Hannes Grandits. The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia: Conflicting Agencies and Imperial Appropriations

Milorad Ekmečić, the most renowned South Slavic historian of the Eastern Crisis, wrote back in 1960 that “historical literature has rather richly rewarded the Bosnian uprising of 1875–1878.” Interest in researching that uprising, which initiated the actual end of Ottoman rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina and most of the Balkans, has continued to this day. Hannes Grandits, professor of Southeast European history at Humboldt University in Berlin, has made an important contribution to the understanding of that complex historical phenomenon with the fresh methodological approach applied in his book The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia: Conflicting Agencies and Imperial Appropriations.The book was originally published in English in 2020 and later translated and published in Bosnian in 2023. It consists of seven chapters addressing the following topics: the reformed society in Ottoman Bosnia, upholding stability in the Bosnian Vilayet during politically turbulent times, the escalating crisis on the Ottoman-Montenegrin border (1874/1875), efforts for pacification and refugee return in early 1876, the anti-Ottoman war of the principalities and the breakthrough of Ottoman constitutionalists, the Bosnian Vilayet during the devastating Russo-Ottoman War of 1877/1878, and the creation of a new imperialist order in the Orient/Bosnian Vilayet.Grandits undertakes the complex task of thoroughly tracing the political and social dynamics in Ottoman Bosnia before and during the 1875–1878 uprising—something no one has done in quite the same way. He places these dynamics not merely in context, but at the core of the political and socioeconomic development in the region—and even beyond—highlighting the opposing relations between the great powers and the rivalry between dominant imperial ideologies and emerging national concepts of the organization of state and society. In that sense, the author successfully fulfilled the task he set for himself, not to reduce the number of actors and groups involved in the Bosnian question. Grandits also succeeded in identifying other social contradictions in Ottoman Bosnia during the reform period—not just the opposition between “Christians and Turks.” Furthermore, in this book, Bosnia as a whole is not portrayed as a land completely overwhelmed by chaos, violence, and distrust—phenomena undoubtedly characteristic of areas affected by the uprising and counterinsurgency actions of government and pro-government forces.In the section of the book that discusses the political mobilization of European public opinion, Grandits, without denying the existence of violence and crimes, avoids the trap of uncritically accepting claims of horrific crimes against Christians in Bosnia as typical “Turkish” behavior or portraying Christians as the sole victims of violence during the Bosnian Uprising. Instead, he analyzes the political function of such claims, which, as he concludes, transformed the diplomatic thinking of all the great powers. The major European powers began to view the crimes against Balkan and Bosnian Christians as the inevitable result of inadequate Ottoman governance, rather than as isolated incidents.In the book’s section dealing with the gaining of the occupation mandate at the Congress of Berlin and its implementation by Austria–Hungary in 1878, the author devotes considerable attention to internal dynamics. He also tracks the diplomatic activities of the great powers, who had already agreed on territorial and political revisions of the Treaty of San Stefano before the Congress. This aligns with Grandits’s general approach of not reducing the number of actors and groups involved in resolving the Bosnian question. Among these newly visible actors was the Bosnian Muslim political elite, which, as Grandits shows, later opened the way for the creation of Bosnian multi-confessional institutions and put forward its political demands—rejecting the Berlin Congress decision on Austro-Hungarian occupation.Generally speaking, Grandits approaches the subject of the book without being burdened by the dominant historiographical or ideological frameworks in Balkan or European historiography, which have often combined negative elements of both a priori and a posteriori judgments about the nature and fate of the Ottoman Empire. Grandits does not a priori deny the Ottoman Empire the capacity or willingness to accept and implement reform principles—primarily the principle of equality for all inhabitants. On the contrary, he traces the reformist intent of the state through detailed analyses of reform attempts in Bosnia, particularly those that intensified during the uprising. Furthermore, he offers a balanced evaluation of the Ottoman efforts—partially successful—to repatriate refugees and pacify the region during 1876, thereby rendering the Ottoman perspective on the end of Ottoman rule in Bosnia more visible than in the vast majority of previous historiographical accounts.