Inspired by Italian and German unification movements and Polish plans for a Europe of free, smaller nations, pan-Serb and pan-South Slav unification ideas emerged in the 1830s and 1840s. They gained a new momentum in the 1860s under the leadership of Prince Mihailo Obrenović, whose reign saw the departure of the last Ottoman troops in 1867. Formally independent following the Eastern Crisis of 1875-1878, Serbia became Austria-Hungarys satelite. The first modern political parties, socialist-inspired, pro-Russian Radicals, and Liberals, formed. A violent overthrow of dynasty in 1903 saw the return of a Karadjordjević monarch and coincided with important political developments in the Balkans, including a greater collaboration between Serbia and Habsburg South Slavs. The 1912-1913 Balkan Wars practically ended the Ottoman rule in Europe. Serbia doubled-up its territory, albeit by incorporating mostly non-Serb populated regions which had once been part of medieval Serbia. The 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of the Habsburg heir by a Serb and Yugoslav radical youth from Bosnia led to Austria-Hungarys declaration of war against Serbia, and to the beginning of the First World War.

This chapter provides a brief account of the history of Serbian war poetry, written during the First World War and in the interwar period. By examining its relationship to different geopolitical constellations (Serbian, Balkan, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav) and literary contexts (the revival of war poetry during the Balkan wars, the poetry of pre- and post-war Modernism), it tries to show how Serbian war poetry was shaped by the dominant poetic idiom and by the collective and public representations of the First World War. Although selective, this account will essentially highlight the turning points in the history of Serbian poetry, where the possibilities and limits of expression were expanded or challenged in contact with a subject matter as unprecedented as the First World War.

This chapter narrates the downfall and eventual replacement of the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean port city order. While the Italo-Turkish War foreshadowed the events to come, the following war years predominantly devasted the hinterland. Port city society found its penultimate blow in the Smyrna Catastrophe and the Holocaust in Salonica. In all port cities, however, the introduction of a nation-state order was initially declared but far from reality. Only decades of urban socioengineering and education of subsequent generations managed to install the change.

This chapter explores the genocidal intersection between political history and ethnographic geography in European or near-European regions where the traditional continental empires met the emerging hegemony of Western nation-states. In particular it considers how and why the introduction of nationalism proved toxic in these multicultural ‘rimlands’, with Macedonia and Thrace as illustrative examples. Here the wartime shattering of empires (1912-1948) and their succession by fiercely nationalist competitors resulted in repeated spasms of extreme zero-sum violence whose key outcome was the ‘unmixing of peoples’ by mass deportation, and/or annihilation.

This chapter analyzes the colonial reforms of Bernhard Dernburg that culminated in the founding of the Hamburg Colonial Institute in 1908, to which Karl Rathgen was appointed. It also explores the disappointments with tropical colonies drawn from the surveys spearheaded by Max Sering, the observations of Hermann Schumacher in Southeast Asia in 1911, and Karl Rathgen’s travels in the American south and Caribbean in 1913. Dernburg successfully pushed investments in railways to better connect the German colonies to the German and world economy, and he set strict limits on white settlers. Even so, ambitions for a German temperate zone settler colony never quite died, even as it would prove elusive. The German colonial gaze did shift eastward to the Russian Empire in these years, which Sering and Schumacher visited in 1912 to inspect “inner colonization” in the Ukraine. They returned impressed with what they saw and committed to improving Russo-German relations, but better relations were increasingly hostage to Foreign Office prejudices and the Balkan rivalries of Austria and Russia.