Creating Links and Innovative Overviews for a New History Research Agenda for the Citizens of a Growing Europe
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CLIOHRES.net is a largescale research project, supported by the European Commission through the Sixth Framework Programme of its Directorate General for Research as a “Network of Excellence” for European History. It includes 180 researchers (90 staff and 90 doctoral students) from 45 universities in 31 countries. Working together in six thematic work groups, their aim is to achieve greater understanding of both the histories and the representations of the past current in Europe today, highlighting both diversities and connections.
The Consortium Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria) Universiteit Gent (Belgium) Sofiyski Universitet “Sveti Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria) Univerzita Karlova v Praze (Czech Republic) Panepistimio Kyprou (Cyprus) Roskilde Universitetscenter (Denmark) Tartu Ülikool (Estonia) Turun Yliopisto (Finland) Université Pierre Mendès-France, Grenoble II (France) Université de Toulouse II - Le Mirail (France) Universität Potsdam (Germany) Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg (Germany) University of Aberdeen (Great Britain) Cardiff University (Great Britain) University of Sussex (Great Britain) Ethniko kai Kapodistriako Panepistimio Athinon (Greece) Aristotelio Panepistimio Thessalonikis (Greece) Debreceni Egyetem (Hungary) Miskolci Egyetem (Hungary) Háskóli Íslands (Iceland) National University of Ireland, Galway/Ollscoil na hĖireann, Gaillimh (Ireland) Università di Bologna (Italy)
Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy) Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy) Università di Pisa (Italy) Latvijas Universitāte, Riga (Latvia) L-Università ta’ Malta (Malta) Universiteit Utrecht (The Netherlands) Universitetet i Oslo (Norway) Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Krakow (Poland) Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) Universidade Aberta (Portugal) Universitatea Babeş Bolyai din Cluj-Napoca (Romania) Universitatea ‘Stefan cel Mare’, Suceava (Romania) Moskowskij Gosudarstvennyj Oblastnoj Universitet (Russian Federation) Univerzitet u Novom Sadu (Serbia) Slovenskej Akademie Vied (Slovakia) Univerza v Mariboru (Slovenia) University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (Spain) Universidad de Deusto (Spain) Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) Universitat de Valencia (Spain) Universität Basel (Switzerland) Orta Dogu Teknik Üniversitesi (Turkey)
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
Neval Berber
Berber, Neval Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in british travel literature (1844-1912) / Neval Berber. - Pisa : Plus-Pisa university press, 2010. - (Doctoral dissertations ; 8) 914.9742 (21.) 1. Bosnia-Erzegovina – 1844-1912 – Descrizioni e viaggi 2. Viaggiatori inglesi – Bosnia-Erzegovina - 1844-1912 CIP a cura del Sistema bibliotecario dell’Università di Pisa This volume is published thanks to the support of the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission, by the Sixth Framework Network of Excellence CLIOHRES.net under the contract CIT3-CT-2005006164. The volume is solely the responsibility of the Network and the authors; the European Community cannot be held responsible for its contents or for any use which may be made of it.
Cover: Omer Berber, Unveiling Bosnia, photocollage and drawing, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
© 2010 by CLIOHRES.net The materials published as part of the CLIOHRES Project are the property of the CLIOHRES.net Consortium. They are available for study and use, provided that the source is clearly acknowledged.
[email protected] - www.cliohres.net Published by Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press Lungarno Pacinotti, 43 56126 Pisa Tel. 050 2212056 – Fax 050 2212945
[email protected] www.edizioniplus.it - Section “Biblioteca” Member of
ISBN: 978-88-8492-706-4 Informatic Editing Răzvan Adrian Marinescu Editorial assistance Viktoriya Kolp
Contents Preface Ann Katherine Isaacs, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson ....................................................... pag. VII The CLIOHRES Network of Excellence.......................................................................
» IX
Acknowledgements . .................................................................................................
» XI
Introduction ..............................................................................................................
» XIII
I. Emerging geography and Slavic identification . ............................... First travellers, first information ............................................................................ Travellers in the 1870s: racial identification, culture and politics . ...................... 1878-1912: the continuity of the paradigm in a new epoch ................................ II. Forms of Othering . ...................................................................................... South Slavs and the Eastern Question ................................................................. Imagining Bosnian Muslims ................................................................................. Violence and Bosnian Islam: divergent opinions ................................................ III. The Orientalization of Bosnia .............................................................. Western imaginary spaces and Bosnia-Herzegovina ........................................... Bosnia is the Orient . ............................................................................................. ‘Balkan-deflected Orientalism’ ............................................................................. IV. Unveiling the Bosnian Muslim woman ................................................ Orientalism as a male-oriented erotic discourse .................................................. Figurative topoi of Western images of the Muslim woman: political implications and historical changes .................................................................. Veiling/Unveiling of the Bosnian Muslim woman .............................................. V. The Irish Paradigm ........................................................................................ Comparing Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina ...................................................... The historical roots of an imaginary process . ...................................................... Reading Bosnia-Herzegovina through the ‘Irish lens’ ......................................... VI. Travellers and the public arena ........................................................... From politics to literature ..................................................................................... From literature to politics ..................................................................................... Notes ....................................................................................................................... Bibliography ........................................................................................................ Italian Summary .................................................................................................. Bosnian Summary ................................................................................................
» » » » » » » » » » » » » »
1 2 6 21 27 27 33 37 45 45 53 63 69 70
» 74 » 76 » 89 » 89 » 91 » 93 » 109 » 109 » 122 » 131 » 161 » 177 » 185
Preface We are very happy to present Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912) by Neval Berber, the eighth in a series of studies based on doctoral dissertations of young researchers who have been members of the CLIOHRES Network of Excellence. A central theme in the CLIOHRES research agenda is that of ‘identity’ or, better, ‘identities’, particularly as they affect European citizenship and Europe’s citizens. The elaboration of identities, or representations of what is specific or special about an individual or a group of people, is a constant, dynamic and highly selective process in which certain descriptions of ourselves or others are presented and perceived as important or even decisive, according to the context. Rather than on personal experience, identities are usually connected with general ideas about the past – acquired in the family, at school and from the media. Strangely, the building of identities is one of the principle ways in which ideas about ‘history’ come into direct contact with the political, intellectual and social life of citizens, shaping attitudes and decisions, not necessarily in a rational and critically founded way. A number of general categories, often crude and erroneous, are available, ready to be applied when we look at our neighbours. Are they immigrants? southerners? northerners? honest? kind? civilised? corrupt? Our conclusions influence our opinions and actions. Is it possible to document and analyse how specific identitary images come into being and evolve? Neval Berber’s book addresses a carefully circumscribed and very interesting case: how British travellers of the 19th and early 20th century depicted Bosnia-Herzegovina and how their reported perceptions varied in accordance with their personal political attitudes and the issues emerging in British public opinion and debate. In Berber’s view, the relationship between travel literature and policy is complex and intertwined: travellers’ perceptions changed as British policy towards the Porte and the Balkans changed; but at the same time the travellers’ contribution to the ‘construction’ of Bosnia influenced public opinion and policy debate. Ruled by the Ottomans until 1878, then placed under Austrian-Hungarian administration, Bosnia provides an illuminating example of the processes involved. In Berber’s view, the images of the country and its population coincide only in part with the Orientalist paradigm (suggested by the largely Muslim population and the pervasive influence of Muslim and Ottoman culture ) and, again, only in part
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with the Balkanist paradigm applied to other Balkan countries, seen as European although characterised by specific traits. Berber examines the development and use of racial and racist language: Bosnians are presented as ‘Slavs’, hence ‘racially’ capable of civilisation and self government in the opinion of some; for others, they are destined to a future of primitivism and incivility. Indeed, when British policy dictates it, the ‘Turks’ are portrayed as civilizers, forced to deal with the backward and unruly Bosnians. In the case of the Bosnian Muslim woman, the subject of a specific analysis, Berber finds that the female images only partially coincide with the Orientalist idea of sensual femininity; rather they are centred on the veil as a symbol of subjection. A particularly significant chapter, already published by CLIOHRES (in Imagining Frontiers. Contesting Identities, Steven G. Ellis, Lud’a Klusáková eds., Pisa 2007, pp. 319-338) looks at how discourses on Ireland and on Bosnia were connected, both in travelogues and in public opinion. Some characteristic were identified as common to both countries, although distinctions were made between the far-off Balkan periphery and the nearby island, aspiring to home rule. Berber paints her results on a broad canvas, and uses the resources of a colourful palette to do so. Her analysis, instructive in itself, also suggests a multitude of further cases that should be examined to understand critically the processes through which in various periods, countries and contexts the single bits of the many-faceted glass through which we perceive and judge ‘others’ have been elaborated. We thank Neval Berber for preparing the volume for publication in order to share the results of her research both within and beyond the Network. We also thank Omer Berber for creating the cover image, symbolising the emergence of Bosnia from ‘beneath the veil’. Ann Katherine Isaacs University of Pisa
Guðmundur Hálfdanarson University of Iceland, Reykjavik
Neval Berber graduated in English Language and Literature from the University of Verona. She received a PhD in History from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a Research Doctorate in English Studies from the University of Verona. She translated and edited the first Italian edition of Arthur J. Evans’s travelogue, A piedi per la Bosnia durante la rivolta (Edizioni Spartaco, 2005). She has also published several essays on the representations of the Orient and the Balkans in English travel literature.
