How the Serbian state emerged from the Ottoman Empire
SERBIA A modern history
MARKO ATTILA HOARE 720pp. Hurst. £65.
SERBIA IS MODERN EUROPE’S odd man out. Today, this small Balkan country sits comfortably outside the European Union and NATO, at a time when nearly every other European country is either a member or aspiring member of both. Its people would seemingly sooner be engulfed by the institutional West than ever be a part of it. Murals, billboards and posters praising Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China even suggest that Serbia would prefer not only to stand apart from the West, but against it.
The question of whether this estrangement can be blamed purely on contemporary politics looms large over Marko Attila Hoare’s magisterial new history of Serbia. But he wisely stays away from it. Hoare’s book instead presents modern Serbian history on its own terms, synthesizing an impressive body of largely Serbian literature to provide an exceptionally insightful English-language history of the country. As with any country, Serbia’s past has influenced its present, but that does not mean we should read the present back into the past.
Hoare’s restraint about contemporary implications makes his choice to end the book in 1941 surprisingly fruitful: it allows for a singular focus on the modern Serbian state, born in the struggle against Ottoman domination in the early nineteenth century. This state expanded into a much larger Yugoslav monarchy in the wake of the First World War, before its final destruction at the hands of the Axis in 1941.
Hoare’s account is voluminous but rarely drags. While the focus is largely on internal political history, significant portions of the book are devoted to the changing cultural, social and economic face of Serbian society, which help bring the story to life. As do the many sections dealing with seminal figures in Serbian public life.
In the centuries following the late medieval Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, there was no Serbia. With its native elite eliminated, its Orthodox South Slavic inhabitants were reduced to a rural peasantry. Entwined with intra-Ottoman power struggles, the Serbs revolted in 1804, beginning a decades-long struggle for autonomy and independence from the decaying Ottoman Empire. Their partial success saw the establishment of a Serbian Principality as an autonomous Ottoman vassal, which it would remain until 1878, when its independence was recognized across Europe.
Serbia’s first prince, Miloš Obrenović (1780–1860), an illiterate herdsman, came to prominence in two uprisings against Ottoman rule, and eventually presided over a country drifting away from Constantinople but still recognizably Ottoman. The majority of the population of Belgrade in 1834 was still Muslim, which accounts for Miloš’s decision to use the provincial town of Kragujevac as his capit
