Robert C. Austin. Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania’s First and Last King

The uniquely violent times that regions populated by Ottoman Albanians faced in the last century began with the Russo-Ottoman wars of 1877 and expanded with the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. As the latter sequence of wars folded into a larger European conflict that lasted well beyond 1918, the rapacious dispossession of hundreds of thousands of people reached its apex, ushering in the rise of unusual individuals and their loose coalitions of political opportunists and economic go-betweens, among whom Ahmed Muhtar Zogolli Bey (1895–1961) certainly qualifies.Albania, in the frame of Austin telling his story, is nothing more than the arena of a corrupt, “profoundly lazy” despot ruling over a “twelfth-century” people (p. 14). Austin’s claim that Albania consisted of “nothing beyond mosques, baths and minarets” wherein “Europe’s last feudal country . . . of big landlords and poor peasants scratch[ed] out a living as nothing more than rock farmers” (p. 14) fails to account for the resources available to Ahmed Zogolli and his allies in the interwar era (and indeed briefly during World War II). Despite Austin’s insinuation that he was “illiterate” (p. 10), Ahmed Zogolli was part of a privileged and thus elite Ottoman class of landlords and political agents. In fact, they were some of the most educated men in Europe by World War I; Zogu graduated from the best schools in the region and Istanbul, placing him in a self-identified class of European elites that invariably informed his (and his family members’) remarkable journey through interwar Europe. A polyglot whose overtures to various European interests belie Austin’s picture of a slovenly oriental despot who wasted his time playing cards, by the time Ahmed Zogolli begins a formal career in independent Albania as prime minister at 27 years of age (1922), his familiarity with power politics draws intimately from his uncle Essad Pasha’s intrigues and that of his extended family (pp. 47–49). Of no consequence to Austin, it is necessary to highlight here that Zogolli’s political setting includes intrafamily intrigues with some of the most important Ottoman-Albanian figures of the era, including Ismail Kemal (Qemali), Süreyya Bey Vlora, and members of the Muhammad Ali dynasty ruling Egypt. Again, Ahmed Zogolli’s deep insinuation into regional power relations cannot be ignored, despite the characterization of his arena as backward (with Austin far too often connecting “Islam” to that cultural state), impoverished, and historically irrelevant, with the Ottomans only contributing “food and attitudes” (p. 40).While it may be the case that Ahmed Zogu’s future capital, Tirana, was a mere village (with the resulting mud and animal smells accompanying it) prior to the 1930s, the reader must remember that Central Albania was not the center of economic or political affairs in the region. Far more critical were Işkodra/Shkodër, Berat, Korça, Tetova/Kalkandelan, Janina/Yanya, Ohrid, Manastir/Bitola, Prizren, and Skopje/Shkup. These were thriving hubs of commerce, governance, and education with, yes, Islamic (and Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) religious infrastructure leading the way. The author’s depiction of the Balkans as utterly empty of wealth belies an incredible ignorance. Indeed, the sheer complexity and rivalries that extended to seven different foreign armies occupying Albanian lands in World War I contradict the idea that this was a mere side story. While still peppered with the entirely unnecessary atmospherics, it is only in Chapter 5 that Austin demonstrates his acumen as a historian. In the face of local rivalries, Zogolli’s opportunistic alliance first with Serbia, Britain, and then Italy did the heavy lifting of political survival (pp. 75–76). Without references to steer the uninformed readers this book seems to target, the paragraph-long flourish of authorial flavor that characterizes frustrated opponents of Zogu (Fan Noli, for example, pp. 53–54) in equally reductive terms means the regional intrigues at play fly way above the heads of any novice to the story.For Austin to treat a regime dismissively as deeply insinuated into Italian, Yugoslav, Greek, and other “Great Power” policies as a mere theater of a “fraud” betrays the point that Albania was the focus of lobbying by oil and mining interests (pp. 52–61). While Austin asserts “nobody cared” and Ahmed Zogolli’s domestic intrigues were mere reflections of a backward, “barefooted,” “tribal” society, such renderings of Albanian interwar history are no longer acceptable. Austin’s slim book has space to explore the legacy of King Zog on present-day Albania. In this regard, the book rushes the reader through World War II, the successful rise to power of factions eventually commandeered by Enver Hoxha, and then the years since the end of the Cold War (pp. 111–46). This section, like the rest of the book, hardly reflects the craftwork of a historian who wants to contribute something new to fellow scholars, let alone a broad readership.