The CLIOHRES Network of Excellence CLIOHRES is a consortium of 45 universities and research institutions in 31 countries. Each institution is represented by two senior researchers and two doctoral students coming from various academic fields – primarily from history, but also from art history, archaeology, architecture, philology, political science, literary studies and geography. The 180 researchers in the network are divided into six “Thematic Work Groups”, each of which deals with a broadly defined research area – ‘States, Institutions and Legislation’, ‘Power and Culture’, ‘Religion and Philosophy’, ‘Work, Gender and Society’, ‘Frontiers and Identities’, and ‘Europe and the Wider World’. Furthermore, the Network as a whole addresses ‘transversal themes’ of general relevance. These include ‘Citizenship’, ‘Migration’, ‘Tolerance and Discrimination’, ‘Gender’ and ‘Identities’; one of these is targeted each year. As a Network of Excellence, CLIOHRES is not an ordinary research project. It does not focus on a single research question or on a set of specific questions. Rather it is conceived as a forum where researchers representing various national and regional traditions can meet and elaborate their work in new ways thanks to structured interaction with their colleagues. The objective is not only to transcend the national boundaries that still largely define historical research agendas, opening new avenues for research, but also to use those very differences to become critically aware of how current research agendas have evolved. Thus, the goal is to examine basic and unquestioned attitudes about ourselves and others, which are rooted in the ways that the scientific community in each country looks at history. Historians create and cultivate selective views of the national or local past, which in turn underpin pervasive ideas about identities and stereotypes: national, religious, gender, political, etc. National historiographies today are still largely shaped by problems and preoccupations reflecting previous political and cultural contexts. CLIOHRES aims to create and promote a new structure and agenda for the community of historical research, redirecting its critical efforts along more fruitful lines. The Network began its work in June 2005, thanks to a five-year contract with the European Commission through the Sixth Framework Programme of its Directorate General for Research, under Priority 7, dealing with “Citizenship”. Its activities aim to contribute to the development of innovative approaches to history as regards both the European Research Area and European Higher Education Area. The Network works for a closer connection between research and learning/teaching,
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holding that this is essential in order to ensure that European citizens possess the necessary information, conceptual tools and more in general the vital critical and self-critical abilities which they will need in the future. All the thematic groups have worked from the start according to a common research plan, beginning in the first year with reconnaissance or mapping, of how the questions perceived as important for the thematic area appear in the different national historiographies. During the second year they defined ‘connecting’ themes, which are relevant for research in a wider geographical and chronological context. The third phase has concentrated on comparing and reviewing sources and methodologies; the fourth has focussed on cross-fertilisation, that is on showing how problems identified in the previous phases can be developed in new contexts. During the last phase, the groups are defining new and relevant projects, in the broadest sense, for future research in the sector. Each Thematic Work Group publishes one volume a year in order to share and discuss the results of their work with the broader academic community. The volumes are not conceived as the final word on the issues that they deal with, but rather as work-in-progress. In addition to the six Thematic Work Group volumes, the Network publishes one common volume per year dealing with the transversal theme targeted. It also publishes abridged versions of the dissertations written by doctoral students who have participated in its work. Together the volumes already published form an invitation to discuss the results of the Network and the novel directions that are emerging from its work; they also constitute a unique patrimony of up-to-date studies on well-known and less well-known aspects of Europe and its history. All publications are available in book form and on the www.cliohres.net website. They can be downloaded without charge. A list of publications to date can be found at the end of this volume.
Acknowledgements This book owes much to many people and many places. It began as a doctoral dissertation at NUI Galway at the Department of History. There I would like to thank Professor Nicholas Canny, then Head of the Department of History, who was also the Director of the Faculty of Arts’ Institute, the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change (now the Moore Institute), where I was based during my studies and where most part of this research was written. At the Moore Institute I would like to thank its Administrator, Martha Shaughnessy, and all my colleagues and friends from the year 2002 to the present. In the Department of History at NUI Galway, I would like particularly to thank the present Head of the Department, Professor Steven Ellis, who as a member of the CLIOHRES management committee is a leader of the Thematic Working Group ‘Frontiers and Identities’, which allowed me to partecipate in a pan-European network, without whose financial support this book would not have been possible in its present shape. My special thanks go to Professor Katherine Isaacs who thoughtfully led the CLIOHRES project from 2005 to 2010 and also offered her moral and practical support in all phases of this book’s preparations. All my colleagues in the CLIOHRES project, who commented on various aspects of this work-in-progress, also deserve my gratitude. The Moore Institute, the Department of History and the Office of the Registrar at NUI Galway offered material support over the course of my PhD project which preceded this book and without whose support it would not have reached its conclusion. My gratitude also goes to the Department of English, German and Slavonic Studies (Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere) at the University of Verona for ongoing and kind support, and particularly to the Head of the Department, Professor Cesare Gagliardi, to Professor Bianca Tarozzi and above all to Professor Yvonne Bezrucka, who has been following my research work since my graduate program and without whose support I would probably not have undertaken the path of scholarly research. Thanks are also due to my friends in Galway, London, Venice, Rome, Buffalo, Milan, Zagreb and elsewhere, who in many and different ways encouraged this work while it was in its first preparatory phases, including Jozefina Dautbegović, Saud Berber, the Petrungaro family, Gianna and Piero Brunello, Ljilja Vuković, Judith Kasper, Luca Solla, Deniz Zahirović, Theo Belniak, Paola Ciuffoletti, Claire Healy, Ciaran Whelan and Vjeran Kursar.
The staff at research institutions, libraries, archival depositories and various universities have made my work no only possible but often easy and pleasant. I would like to thank the staff of the James Hardiman Library at NUI, Galway; the National Library of Ireland; the University Library at University of Cambridge; the King’s College Library and Archives (Cambridge); the British Library; the National Archives (London); the UCL SSEES Library (London); the Library “Arturo Frinzi” of the University of Verona; the “Nacionalna i Sveučilišna Knjižnica” (Zagreb), the Library of the “Bošnjački Institut” (Sarajevo). I also thank my examiners, Dr Wendy Bracewell, Dr William O’Reilly and Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, who commented on various aspects of my dissertation and helped me to correct some of its weaknesses. However, I am the only person responsible for the intellectual content of this work. I would particularly like to thank my supervisor, Dr William O’Reilly, who helped me in conducting this research in many different ways throughout the years, and without whose support I would not have been able to undertake this task. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Nidžara and Omer, and my brother Tarik, who have supported me since the very beginning, throughout our good and bad times, and Stefano Petrungaro, without whose goodness all this would simply not have been possible.
Introduction The first evidence of an English travel interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina emerged at the end of the 16th century, an interest, however, that was short-term in the extreme and came to a quick end in the first years of the 17th century1. For early travellers Bosnia-Herzegovina was just one stage in a much longer journey with Istanbul as the final destination. When they did not travel exclusively by sea, one of the routes that the English, and later British, travellers chose to reach this city, full of enchantment and fascination, but which also represented an Ottoman Empire seen as a military threat, was via Venice, along the Dalmatian coast and across the mountainous interior of the Balkan Peninsula (see Map 1). This route obliged travellers to stop temporarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina2. As Bosnia did not represent the final destination of British travellers’ in these early Balkan trips, and due to the brevity of their Bosnian stay, travellers who wrote the first accounts of this region offered very nebulous testimonies, accounts that were rather imprecise and inaccurate, even when reporting the travel routes of the journey3. In the 17th century, as more travellers journeyed to Istanbul and occasionally to the Holy Land over land, the need to travel through the Bosnian lands came to an abrupt end: instead of taking the Dalmatian and Bosnian roads, often over mountain passes and for that reason difficult to cross, British travellers preferred to take a northern route to Istanbul, via Vienna and Budapest and then southward, across the Pannonian Plain, Serbia, Bulgaria and Tracia. It was an itinerary that became quite popular during the next centuries, as merchants, diplomats and their retinue moved east, bypassing the Bosnian-Herzegovinan provinces. For this purely practical reason, it seems, until 1844 no British travellers journeyed to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, if they did so, they left no written testimonies4. After a gap of two centuries, the year 1844 marked the modern revival of British travellers’ interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina5. This was determined, in the course of the 19th century, by an increase in British public interest in ‘European Turkey’, prompted, on the one hand, by the new approach in British foreign policy towards the Ottoman Empire (beginning around 1830)6, and, on the other, by the involvement of Great Britain in the Crimean war (1854-1856). This interest was reinforced in 1856 with the Treaty of Paris, when Britain also became officially involved in the Eastern Question7. Only one year later, in 1857, Sarajevo also became the seat of a British consul in the Balkans8.
