This accessible and engaging book covers the full span of Serbia’s history, from the sixth-century Slav migrations up to the present day. It traces key developments surrounding the medieval and modern polities associated with Serbs, revealing a fascinating history of entanglements and communication between southeastern and wider Europe, sometimes with global implications. This is a history of Serb states, institutions, and societies, which also gives voice to individual experiences in an attempt to understand how the events described impacted the people who lived through them. Although no real continuity between the pre-modern and modern periods exists, Dejan Djokić draws out several common themes, including: migrations; the Serbs’ relations with neighbouring empires and peoples; Serbia as a society formed in the imperial borderlands; and the polycentricity of Serbia. The volume also highlights the surprising vitality of Serb identity, and how it has survived in different incarnations over the centuries through reinvention.
Author(s): Dejan Djokić
Series: Cambridge Concise Histories
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 581
City: Cambridge
Tags: history, history of Serbia, history of the Serbs, concise history
Cover
A Concise History of Serbia – Dejan Đokić
Contents
Figures
Maps
Tables
Boxes
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Where is Serbia?
Historical Legacies
Culture and Society
How Unique is Serbian History?
When is Serbia?
1. Migration
Prehistory
Slavs and Avars
Origins of the Serbs
The Formation of the First Serbs/South Slav Polities
Spread of Christianity
The Decline of ‘Baptized Serbia’ and the Rise of Duklja/Zeta
2. Empire (c. 1170–1459)
Raška
The Kingdom and the Church
Serbia’s Byzantine Turn?
The Serb–Greek Empire
The Last Emperor and New Pretenders
The Battle of Kosovo, 1389
The Despotate
Economy in Late Medieval Serbia
The Fall of Smederevo
3. Borderland (1450–1800)
The Ottoman Conquest
‘Serbia’ in Western Imagination
Military Border
Conversion to Islam
Society and Economy
Brigands and Rebels
Restoration of the Peć Patriarchate
The Serbs and European Wars, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
The Great Migration
Habsburg Serb Society
New Migrations and the Abolition of the Patriarchate
Enlightenment
4. Revolution (1788–1858)
Fateful Encounters
The First Serbian Uprising, 1804–13
Language of the Nation
The Second Serbian Uprising, 1815–30
Autonomous Principality
The Fall of Prince Miloš
Defenders of the Constitution
A Society Transformed
The Serbs and the 1848 Revolution
The St Andrew’s Assembly
5. Independence (1860–1914)
Ottoman Departures
Serbia’s Balkan Alliances
Nascent ‘Europeanization’
Socialists and Radicals
The Eastern Crisis
Party Politics
Nation, Society and Economy
A Critical Decade, 1903–14
6. War and Interwar (1914–1944)
The Sarajevo Assassination and the July Crisis
Between Serbia and Yugoslavia
The Corfu Declaration
From Salonica to Belgrade
The Serb–Croat–Slovene Kingdom
Society, Economy, Culture
Serb–Croat Contests and Compromises
The Second World War: Partition, Resistance, Collaboration
The Holocaust in Occupied Serbia
Serb Civil War
7. Federation to Fragmentation (1945–1990)
Federal Serbia in Federal Yugoslavia
The Tito–Stalin Split and the Djilas Affair
Non-alignment
Society and Culture
The Return of the ‘National Question’
The Death of Tito – and After
Milošević’s ‘Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution’
8. Ruin and Recovery (after 1990)
Serbia in Transition
The Serbs and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia
The War in Slovenia, 1991
The Croat–Serb War, 1991–95
The Bosnian Wars, 1992–95
Serbia’s Society and Economy in the 1990s
The Battle for Kosovo, 1998–99
The Fall of Milošević
Hope and Disillusionment, 2000–2012
Serbia in a Populist World, 2012–22
Further Reading
Index
