences, divergences, and similarities between Catholic Croats, Eastern Orthodox Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims but also on the impact of the Turkish, Hungarian, German, and Jewish populations. To give a nuanced account, Carmichael often points out the relevant aspects of the urban–rural divide, the effects of feudalism in the Middle Ages, and industrialization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the social conditions of modernization processes and traditional lifestyles. Furthermore, instead of adopting a purely descriptive approach of internal diversity, she often outlines the differences—nevertheless, not as antagonisms but as complementary features. Transgressions in language, religious practice, architecture, music, and the culture of everyday life are thus thoroughly explained and juxtaposed with the traditions of the neighbouring Dalmatian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Austrian, and Turkish cultures. By distinguishing these customs, and putting them into context by separation from and in relation to the neighbouring value systems, however, the author also avoids the uncritical essentializing and orientalizing so often encountered in both methodology and tone in the ever growing number of publications on the Balkans.