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Map 1 Relief Map of the Balkans
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If this interest took hold between the 1840s and 1850s, also due to the new orientation in British foreign policy, it intensified in the years of the Bosnian peasant revolts (1875-1878). In fact, the latter renewed the interest of British public opinion in the Eastern Question, an interest which had tapered slightly in the period after 18569. Unlike the previous periods, in these years the phenomenon of British travellers in Bosnia-Herzegovina assumed a certain regularity. Moreover, henceforth this travel depended largely upon events linked to the Bosnian context, giving rise to travelogues that were not only political, but, progressively, also scientific and, in the last period, even touristic in scope10. Therefore, this trend, originating in the mid-19th century and developing further over the next decades, continued down to 1912, when it was suddenly interrupted by the outbreak of the First Balkan War. This study will investigate the corpus of travel texts that focus on Bosnia-Herzegovina, observing them from a variety of different standpoints. The chronological scope of the book depends upon both geo-political circumstances and the available sources: it is between the mid-19th century and the first decade of the 20th that a modern view of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its people comes into being and is established in Great Britain. This 19th-century chapter in a longer tale of travels and travelogues creates a template for the 20th-century reception of Bosnia and Bosnians in Great Britain. The object of this study is to investigate the genesis of the modern public image of Bosnia in Great Britain. It is, therefore, necessary to locate such historical analyses in the 19th century, attempting to reconstruct the origins of the first representative modules of such an image, but also to reconstruct their mutations and first crystallizations, which took place at the turn of the 20th century. The British who, in the seven decades between 1844 and 1912 went to, and wrote about, Bosnia-Herzegovina were predominantly men, but there were also a few women. Their travel accounts often aimed to document the Bosnian way of life for their fellow countrymen at home, constructing an image of life in this Balkan society from political, religious, social, cultural, racial, national and military points of view. Those who wrote about Bosnia belonged to different professional categories and ethnic backgrounds; English, Irish and Scottish travellers who wrote their accounts about Bosnia were by trade and training students, journalists, diplomats, men of letters, archaeologists, doctors, historians, military men, missionaries and even, at the end of the 19th century, tourists. Furthermore, the present study has taken into consideration travel accounts by travellers from Hungary, France and the United States, accounts that circulated in Britain in English translation or, in the
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case of the American texts, could be read in reviews that were coming to have an international readership. The relationship that the travellers established with Bosnia was determined by political, social and cultural conditions both in their native country, and in the country which they visited. Besides, the relationship between these two different geocultural poles was further enriched by travellers’ personal vicissitudes. Travellers’ gender and ethnic background, as well as their cultural baggage and political orientation, influenced their descriptions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country generally perceived as geographically close but culturally far from home. The British who travelled to ‘Ottoman Bosnia’, between the 1840s and 1860s, first ‘discovered’ this country in geographical terms. Their successors, in the 1870s, were also interested in analysing the socio-cultural phenomena they encountered. In the process of discovery of Bosnian society travellers selected their material, favouring some aspects over others, applying their own parameters of assessment and consciously or unconsciously using their pre-existing cultural reference points to do so; in short, they transmitted a very complex fresco of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its people. This study aimed to deconstruct this picture, investigating the factors that determined British travellers’ representations of Bosnia11. It also attempted to reconstruct British stereotypes and prejudices of Bosnia-Herzegovina, once again by focusing on British travel texts. This study is not intended to be an investigation of the historical accuracy of these images; the historical circumstances in which they were produced and which they refer to have been obviously taken into consideration, but the main aim of the work was to question the end result, the representations that emerged from the travelogues and shaped the way British travellers related to Bosnia. Focusing on the images is likely to result in a better understanding not of Bosnia-Herzegovina or its people, but of British travellers and their cultural baggage12. Finally, such an investigation also helped to trace the British public discourse on Bosnia-Herzegovina between the mid-19th century and the first years of the 20th century. This study concentrates on the fact that the British who travelled in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 19th century ‘discovered’, above all else, the Islamic character of the country, tendentiously perceiving and therefore representing the country from a stereotypical perspective that, at this same time, was applied to the ‘Orient’13. For this reason, this study on the formation of discourses from the standpoint of its methodology, relies on the current historiography of imperialism that, especially
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over the last three decades, has been influenced by critical theories of ‘colonial discourse’, originating with Edward Said’s critical reading of 16th- to 19th-century Orientalism14. Inspired by the political and cultural theses first advanced by Michel Foucault and the techniques of textual deconstruction pioneered by Jacques Derrida, and dealing with a series of European representations of Islam, from the ancient Christian to the modern age, Said held that the political-economic dominion of the West over the East in the age of ‘second imperialism’, also worked through some scientific and literary discourses. Indeed, according to Said, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the West, utilizing the modern Orientalist discourse, ‘constructs’ a certain ‘Orient’ “as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience”, creating in this way an important premise “for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”. Despite numerous controversial aspects of Said’s theoretical framework, his work has led to the foundation of a new field of studies, generally known as ‘postcolonial studies’, that have developed a whole range of critical theories of ‘colonial discourses’15. Others have assumed a critical stance towards Said’s theories, taking his work as a starting point, but attempting to clarify it in terms of both theory and practice16. This intense debate has also affected historiography more generally, showing that diverse colonial situations have certain (distinctive) types of knowledge and relations of dominations17. Methodologically, this study has also been informed by the South-Eastern location of Bosnia-Herzegovina, following the currents of historiography that focused on collective imaginaries of both Eastern Europe18 and the Balkans19. What has been noted is that as a consequence of a process that began in the 15th century and reached its peak between the two Balkan wars (1912-1913), what was ‘conceived’ as ‘East European’ or ‘Balkan’ was also represented in terms of ‘Otherness’ with respect to ‘Western Europe’. These studies have, therefore, concluded that Western Europeans, when writing about South-East Europe and the Balkans, made reference to very radical, prevalently negative, generalisations regarding both these regions and their peoples, adopting an intellectual approach imposed in an hegemonic way towards these areas which although geographically European are represented culturally as an ‘Other’. This research has also taken into consideration some works that have assumed a critical attitude towards the studies carried out in the 1990s. These have focused on the necessity to re-consider the theses on Western European collective imaginaries and subsequent collective constructions of Eastern European and the Balkan space20. In particular, critical studies have aimed to emphasize the diversity of national situations, showing that, rather than conceiving of one Western-European image of
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Eastern Europe, it would be more appropriate to talk about multiple forms, which developed in different times with quite different characteristics; these studies have also stressed the bi-directional nature of these images, underlining how they were conditioned by geo-political and cultural contexts both in the (Western-European) country of origin, and in the countries of (Eastern) Europe21. These works emphasized that the discursive paradigm that the Westerners adopted in relation to South-East Europe and to the Balkans – so-called ‘Balkanism’ – was founded by attributing to those regions a specific characteristic of ‘liminality’, highlighting in particular the Balkan transitional status between Christianity and Islam22. Yet, consequent to these reflections, the present study hopes to test the validity of this interpretative paradigm in a region that, for a long time, was the northernmost border of the Ottoman Empire and that ethno-demographically was and was seen by the British commentators as more Islamicized than other Balkan regions. Therefore, it was a region where travellers attempted to gather evidence on the appearance of the land and its peoples: not only of the Ottoman administration, but also of Islamic culture and belief. As far as the importance of travel writing as a source for the study of public opinion in 19th-century societies is concerned, some works have stressed the role of ‘opinion makers’ that British popular literature, and particularly travel writing, on SouthEastern Europe, developed in the 19th century and particularly in the years between the Treaty of Paris (1856) and the so-called ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ (1876)23. For this reason, it was decided to rely above all on these sources for the study of the principal British discourse on Bosnia-Herzegovina in these years24; this strategy is all the more valid if we recall that Britain was known for her exploration and travel, as well as for her significant production of travel texts, and particularly in the Victorian era25. Other types of sources that contributed to the formation of collective representations are also relevant and have been taken into consideration in this study, including reviews, such as “Fraser’s Review”, “The British Quarterly Review”, “Edinburgh Review”, and the “Cornhill Magazine”, which in the period examined often presented texts by British travellers to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Furthermore, it has been held necessary to integrate these two principal groups of sources with some instruments of travel that were used by travellers while sojourning in Bosnia or before going there – above all contemporary tourist guides which often served as compasses for the British who travelled in ‘European Turkey’. Epistolary correspondence between public personages affiliated with the two geo-political realities has also been occa-
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sionally used, especially when the letters showed interest in the issues relevant for this study. As far as British magazines and newspapers as a source is concerned, it is necessary to add a clarification: during the period under examination, numerous newspapers and magazines in the years of the ‘Eastern Crisis’ (1875-1878) regularly engaged in a debate regarding the moral necessity to intervene to aid the ‘oppressed’ SlavoChristians in the Balkans from Turkish ‘tyranny’. This debate was prompted by the Gladstonian election campaign, but was largely forgotten with the election of Gladstone as prime minister in 1880 when, in the aftermath of the elections, he assumed a much more conservative line than was expected26. At the root of this debate lay the Turkish repression of Christian rayah’s27 revolts in the Bosnian and Bulgarian provinces, a repression that British public opinion considered particularly violent and cruel. “Punch”, with its usual caustic flavour, avoided Gladstonian moralism, showing, on the one hand, the ‘Turk’ in the role of victim, and his ‘enemies’, the ‘Slavs’, including Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Serbs, Russians and Montenegrins, in the role of aggressor (see Fig. 1, 2). It was thanks to the events of these debates that BosniaHerzegovina often figured in such newspapers as “The Times” and “Manchester Guardian”. Yet, here it has not been considered necessary to proceed to a systematic analysis of these sources, as the correspondents who wrote for these newspapers were also authors of travel accounts. In fact, their publications were often the collections of articles previously published in the periodical press. II Chapter one deals with the geographical emersion of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as with the racial identification of Bosnians in British travelogues between 1844 and 1912. Travellers are divided into three different groups, formed on the basis of the historical events which led them to undertake their Bosnian tours. Initially, this chapter asks who these travellers are, when they travelled and by what routes, as well as tracing some of the reasons for their Bosnian journey. The second focus of the chapter is the issue of recognition of Bosnia and Bosnians. Bosnia-Herzegovina was generally an unknown area, which still required geographical definition. Thus the chapter traces the evolution of this process, during which travellers also began to draft a discourse that would later develop into a more concrete structure. To these first elements others, much more general in character, were later added dealing with the ‘character’ of Bosnians and Bosnia, and especially its economic and social make-
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Fig. 1 The Dogs of War Source: “Punch, or the London Charivari”, 17 June 1876, p. 247.
