The purpose of this document collection is to establish, from the historical record, the diplomatic and cartographic background to the Balkan zone of territorial and ethnic conflict. The primary focus of the work is on the internal boundaries of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia rather than on their relationships with states on their outer periphery. The Editor has sought to provide documentary evidence at the main watersheds of history between the end of the Napoleonic era and the end of the Second World War. Since then, as Tito's régime established itself, the international community has been able to gain few documentary traces of internal Yugoslav administration. This publication offers, therefore, a survey of the great imperial shift of the Balkan territories in the nineteenth century, from the Ottoman to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of the creation of the twentieth-century kingdom, subsequently the republic, of Yugoslavia. Text and maps support each other closely.
