Transforming Southeast Europe During the Long 19th Century

The volume offers a new perspective towards the transformation of Southeast Europe through the lens of persons and personalities as agents of modernization. Exploring the experience of modernity through the lens of the personal allows for approaching transformation as a result of a specific conjuncture of ideas, influences, and beliefs. The book chapters address topics as diverse as political and institutional development, social and cultural transformations, economic and legal changes, and technological innovations in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Balkans. By doing so, the collection approaches the advent of modernity in Southeast Europe from various and even contrasting standpoints, highlighting the multiplicity of actors as well as the entanglement and interconnectedness of topics, arenas and scales of the modernization process.

Boriana Antonova-Goleva, PhD (2016), is based at the Institute for Historical Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include Ottoman railway and telegraph development, industrialization and modernization. Ivelina Masheva, PhD (2015), is a researcher at the Institute for Historical Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include Bulgarian and Ottoman legal, gender, social and labor history.