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Fig. 2 A Critic-al Situation Source: “Punch, or the London Charivari”, 7 April 1877, p. 48.
up. This chapter considers the evolution of these elements, closely related to the country’s social events, and especially those relative to the 1870s revolt that the travellers often observed, as well as to the political projects that many of them formed and projected onto the country. The second chapter follows closely on the first, analysing how the racial paradigm that took shape in the course of the 19th century was applied to the South Slavs in general and to the Bosnians in particular. An important role is played by European, and particularly British, culture, and especially by the racial theories popular at the time. Some of these even addressed issues regarding the ‘Slavic race’. At first, the travellers interpreted the concept of race from many different standpoints, all linked to the polemic regarding the Eastern Question. However, there were also significant
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differences among the authors and, depending on both period and political orientation, authors adopted either a ‘Slavophile’ or a ‘Turkophile’ approach. Behind what was considered a common racial Slavic identity, that according to liberals gave the Slavs the possibility to progress and organize in self-governed states when placed in favourable environmental conditions, Bosnian Muslims were often perceived as essentially different from the other ethno-confessional groups of the region. In brief, they assumed all negative aspects of the ‘Balkanist’ and ‘Orientalist’ projections, being thus described as particularly barbarous, lethargic and above all violent. Yet, even though there was a uniformity in the stereotype of Bosnian Muslims as violent, the representations by the conservatives, on the one hand, and by the liberals, on the other, were distinguished by the different ways in which they identified the sources of this violence. Coherently with their theoretical background, the conservatives considered the violence to be a hereditary trait; the liberals, on the other hand, explained the violence of Bosnian Muslims through environmental theories that considered race as something variable and capable of changing its characteristics in different political and socio-cultural circumstances. The authors that defended these environmental explanations for violence wrote especially in the 1870s, during the years of the peasants’ revolts. They were openly Slavophile and frequently explicitly against Ottoman culture, often identified with Islam. Although the environment could also affect the other ethno-confessional groups, it was prevalently thought that the typical Muslim cultural and religious ‘fanaticism’ gave to the Bosnian Muslims a peculiar sort of ferocity. As has been mentioned, the travellers’ awareness of the existence of a Bosnian Islam was an important element in the construction of an image of Bosnia, and it also led to a specific process of ‘othering’ by the authors examined here. Chapter three analyses the image of (Muslim) Otherness in British travel accounts of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the period 1844-1912. This chapter also confronts the sources from the perspective of ‘Orientalist’ and ‘Balkanist’ paradigms, exploring how the British discourse on Bosnia relates to them. The chapter also refers to studies in cultural history that explore the history of mentality, ideas and imaginaries of Western countries. Finally, it relates this material to both early and more recent studies of European mental maps. Chapter four analyses the image of the Bosnian Muslim woman in British travel writing, by conparing it with the Western stereotypes that, in the 18th and 19th century, showed Muslim women either as passionate erotic subjects, or as victims of
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tyrannical masculine Muslim societies. The analysis also refers to the historical context that served as a backdrop for travellers in this process of stereotyping the Bosnian Muslim woman. In particular, this study has taken into consideration Bosnia’s status outside the British empire, remembering that Bosnia was not a British colonial possession and that only in 1878 did Bosnia formally enter the administrative framework of a western European country. The chapter aims to explain how these political and social issues affected the image of the Bosnian Muslim woman. In this particular analysis, certain approaches from the area of gender studies, and particularly those relating to symbolism bound to the figure of Muslim woman within the rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, have been used. Chapter five deals with the 19th-century construction of the British image of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of Bosnians from the point of view of the ‘Irish Question’, the issue which lay at the core of British government policy in the 1870s, when British interest in the Eastern Question was formed. First, it will be shown that perceived economic, political, social and cultural similarities between Ireland and Bosnia brought British travellers and diplomats to compare these two societies and, especially when writing of Bosnia within the Ottoman context, to make use of the Irish political paradigm. Nevertheless, British travellers and diplomats, while comparing the two peripheral realities on the basis of these analogies, very often established a hierarchical scale of values. This scale not only saw the Bosnians, in comparison with the Irish, as less capable of establishing an autonomous state, it also, in literary and iconographic representations, placed the Bosnians and the Herzegovinians – both of Muslim and Christian religious backgrounds – in a position of cultural and racial inferiority. The chapter also explores the reasons that led British travellers to establish this specific hierarchical scale of values. Finally, this chapter will also reflect on the construction of mental maps within Europe. It questions the validity of those theses which have stated that cultural relations within Europe are constructed along an East/West divide, taking into consideration the alternative centre/periphery contrasting position. Chapter six explores the relationship between British travel writing on BosniaHerzegovina and British politics and aims to demonstrate the importance of travellers’ role in informing public opinion on the Balkans in general and on Bonsia-Herzegoina in particular in the period examined. Considering the subtle and complex nature of the relationship, this analysis develops in two different directions, showing, on the one hand, how the travellers, in their perceptions of Bosnian society, were strongly conditioned by British politics in the second half of the 19th
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century, and on the other, that the orientation of British foreign policy towards both South-Eastern Europe in general, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular, depended upon, and took inspiration from, the contents of these same travelogues. It has also proved possible to develop this analysis on the basis of some earlier studies, that have shown that popular literature in general, and travel literature in particular, exercised a powerful influence on public opinion in the 19th century. III Western European public representations of Eastern European regions have been increasingly investigated in recent academic works. Rarely, however, have the specific forms which these processes of generalisation assumed been investigated within a particular context, or the different modalities through which they were transmitted been studied. This book, working from a premise that collective imaginaries of Bosnia-Herzegovina were constructed from the standpoint of geo-political-social conditions of both the (Western-European) country of origin and the (Eastern) country of arrival, intends to show how British travellers, while writing about Bosnia-Herzegovina between the second half of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century, used an inventory of images and a very peculiar ‘discourse’ that is distinguished from the typically ‘Balkanist’ one. The stereotypes and prejudices which were coined for the area were very often ‘Orientalist’, and only occasionally assumed ‘Balkanist’ traits. This meant that the British discourse on Bosnia-Herzegovina was not just a simple sub-species of ‘Balkanism’, but a peculiar discourse, here denominated ‘Balkan-deflected Orientalism’. The deconstruction of British stereotypes concerning Bosnia-Herzegovina and the subsequent reconstruction of the discourse were all possible through a study of the image of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of Bosnians in the British public discourse, that, between 1844 and 1912, developed with real force in the pages of travel texts. In conclusion, and on the basis of the investigations described in this book, it would be opportune to pose a further question. If the discourse here analysed can be called ‘Balkan-deflected Orientalism’ referring as it does to a region which was perceived, geographically and culturally, as European, but also as Oriental because of its Islamic character, it is, therefore, essential to question what the situation was with other Balkan regions of a similar Islamic character. What was the public discourse, for example, for Albania, Bulgaria or Macedonia? If the conclusions reached by this study are correct, it would be reasonable to assume that Western collective imaginaries
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towards these areas too were dominated more by the Orientalist approach than by the Balkanist one. Yet, there is very likely one radical difference between BosniaHerzegovina and such Balkan regions, due to the province’s Islamicization. Even though Islam was adopted by only one part of the Bosnian population, it strongly influenced local culture, which followed historical and cultural patterns very different from those of Bulgaria, for example, which was also Ottoman for a long time. The conclusions reached by this study would, most likely, need to be refined in order to verify their possible validity for other Balkan regions and peoples: Pomaks in Bulgaria, for example, or Albanian Muslims and the areas they inhabited. This study, focusing on the representation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of Bosnians in British travel literature in the period 1844-1912, can only hope to contribute to much-needed research projects on the variegated representations of the Balkans and their communities.
