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.

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.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Southeastern Europe became a prime sending region of emigrants to overseas countries, in particular the United States. This massive movement of people ended in 1914 but remained consequential long thereafter, as emigration had created networks, memories, and attitudes that shaped social and political practices in Southeastern Europe long after the emigrants had left. This book's main concern is to reconstruct the political and socioeconomic impact of emigration on Southeastern Europe. In contrast to migration studies' traditional focus on immigration, this book concentrates on the sending countries. The author provides a comparative analysis of the socioeconomic causes and consequences of emigration and argues that migrant networks and emulation effects were crucial for the persistence of migration inclinations. It also brings the state back in the emigration story and discusses political responses towards emigration by governments in the region before 1914. Emigration policy became closely aligned with nation-building and social engineering. These stances continued even after emigration had subsided: interwar Yugoslavia, which is studied in detail, tried to create a Yugoslav "diaspora" in America by turning emigrants from its territory into expatriate citizens. Hence, a nationalizing state exploited transnational linkages. The book closes with the emigration policies of communist Yugoslavia until the early 1960s,when experiments and experiences of the government were crucial for its eventual decision to liberalize labor migration to the West (the only communist government to do so). A paramount reason for this was the fact that emigrants, both as a place of memory and a source of remittances, continued to be significant. This book therefore presents emigration as a complex social phenomenon that requires a multifaceted historical approach in order to reveal the effects of migration on different temporal and spatial scales.