John R. Lampe – författare

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.

First published in 1986, The Bulgarian Economy (now with a new preface by the author) traces the rapid growth of the Bulgarian economy throughout the twentieth century. It also notes the obstacles Bulgaria has faced in bringing about industrial development in a small relatively poor country where, in the early twentieth century, agriculture predominated. It explores the difficulties which have arisen because of the unusual domination of a relatively isolated capital city, Sofia, over the rest of the country. It examines the effects of Bulgaria’s being on the losing side in three wars. An abrupt change in economic strategy and management came with the Communist accession to power in 1944 and with the simultaneous reorientation from close ties with Germany to close ties with the Soviet Union. The book shows, however, that significant state control had appeared well before this transition and that there is much in common between the pre- and post-war periods. It goes on to emphasise economic growth and structural change in the post-war period and the unusually large role of foreign trade. The reforms which have taken place since 1960 are accorded a separate, final chapter.

First published in 1986, The Bulgarian Economy (now with a new preface by the author) traces the rapid growth of the Bulgarian economy throughout the twentieth century. It also notes the obstacles Bulgaria has faced in bringing about industrial development in a small relatively poor country where, in the early twentieth century, agriculture predominated. It explores the difficulties which have arisen because of the unusual domination of a relatively isolated capital city, Sofia, over the rest of the country. It examines the effects of Bulgaria’s being on the losing side in three wars. An abrupt change in economic strategy and management came with the Communist accession to power in 1944 and with the simultaneous reorientation from close ties with Germany to close ties with the Soviet Union. The book shows, however, that significant state control had appeared well before this transition and that there is much in common between the pre- and post-war periods. It goes on to emphasise economic growth and structural change in the post-war period and the unusually large role of foreign trade. The reforms which have taken place since 1960 are accorded a separate, final chapter.