I. Emerging geography and the Slavic identification In the first half of the 19th century, Great Britain could count on a centuries-long tradition of travel texts since, in the modern era, writing had become an essential part of travelling and documentation an integral aspect of this activity28. Nevertheless the Balkans only occasionally appeared in the indexes of these travelogues. Poor commercial relations between this region and Britain and the lack of a British expansionist project in this geographic area played a decisive role in forming this cultural attitude. The interest created over the course of centuries in the pages of numerous travel books for destinations in the Near and Middle East, Asia and the Americas, was still missing for the Balkans. The Balkan topos appeared with greater frequency on the pages of travel texts when, with colonial expansion almost completed, it was necessary to organize strategies to defend imperial hegemony29. This political attitude became even more urgent with the appearance of Russia on the Balkan chessboard, together with her territorial conquests from the Ottomans in Asia. As we will see in detail, the main British defensive strategy was elaborated in the 1830s and foresaw the continuity of the Ottoman Empire, to which most of the Balkan region still belonged. This political strategy favoured a trend that brought many British travellers to pry into the Balkans and that developed further in the 1850s, especially immediately before the Crimean war (1854-1856)30. During this conflict Great Britain, challenging Russia, found herself directly implicated in the defence of the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. In other words, it was in these years that a real ‘discovery’ of the Balkans by British public opinion took place, linked with flourishing diplomatic relations between England and ‘European Turkey’ and an increase in the production and publication of popular literature focusing on this area31. With the end of the Crimean war in 1856, the Balkans disappeared once again from the newspapers and official political debates; a situation determined also by the fact that commercial interests remained few. There was no plan for British expansion in the area. Yet, the Balkans did not completely disappear from the English public arena, and even though the region continued to be largely overlooked by politicians – who often showed a superficial knowledge of it – it was still remembered by travellers who continued, albeit rarely, to visit the Balkans, guided either by curiosity or by an adventurous spirit.
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First Travellers, First Information British travel in 19th-century Bosnia-Herzegovina was due both to the new political direction in British foreign policy from the 1830s and to the official involvement of Britain in the Eastern Question from the 1850s32. The first modern traveller to Bosnia-Herezegovina was Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875)33. An authority in the field of Egyptology, Wilkinson matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1816 and left three years later without taking a degree, to begin his grand tour. Between 1821 and 1849 he travelled four times to Egypt, leaving to his contemporaries, as well as to future generations, testimonies on Egyptian archaeological sites, as well as some important studies on hieroglyphic script34. It was probably this interest in archaeology that led him in 1844 to visit Dalmatia and Montenegro, and caused him to visit Herzegovina and its capital Mostar briefly, as results from his travelogue of 1848. Like all the other texts by Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro: with a Journey to Mostar in Herzegovina is characterised by the sketches of archaeological sites the author considered of some importance either simply to register or to transmit to archaeological experts at home, who still, in the 1840s, had little or no knowledge of the important archaeological sites in South-Eastern Europe35. Thus, Wilkinson can be considered one of the first archaeologists to be interested in the Balkan region, and he drew his fellow countrymen’s attention to the geography and topography of the area, as the names “Dalmatia”, “Montenegro”, “Mostar” and “Herzegovina” in the title of his book show, drawing a virtual atlas of the region for his readers at home. The same interest in topography and geography is present in the title of another travel text, Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic, Including Dalmatia, Croatia, and the Souhtern Provinces of the Austrian Empire, by Andrew Archibald Paton (18111874), the first traveller after Wilkinson to offer an account of a trip to BosniaHerzegovina36. Even though the name Bosnia does not appear in Paton’s title, his travelogue reveals that he did visit the western part of the country and left an account of the town of Bihać37. Of Scottish origin, Paton showed a great passion for travelling from a very young age. He was only twenty-five when he first landed in Naples, crossing the Italian peninsula and arriving in Vienna on foot. After this first travel experience, between 1839 and 1862, Paton made also many tours of South-Eastern Europe, including the one from 1846 when he visited Bosnia and other parts of the Balkan peninsula.
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It was thanks to his diplomatic engagements that Paton discovered the Balkan countries; his consular activity engaged him for many years in the Balkans, and even his travelogue from 1849 can be considered a product of this professional experience. Indeed, in 1843, Paton was British consul-general in Serbia and in 1862 he was appointed consul in Ragusa/Dubrovnik and Bocca di Cattaro/Boka Kotorska38. In 1846 he wrote an unofficial report on the Austrian ports in the Adriatic and it was during this mission that he visited the Bosnian town of Bihać. Paton’s travelogue, as well as that by Wilkinson, represents a precious source of information on the geography and topography of the western Balkans. As often happened at that time, there are a number of geographical mistakes in the text, as when Paton showed on a map the mouth of the river Neretva lying to the west of Mostar39. Despite these inaccuracies, that show that these authors were the first to trace the contours of Bosnia for the English geographical imaginary, Paton was much more informed about the historical context of the country than was Wilkinson. Aware of the religious and political tensions that pervaded Bosnia in the middle of the 19th century, probably because of his diplomatic work in the Balkans, in 1849 Paton drew his readers’ attention to the causes of unrest in Bosnia, which he described as the violence of the Muslim population towards their fellow Christian countrymen. It was in this context that Paton stressed the Christian origin of the Bosnian Muslims, placing the issue of the Bosnian Muslims’ past in religious terms and demonstrating a historical knowledge of the religious past of the country not evident in Wilkinson’s work: In one street, I saw a most unusual sight in Turkey – a new mosque built by the Pasha, but in a very rude taste. A thrilling contrast to this new mosque was visible outside the walls. A Christian Church had formerly existed there, but it had been destroyed, so that literally not one stone was left above another; but the ground was still consacrated in the eyes of the Christian rayahs of Bihacs; the temple no longer existed, but here their fathers worshipped, and here, in summer’s heat and winter’s cold, they still assemble for their devotions [...]. In the most distant parts of the Ottoman empire Christianity is tolerated; the Protestant, the Catholic, and the Greek may worship in his own temple, in Tunis [...] but here, at the very foot of the Julian Alps, and within sight of the frontiers of one of the greatest monarchies of Europe, a Christian community dare not rear a roof to shelter their heads from the inclemency of the weather. The Sultan, uniting in his own person the spiritual succession of the Caliphate, and the temporal inheritance of Mohammed II, Selim, and Solyman, speaks and practices, as far as his personal supervision extends, maxims of justice and tolerance; but the descendants of a Christian nation are the fiercest persecutors of the faith of their ancestors40.
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Edmund Spencer41 was less concerned with the country’s geography than the two previous travellers when he crossed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1850, accompanied by the Austrian consul Dimitrije Atanasković, from Novi Pazar to Sarajevo on horse-back. Indeed, when writing about this trip in his travelogue from 1851, Travels in European Turkey, his major preoccupation was to define for his readers at home the political and social conditions of the country: “In our pictures of European Turkey and those provinces of Austria on the Lower Danube [...] our aim has been to describe the customs and manners of the people, their moral, political, and social conditions”42. Spencer noticed the regularity with which insurrections occurred in this country, and also commented on the poor functioning of the government: “a country [Bosnia-Herzegovina] so depopulated, so frequently the theatre of insurrection, and where the executive is weak”43. But this travelogue is peculiar in another matter, too. It reveals a certain degree of attention to the issues of quotidian life, noticing the poor condition of the roads on which the author travelled by horse or the dangers posed by the “Haiducs” and “Ouskoks”44 and the hostility “of some rebel bands of non-reforming Mahometans in Bosnia and Albania”45. It is not possible to deduce the primary motive of Spencer’s journey, at least until we know more about his biography. It may very well be that, behind the name Edmund Spencer, lay some Victorian personage who feared for his privacy and who made a career of writing about the Balkans without necessarily travelling there46. This could also be the reason why his travel accounts were rich with fanciful information and why much data was borrowed from other travellers’ testimonies. Indeed, many aspects of this account of a tour of Bosnia in 1851 were copied from the well-known travelogue by Ami Boué, La Turquie d’Europe, published in 1840, ten years before Spencer’s, and which represented in the Western-European countries a precious source of information on Bosnia47. In 1861, ten years after Edmund Spencer, George Arbuthnot (1824-1899), an army officer of Scottish origin, arrived in Bosnia for explicitly military reasons48. Arbuthnot, indeed, traversed Bosnia during a military mission by Omer Pasha49 against the Christian population, who, in 1861, had revolted against the sultan’s authority. His interest in military matters in the country was probably a consequence of his long military career that, in 1855, saw him engaged as a captain in the British army in the Crimean war. Different from Spencer, who despite being in Bosnia during the 1850s begs’50 revolt left little or no trace of it in his account51, Arbuthnot’s travelogue Herzegovina; or
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Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels also represents a detailed description of what happened in the autumn of 1861 during the Omer Pasha’s military campaign52. Moreover, his travel account was also quite detailed in illustrating the socio-political conditions of the country, as well as historically informed with regard to its ethnoreligious composition. It is particularly interesting to observe Arbuthnot’s method of identifying the population within the Ottoman Empire, as he anticipates the language of racial paradigms that would also become characteristic of British travellers in Bosnia in the 1870s. As the passage below suggests, Arbuthnot, a convinced supporter of the Turkish party in the Balkans, denounces the Russian-sponsored plots that, in the course of the 19th century, frequently occurred in the countries that bordered ‘freed’ Serbia, while dividing the population of the Ottoman Empire between “Slave” and “Turk”, “Christian Slave” and “Mussulman Slave” and finally between “Asiatic Turk” and “European Turk”. Yet, Arbuthnot neither argued nor thematised this subdivision, as would happen in later years: They [Russians] had launched the Slave against the Turk, and then the Christian Slave against the Mussulman Slave, whilst at the same time the Asiatic Turk – the Turk pur sang [sic]– was struggling throughout Anatolia against the reformed and European Turk53.
