Ed. by M. Hakan Yavuz with Peter Sluglett.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011. IX+610 p.*
In recent decades, Turkish and Western historiography has been striving for a more thorough and in-depth study and largely rethinking of the process of disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of new state and ethno-political realities in the territories that were part of it. The subject of very close interest and critical analysis is, in particular, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 and the Berlin Congress of 1878, which formed its results, which undoubtedly formed an important milestone in this process. Suffice it to say that two international conferences on these issues have been held recently - in Ankara in 2005 under the auspices of the Middle Eastern Technical University (Turkey) and Meiji University (Japan)1, and in 2010 in Salt Lake City as part of the Turkish Studies Project at the University of Utah. A particularly significant event was the second conference, which was held with the participation of more than 50 experts on the history of the late Ottoman Empire, the Balkans and the South Caucasus.
The peer-reviewed collective monograph includes 18 articles by participants of this forum, representing a wide range of important and rather controversial issues that go far beyond the chronological and thematic framework of the actual war and post-war diplomacy. In contrast to the traditional view of the results of the "eastern crisis" as a stage in resolving the conflicts that gave rise to it, the book consistently conceptualizes the events of 1877-1878 as the starting point of the collapse of the cosmopolitan Ottoman imperial system, which resulted in mass forced migrations, ethnic and religious cleansing, radicalization of collective identities, and prolonged conflicts in the territory from South-East From Europe to the Middle East as a kind of humanitarian payment for the principle of nation-states implemented in Berlin. At the same time, the ...
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