The great cauldron : a history of southeastern Europe /

The elegant translation of Marie-Janine Calic's The Great Cauldron adds an indispensable new history of southeastern Europe to English-language scholarship. Calic expertly engages new approaches to global history and English-, German-, and Serbo-Croatian-language scholarship on the region. She asserts the value of engaging southeastern Europe as a case study for regional histories framed around interrelationships and global processes. Calic organizes the text chronologically, so that each chapter's periodization is tied to overarching dynamics and global eras with which she refutes myths of southeastern Europe as an isolated or passive region in history. She argues that the Ottoman Empire's conquest and integration of the region constitutes the single most important event in the history of the region. Calic presents the Ottoman Empire as mediating southeast European's experiences of global dynamics and modernity to the point of assessing the independent states of the 20th century in terms of Ottoman legacies, whether harmful, beneficial, or simply distinct. The text does an excellent job of balancing narrative and assessment, shifting between levels of detail. It stands out for its integration of economic and demographic data with political and cultural history. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Steven G Jug, Baylor University