Similar language is to be found in a travelogue that appeared anonymously in 1865 under the title Notes on the South Slavonic Countries in Austria and Turkey in Europe and whose authors, Paulina Irby and Georgina Mackenzie, were made known a few years later. Even though it emerged from this account that Irby and Mackenzie had also travelled to Bosnia in 1865, they did not leave a detailed account of the country at that time, as they would do some years later. This was, in part, due to the fact that in 1865 their intention was to offer an overall account of “the South Slavonic countries” held by Austria and Turkey, for, as they wrote, these provinces were “as little known to Englishmen as the interior of Tartary or the centre of Africa”54. Nonetheless the authors offer a detailed description of the city of Sarajevo and of its population. The British were not the only travellers to visit Bosnia in the 19th century55. Between 1850 and the first years of the 20th century there were many French56, Austrians57 and Russians58, and also Croats and Serbs, who made excursions to that country59. According to an earlier study, it would appear that the latter, in comparison with their Western European colleagues, were short on information relative to the historical background of the country, a reason why, in addition to the obvious
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linguistic difficulties, they were not given serious consideration by their Western European colleagues60. In any case, even though both the number of European travellers to Bosnia, and the publication of their travelogues, increased, Bosnia continued to be relatively ignored in Western Europe, causing many travellers to remind the reader frequently that Bosnia, as a country, was little explored and poorly described61. Travellers in the 1870s: racial identification, culture and politics What took British travellers to Bosnia in the 19th century and increased the foreign interest in the country, were not only the new orientations in foreign policy, as already mentioned, but also the political and social upheavals within the country. For the European countries involved in the Eastern Question, any unrest within the Ottoman Empire represented a source of preoccupation. Some scholars have rightly observed that 19th-century European travel writing on the Balkans was at its most informative in the period immediately before, or during, the significant revolutions in this peninsula62. A growing interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina among British travellers between the 1850s and the 1870s is clearly evident. In the middle of the century the British were attracted by the intervention of Omer Pasha Latas in Bosnia; in the 1870s, and especially between 1875 and 1876, it was the rayah’s revolt which prompted renewed interest for this region among the British. Travellers in the 1870s, while showing a growing interest in the analysis of the sociopolitical conditions of the region, also sought to identify the unifying element for the peoples within Bosnian society. It was within this context that the Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim Bosnians acquired their principal distinctive feature for British commentators, that is their Slavic racial identity. Even though these three ethnic groups continued to be compared to their neighbours also on the basis of their religion, their alleged Slavic racial origin became the essential trait that identified them, on the basis of which they were all grouped together independently of their ethno-religious origin, as we will see in greater detail in the next chapter. The novelty of the use of the racial identifying tag in referring to Balkan peoples was certainly indicative of the greater attention paid by the British to the racial composition of society more generally and to the ‘Ottoman Balkans’ in particular. In Great Britain, “race” was in the 19th century a decisive tool of categorisation, as well as
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
the key to understanding the customs and behaviour of peoples. Even though racial concepts did not have the clear racist connotations which they were to acquire later with the affirmation of “biological racism”, at this historical moment their use was widespread, connoting some sort of confused mix of biological and linguistic-cultural traits63. This cultural phenomenon inevitably influenced British travellers in Bosnia-Herzegovina between the 1870s and the first years of the 20th century. In fact, the language they used in these years to connote Bosnians from the point of view of their Slavic origin was distinctly racial, with all the ambiguous nuances that this approach had at that time. The phenomenon also depended on the particular circumstances of both the Slavic and the Balkan situation. First, in the 1840s ‘Pan-Slavism’ as a movement became much more visible and Slavs, long an abstract philosophical issue for most WesternEuropeans, began to gain more materiality and warrant more interest64. Furthermore, the 19th century was characterised by the birth of modern Balkan national movements that opened a new phase in the history of the Ottoman Empire. In this period the foreign and domestic cultural relations of the Balkan intelligentsia intensified not only with politicians and traders in Western and Central Europe but also with European intellectuals, particularly within the circles inspired by Romanticism and Herderian historical and cultural principles65. All this led, in the West, to a renewal of interest in the Christians of the ‘Ottoman Balkans’, in Slavic subjects, as well as in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the Bosnians66. As the 19th century developed, cultural and political movements that aimed to reunite the South Slav peoples began to exercise a powerful influence. The well-known Illyrianist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, as well as the currents of ‘jugoslovenstvo’ [Yugoslavism] and of ‘Austroslavism’ that spread in the Habsburg context during the following years can be mentioned as examples67. The intellectuals operating in this context often stressed the ‘Slavic essence’ of the Bosnians, a feature that, along with Pan-Slavism and the Balkan national movements, characterized the intellectual and political debates of these regions in the period examined. Even though the category of “race” was not always explicitly mentioned and often could only be sensed in the background of the expressions such as “Sclav”, “Slav” or “Sclavonic”, the 19th-century idea of race was certainly in use among the travellers and it prevalently designated a commonality of descent of Bosnians. The first explicit connotation of the Bosnians as belonging to the “Slavic race” appeared in a tourist guide from 1854, A handbook for travellers in Turkey (describing Constantinople,
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European Turkey, Asia Minor, Armenia, and Mesopotamia), which addressed British travellers who intended to gain a deeper knowledge of this still largely unknown part of the Ottoman Empire. This very authoritative work, widely disseminated among the British travelling community and published by the important printer John Murray68, was by 1854 in its third edition69. In this book a tripartite religious division of the population of the Bosnian eyalet70 was offered: “Mohammedanism”, the “Greek” and the “Latin Church” were mentioned, along the lines of the official administrative subdivision within the Ottoman Empire based on the millet-system71. The guide also emphasized that these three groups were unified in that they were all members of a shared “Slavonic race”: The population of the whole eyalet is estimated at somewhat above a million, of which number about one-half has embraced Mohammedanism at various epochs since the Turkish conquest, while the remaining majority nearly equally divided between the Greek and the Latin Churches. They are all of the Slavonic race, and speak a dialect of the Slavonic language72.
Due to the growing popularity of tourist guides in 19th-century Britain, witnessed by their increased production and competition in the market73, it would not be hazardous to assume that this Murray Handbook played a central role in spreading the idea of a Bosnia-Herzegovina somehow united on the basis of its peoples’ racial origin. In the years to come, this issue would, indeed, influence the minds of many travellers, whose priority would become the identification of the Bosnians starting from their presumably Slavic racial origin. Among the first traveller to identify the Bosnian population in Slavic racial terms was Humphry Sandwith, who travelled to Bosnia in 187374. Already in 1849, Sandwith (after failing in an attempt to open a practice as a physician in London) arrived in Istanbul, from which base he would pursue in the years to follow his archaeological interests, joining different archaeological sorties to Asia Minor. At the beginning of his stay, Sandwith gained a chance to confirm the correctness of his Turkophilic position, which, just as for most travellers who travelled to the Ottoman Empire in this period, became part of his intellectual baggage. During the Crimean crisis, when he was engaged by “The Times” as a war correspondent, his strong defence of the Turkish cause caused the newspaper to terminate his employment. But Sandwith did not give up on the idea of offering his opinion during the Crimean war, which saw Britain fight on the side of Turkey; indeed, in 1854 his role changed from civilian to military. He joined the irregular force organized by Gen-
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eral Beatson as staff surgeon and upon its disbandment he became the chief military officer for British and Turkish forces at Kars. His medical and organizational skills were pushed to the limit when the Russian siege of Kars led to starvation and rampant cholera among the besieged troops. After the fall of Kars in 1855, Sandwith was the sole British captive to be released by the Russians, in appreciation of his services to the sick and wounded among their forces, as well as his own. On his return to Britain he was celebrated as a hero for his services during the Crimean campaign; he was given the honour of a private interview with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. His account of those years was offered in A Narrative of the Siege of Kars in 1856, which achieved great commercial and critical success75. In this book we find traces of that criticism of the Ottoman Empire and the Turks that would become decisive during his mission in ‘European Turkey’ and in Serbia in the 1860s. In fact, during his first Balkan tour in 1864, he assumed an anti-Turkish position and engaged in defending in Britain the cause of the South Slavic Christian population. And the same standpoint emerges from his strongly autobiographical novel which tells the story of a doctor in Turkish service who becomes disillusioned with Ottoman rule76. This also explains why Sandwith, in his travel account of Bosnia from 1873, saw the future of this country in a close relationship with Serbia77. While never stating this explicitly, it is evident that the idea of a Bosnia integrated within Serbia was, according to Sandwith, fully sustainable on the basis of the racial cohesion of these regions. This emerges in his consideration of the exterior appearance of the peoples of Bosnia, and especially of the clothing worn by Bosnian Muslims. The latter, according to Sandwith, looked very much “Moslem” and “Asiatic”, even though he expected that all who belonged to the ‘Slavic race’, Bosnian Muslims included, would not exhibit “very striking contrasts”, even though they lived under different governments: “I had supposed that Sclavonians of the same race, though living under different Governments, would not present any very striking contrasts, excepting such as were obvious due to the influence of Government”78. The debate initiated with the Murray guidebook in 1854 and re-enlivened with Sandwith in 1873 did not acquire a hegemonic character, as would happen in the course of the second half of the 1870s. This can be observed in the writing of James Creagh, an Irish traveller who arrived in Bosnia two years after Sandwith, in 1875, and like him disembarked in “Turkish Brod”. What distinguished this traveller from
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others that we have already discussed was his open conservatism that, in the travel account from 1876, emerged in his explicitly-stated Turkophilic convictions. In a long tour that Creagh undertook in 1875 and that also included Hungary, Slavonia, Serbia, Dalmatia, Montenegro and northern Albania, Bosnia was just one stage79. In comparison with Sandwith, this traveller was less preoccupied by race issues, mostly focusing on the Bosnians’ outward appearance. Bosnia, indeed, which he also called “Eslamiah”, was a place marked by numerous religious differences, that passed unobserved when the mode of dress of the Bosnian population was compared: “Whether Mussulmans or Christians, the dress is the same; and I was often surprised to hear from the mouth of a person who looked like a bearded true believer, that he was a Christian of the orthodox or catholic Church”80. With regard to ethno-national composition, Creagh did notice some differences, recognizing for example the “Bosniac Mussulmans” as different from the “Turks”. Nevertheless, this facet of life in Bosnia did not represent a matter of great interest to him. As the passage quoted below shows, the author discussed aesthetic resemblances relative to the dress of these two different groups and claimed that their dress unified the fellow religionists of different ethnic and national origins: In manners and appearance there is no difference whatever between a Bosniac Mussulman and a Turk; and a traveller suddenly arriving at Seraijevo, which, on account of the beauties of the situation, as well as from the fanaticism of its inhabitants, is called the Damascus of the North, might easily fancy that he was in the heart of Asia81.
