Introductory overview: premodern borders and modern controversies
PART I: The early modern Balkans as imperial borderlands
Overview: the Balkans divided between three empires
1. Ottoman Albania and Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs, sixteenth–eighteenth centuries
2. The Venetian- Ottoman borderland in Dalmatia
3. The Phanariot regime in the Romanian Principalities, 1711/ 1716–1821
4. Ottoman Bosnia and the Bosnian Muslims
PART II: Nation- and state- building, 1815–1914
Overview: nations and states between changing borders and the Great Powers in the “long” nineteenth century
5. Nineteenth- century national identities in the Balkans: evolution and contention
6. Bulgaria from liberation to independence, 1878–1908
7. Croatian political diversity and national development in the nineteenth century
8. Montenegro as an independent state, 1878–1912
9. The agrarian question in Romania, 1744–1921
10. Slovene clerical politics, cooperatives and the language question to 1914
11. Serbia’s promise and problems, 1903–1914
12. The Macedonian question: asked and answered, 1878–1913
13. Austria- Hungary and the Balkans
14. Bosnia- Herzegovina under Austria- Hungary: from occupation to assassination, 1878–1914
PART III: The Balkan Wars and the First World War, 1912–1923
Overview: armies and occ
upations, peace settlements and forced migrations
15. Bulgaria’s wars and defeats, 1912–1919
16. After empire: the First World War and the question of Albanian independence
17. Greece from national expansion to schism and catastrophe, 1912–1922
18. Habsburg South Slavs in peace and war, 1912–1918
19. From Salonica to Belgrade: the emergence of Yugoslavia, 1917–1921
PART IV: Southeastern European states and national politics, 1922–1939
Overview: the interwar decades from parliamentary struggles and international pressures to authoritarian regimes
20. Interwar ideas and images of nation, class, and gender
21. Interwar women’s movements from the Little Entente to nationalism
22. Interwar Greece: its generals, a republic, and the monarchy
23. Bulgaria from Stamboliiski and IMRO to Tsar Boris, 1919–1943
24. The legion “Archangel Michael” in Romania, 1927–1941
25. Albania between Fan Noli, King Zog, and Italian hegemony
26. The Croat Peasant Party: from Stjepan Radić to Vladko Maček
27. Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia from revolt and resettlement to repression
28. Yugoslav identity in the interwar period
PART V: Economies and societies, 1878–1939
Overview: challenges of change. Economic and population growth, social and cultural transformations up to World War II
29. Demographic growth: patterns and problems, 1878–1939
30. Financing economic growth and facing foreign debt, 1878–1939
31. Modern manufacture, state support, and foreign investment: comparing Balkan textile industries, 1878–1939
32. Neighbors into foreigners: the Greeks in Bulgaria, 1878–1941
33. Southeastern European overseas migration and return from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s
34. Eugenics and race in Southeastern Europe
35. Sofia and Plovdiv between the world wars
PART VI: From the Second World War to the establishment of the postwar regimes, 1939–1949
36. The Albanian Communist Party from prewar origins to wartime resistance and power
37. Romania in the Second World War
38. The Ustaša regime and the politics of terror in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945
39. Partisans and Chetniks in occupied Yugoslavia
40. An oppressive liberation: Yugoslavia 1944–1948
41. Greece from occupation and resistance to civil war, 1941–1949
PART VII: Cold War division and European transition, 1949–1989
Overview: communist regimes and the Greek exception
42. The collectivization of agriculture in Southeastern Europe
43. The Soviet factor in Bulgaria’s foreign policy
44. Enver Hoxha’s Albania: Yugoslav, Soviet, and Chinese relations and ruptures
45. Ceauşescu’s National Communism as National Stalinism
46. Yugoslavia’s third way: the rise and fall of self-management
47. Greece’s Cold War: exceptionalism in Southeastern Europe
48. Yugoslavia’s political endgame: Serbia and Slovenia in the 1980s
49. Changes of social structure from the late 1940s to the 1980s
50. Financing industrialization, 1949–1989: from foreign aid to foreign debt
PART VIII: Epilogue
Epilogue: Southeastern Europe after the Cold War
51. Yugoslavia’s wars of succession 1991–1999
52. From foreign intervention to European integration: Southeastern Europe since 1989

Disentangling a controversial history of turmoil and progress, this Handbook provides essential guidance through the complex past of a region that was previously known as the Balkans but is now better known as Southeastern Europe. It gathers 47 international scholars and researchers from the region. They stand back from the premodern claims and recent controversies stirred by the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Parts I and II explore shifting early modern divisions among three empires to the national movements and independent states that intruded with Great Power intervention on Ottoman and Habsburg territory in the nineteenth century. Part III traces a full decade of war centered on the First World War, with forced migrations rivalling the great loss of life. Part IV addresses the interwar promise and the later authoritarian politics of five newly independent states: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Separate attention is paid in Part V to the spread of European economic and social features that had begun in the nineteenth century. The Second World War again cost the region dearly in death and destruction and, as noted in Part VI, in interethnic violence. A final set of chapters in Part VII examines postwar and Cold War experiences that varied among the four Communist regimes as well as for non-Communist Greece. Lastly, a brief Epilogue takes the narrative past 1989 into the uncertainties that persist in Yugoslavia’s successor states and its neighbors. Providing fresh analysis from recent scholarship, the brief and accessible chapters of the Handbook address the general reader as well as students and scholars. For further study, each chapter includes a short list of selected readings. ( Source: WorldCat)