Eventually, Creagh did also present evidence of being aware of the Slavic origin of these “Bosniac Mussulmans”, when he talked about the “Beys” and the “Capitans” as “the renegade Slavish aristocracy”82, even though it was not his intention to develop this issue any further in his writing. In the same years a number of travellers advocated very different positions with respect to the cultural ‘homogeneity’ of the Bosnian population; if Sandwith pointed to an enormous difference between Muslim and Christian habits of dress, Creagh suggested the exact opposite. This was very likely due to their opposing political positions: on one side there was Sandwith’s Serbophilism, and, on the other, Creagh’s Turkophilic tendencies. Of most interest is certainly their approach to the Bosnians ‘slavicity’; where Sandwith made a fleeting reference to race, such language was almost completely absent in Creagh. What both texts show is that by the middle of the 1870s, the racial paradigm with which to identify the Bosnian population still
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rested in the background, waiting for a call to centre stage which would arrive in the later years of the same decade. The peasants’ revolts of the 1870s, beginning with the Bosnian uprising of September 1875, and followed by the Bulgarian in May 1876, marked the return, after two decades, of the Eastern Question on the international political stage. In Britain the renewal of this interest in so called ‘European Turkey’ is evident from the growing number of travelogues that focused on South-Eastern European regions and frequently reported on the events of those years. Some of the most important travel books and articles on 19th-century Bosnia date from the second half of the 1870s83. These texts are distinguished from those that preceded them by a markedly different political position. What characterises them indeed is that they were no longer Turkophilic, but rather Slavophilic. Some, being real and proper products of their time, were written under the influence of Gladstonian political ideas, then forming in the 1870s, which tended to favour the national emancipation of the Slavo-Christian populations. Others anticipated such liberal positions and, as we will see in the last chapter, in some cases they even influenced them. Among these travellers we find the early travelogues of Adeline Paulina Irby and Arthur J. Evans. In contrast to travellers from the 1840s and 1860s, British travellers from the 1870s focused much more on social conditions and political influences in Bosnia; the issue in focus was the contemporary tendency towards revolt, whose causes they investigated, prioritising social issues. They also offered an account of the ethno-confessional and racial composition of the country. For some authors it was important to assert the national identity of the Bosnian Christian population, especially as in those years in liberal circles there were numerous voices who supported a national emancipation of the Christian South-Slavic populations of ‘European Turkey’. For this same reason, the important issue for all authors was to identify and classify unifying elements of the country that were no longer only racial, but also cultural and social, and that facilitated and justified any national ‘separatist’ aspiration of the South Slavs towards the Ottoman Empire. In this perspective, hope of religious unity in the country based on the re-conversion to Christianity of the Bosnian Muslims reinforced an already existing ‘race point of view’; according to some travellers, this would further compact the area and strengthen the political projects that were inclined to support Bosnia’s separation from the Ottoman Empire and lead to Bosnia’s unification with Serbia.
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When Adeline Paulina Irby84 and Georgina Muir Mackenzie85 published, in 1877, their travel account of Bosnia-Herzegovina, entitled Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, this, as well as representing for a British readership a rich source of information relative to the customs and uses of this country between 1860s and 1870s, offered an analysis of the social turmoil that occurred in the country between 1875 and 187686. In fact, the travel account from 1877 differed from its first edition, published in 1867, with three additional chapters dealing with the insurrection in Bosnia. The first edition of the book was a result of two decades of significant investigation and was recognized as such. In the 1870s it acquired great popularity and a certain degree of authoritativeness, being even quoted by Gladstone during his election campaign of 187687. In reality, when, in 1877, the second and enlarged edition of Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe was published, Georgina Mackenzie was already dead for three years, and the three additional chapters had been written by her fellow traveller Adeline Paulina Irby. Yet, the travel books, which even after Georgina’s death continued to be published under both women’s names, ought be considered the result of a common Balkan experience, shared by these two women over almost fifteen years. It was, in fact, two decades before the publication of 1877, in 1858, that Irby and Mackenzie were fellow travellers in the Balkans for the first time, members of a common expedition to the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, when they first revealed to their audience at home the sufferings of the Slavo-Christian populations living in the Ottoman Empire. It was in this context that the two travellers were arrested by Ottoman forces on a charge of espionage, and later accused of having ‘pan-Slavistic tendencies’. Neither was discouraged and, two years later, in 1860, they both toured the Balkans once again, visiting territories within the Ottoman dominion. Both the first travel adventure, which led to the two travellers’ arrest, and the second, were recounted in books and articles published between 1858 and 186588. Even the first edition of Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe referred to the experiences of both trips undertaken by the two women, distinguishing itself for its attempt to offer to a British audience an account of historical events in Bosnia, as well as for its focus on personal impressions conditioned by their experience89. Evidence of Irby’s and Mackenzie’s emotional attachment to the Balkans, fired by these two trips, is demonstrated by the fact that, in 1865, they moved to promote
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education among the Slavo-Christian population, founding an association that in the years ahead would raise charitable funds for the Orthodox population of Bosnia90. Indeed, in 1871, Irby, now accompanied by Priscilla Johnston91 (Mackenzie had married the consul-general of the Ionian Islands, Sir Charles Sebright that same year), opened a school in Sarajevo for Bosnian Orthodox girls92. The support offered by these two women to the Bosnian Orthodox population, which reached its peak in 1871 when they opened their school, also explained why Irby, writing about the events of 1875 and 1876, focused above all on the conditions of the Christian rayah and the violence under which they lived, a violence blamed on the bashi bazouks93. In her reports on the Bosnian insurrection, Irby emphasized the sufferings of the Orthodox Christian population, holding Turkish tyranny fully responsible. In order to demonstrate the violence of the Turkish army and bashi bazouks towards the Christian population of Bosnia, Irby often referred to the Bulgarian events of May 1876 that reminded her British readership of another period of relatively familiar Turkish tyranny: “The ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ have been repeated again and again in Bosnia, from time to time, on a small scale, in different parts of the country ever since the beginning of the uprising”94. Yet, even though Irby gave moral support to the Christian-Orthodox population, the chapters dedicated to Bosnia in the edition of 1877 also made mention of other ethno-religious groups: Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish95. She also focused on aspects of cohabitation, or rather the absence thereof, among Bosnians at the end of the 19th century. At one point she complained about the fact that the population, who could boast the same ‘Slavonic’ origins (“forming part of one Slavonic race”), claimed also to be composed of three different “nations”, because “so great is the division marked by difference of creed”96. The racial language adopted, which grouped Muslims together with Christians, also confirmed the establishment of a paradigm initiated in 1872 by Sandwith. Besides the issue of racial origin, Irby and Mackenzie also identified in Christianity an adhesive for the Bosnian population and Bosnian society. There are some very interesting and peculiar observations by these two travellers, advanced also by Arthur J. Evans as we will see later, which relate to cultural syncretism on Bosnian territory and which, in the case of Irby and Mackenzie, focused on typically Christian religious practices within the community of Muslim believers. In particular, Irby notes the Christian feasts of St. John the Baptist, St. Elias and St. George, which she claimed were still preserved in some form by the Muslim community of Sarajevo:
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The Mussulmans of Sarajevo still keep St. John the Baptist’s day, when the sun is said to dance at dawn on the top of the hill Trebovich: on that day, and on St. Elias’ and St. George’s days, the Mussulman population turns out of doors, and the whole side of Trebovich, especially the neighbourhood of the Moslem saint’s tomb, is bright with red turbants and jackets and groups of women in white veils97.
A similar remark could not be politically innocent in a text that was, otherwise, very politicized. Only a few lines later, Irby considered the re-conversion of the Muslims to Christianity as a very plausible suggestion: Many of the Bosnian Beys are not indisposed to embrace the Christianity professed by their forefathers. They call a priest to say prayers over them when they are ill, they keep the name of the patron saint of their family, and they preserve with care the patents of nobility of their Christian ancestors98.
It would therefore appear that Irby sought some other elements then present in Bosnian society which might prove capable of reunifying the three “nations”, which otherwise shared the same racial origin. An alternative, Irby was suggesting, could be conceived of if Slavic Muslims reconverted to Christianity. It was hoped that, by the process of religious homologation, added to the issue of racial origin, Bosnia would reach national unification that, at the time of Irby’s travels, seemed to her hopelessly lost. Irby was not the only English person, writing at that time, to believe possible the re-conversion of Bosnian Muslims to Christianity. The same conviction was shared by William Forsyth99. Forsyth, probably inspired by Irby’s accounts, whose articles he often quoted100, developed similar ideas in his The Slavonic Provinces south of the Danube from 1876: We must never forget this when speaking, not only of the Bosnians, but also of other Mussulmans in Turkey in Europe. They are not Osmanlis – not of the same race as those fierce Orientals who crossed the Bosphorus, and made subject to their sway some of the fairest regions of the earth. The consequence is that they have always been distinguished by a spirit of opposition to the central authority of Constantinople, and some writers who have had opportunities, by residence in Bosnia, of closely observing the temper of the people, are of opinion that the Bosnian Mussulmans would, in case Bosnia became independent of the Porte, have little difficulty in changing their religion, and embracing the Christian creed of their forefathers101.
In 1875 Paulina Irby and Priscilla Johnston were forced to close their school and to abandon Sarajevo and Bosnia. Nevertheless, this did not interfere with their campaign for the education of the Bosnian Orthodox population. Indeed, in Austro-
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Hungarian Slavonia, where they took shelter, they also organized aid for refugees in the community and constructed schools for children, distributing supplies to the homeless. Their charitable activity continued in the following years too, so that, between 1877 and 1878, Irby ran more than twenty schools throughout the Dalmatian and Slavonian territories. Probably the best English testimony from Bosnia during the years of insurrection was that of Arthur J. Evans. During his first travel to the Balkans, in 1871102, Evans was still a student of history at Brasenose College, Oxford. The Balkan tour allowed him to discover certain regions of Croatia and Slovenia, but also Kostajnica, a town on the Ottoman frontier, where he bought a Turkish fez and other items of Turkish dress, evidence that, already during this first trip, Evans was fascinated by the diversity of these Balkan regions. One year later, in 1872, he returned to the Balkans, accompanied by his brother Norman. In 1873 he then published an article for “Fraser’s Magazine” that, beyond revealing an ethnographic interest in the peoples the two met on their journeys, was also rich in archaeological insights103. In 1874 the future discoverer of the ancient Minoan civilization at Knossos decided to explore other parts of the European continent. He went to Sweden and Finland, returning home after a short period of time, deeply disappointed at not finding any sites of archaeological interest in the Scandinavian lands104. His next tour to the Balkans, in 1875, was very likely prompted by archaeological insights he came upon during his earlier visits. He and his brother Lewis first went to Zagreb, Sisak and Kostajnica, which he had already seen during his earlier visits, and then to the unexplored regions of the ‘Ottoman Balkans’ (see Map 2). Unbeknownst to them at the time, the two brothers witnessed the start of what is considered one of the most important periods of social upheaval in Bosnia’s modern history. The insurrection (1875-1878) that Evans witnessed undoubtedly enriched the adventurous character of his experience; at the same time, an event of such dimensions brought to the foreground a series of socio-political matters that characterized the area, making Evans sensitive to the relevant problems of the Balkan peoples. Stimulated by these events, on his return to England, he decided to write a travel account that brought the complexity of the Bosnian situation to the attention of his readers105. Evans’s account, rich in anthropological and ethnographical observations and describing in minute detail the natural beauties of these lands, also contains lofty reflections on Bosnia’s ancient, medieval and modern history, while at the same time
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Map 2 Evans’s Bosnian Tour After A. Brown, Before Knossos. Arthur Evans’s travels in the Balkans and Crete, Oxford 1993, p. 91.
constituting an inquiry into the origins of the revolt. Moreover, his conclusions concur with those of historians today: Evans proposed that the main cause of the Bosnian revolt was social unrest and that the members of the rayah – non-Muslim Ottoman subjects – who rose to power were mostly Orthodox and even occasionally Roman Catholics, and that occasionally even the non-land owning Muslim population played an active role in the revolt. Indeed, people of all ranks were victims of a corrupt feudal system and they revolted in order to improve their work and daily
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conditions, which had deteriorated due to the continuous and enormous increase in taxation. Only subsequently, when Evans was no longer in the country, did the revolt assume the features of a rebellion with national connotations, after the Serb notables of Bosnia turned it in favour of unification of the region with the adjoining Principality of Serbia. In his book, which also included a “glimpse” of the population of Croatia-Slavonia and the Republic of Ragusa, Evans analysed the socio-cultural dimensions of the country from religious, ethnographic and historical perspectives. His travelogue was then enriched with passages that focused on Bosnian natural beauties, as well as being characterised by, for him, unavoidable digressions on archaeology. Besides, there are also some very interesting remarks on the syncretisms which characterised Bosnian society. Similarly to Irby, he placed emphasis on what united the ethnic groups of Bosnia, making reference to both local and regional examples. His detailed remarks regarding north-Bosnian Croat women’s custom of plaiting their hair round the fez ‘à la belle Serbe’ are striking, as are his remarks on the practices of some Christian pilgrims who grovelled on the ground and kissed the earth “as in a mosque”. There is the suspicion that Evans was in search of certain ‘characteristically Bosnian’ syncretistic practices in order to find, if not a solution, then at least a counterweight to religious, ethnic and social conflicts to which he was a passive witness106. Furthermore, he also showed interest in the political events of those years, without ever openly siding with any South Slavic party. It is significant that Evans chose to unify the population of Bosnia, not only on the basis of a cultural koinè, both religious and folkloric, but also on the basis of its racial origin. Indeed, Evans did not doubt, for example, that the native Muslim population for example belonged to the ‘Slavic race’ as did their fellow Christian countrymen, confirming in this way a continuity with the previous travellers. In his opening chapter, “Historical Review of Bosnia”, Evans addressed the topic of the mass conversion to Islam of the local population after the arrival of the Turks, also writing about “the unique phenomenon of a race of Sclavonic Mohametans” – a group, Evans noted, which ought for no reason be confused with the “Turks”: “This must be borne in mind at the present moment, for nothing is more liable to confuse the questions at issue than to look on the Mussulmans inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina as Turks”107. Between 1876 and 1878, the Gladstonian election campaign further popularized South Slavic issues, leading to an increase, among the English, of public interest in
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the Balkans. It was for this reason that, in 1877, Evans returned to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, now as a correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian”108. Two years later, he wrote about the same Bosnian revolts which he had first encountered in 1875. This time, very likely also influenced by recent Gladstonian ideas, his articles on Bosnia-Herzegovina focused mostly on the Christian rayah and the outcome of their rebellion109. Evans reported about burnt villages, as well as about massacred women, children and the elderly, showing both affection and moral support for the people and their cause. Nevertheless, he still had not outlined a political project regarding the future for South Slavs. He returned to this matter later, in October 1878, when he advanced the idea of an independent state of the South Slavs under the direction of Serbia110. Between March 1877 and October 1878 Evans, who lived between Bosnia, Croatia and England, worked in the Balkans as a journalist, while at the same time engaging at home in numerous humanitarian activities in support of Bosnian refugees. Much of his time was also dedicated to reviewing books dealing with the Balkans. At the end of October Evans decided to settle with his wife in Dubrovnik. In the next three years he worked more as an historian and archaeologist than as a journalist, and this was due prevalently to two facts: in 1878 Bosnia was occupied by the Austrians and, even though the revolts continued and Evans could have continued writing articles regarding this topic, it became very difficult to send them to Britain, due to Austrian censorship. Furthermore, Gladstone, who in 1880 was elected prime minister, favoured a policy of collaboration with Austria, abandoning the project of the South Slavic national emancipation. What followed was a decline of the British interest in the Balkans, and also a subsequent fall in demand for articles on the part of the “Manchester Guardian”. In this period Evans outlined a history of the Illyrian lands111 and a history of Dubrovnik112, which led him to develop a deeper knowledge of Dalmatia and to travel more extensively throughout Serbia, Montenegro, Sandžak and Albania. Evans not only increased his geographical knowledge of these areas, but he also became convinced of their archaeological merit. Even during these years, when British public interest in the region was rather limited, he did not give up his interest in the future destiny of the South Slavs, continuing to support their national cause, and, after the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, continuing to act against their Austrian ‘occupiers’. In April 1880 Evans described the situation in Herzegovina following the establishment of the new Austrian administration in these words:
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There can be no doubt that Trebinje has gained in some material ways from its new drill-masters; its trading Begs and bugs have alike diminished; it certainly is cleaner. But I should say the present administration was quite intolerable in all other respects. The people are treated not as liberated, but as conquered and inferior race; their sense of Right – which they do possess in a remarkable degree – is simply trodden underfoot. It is military law plus bureaucratic vexation. I saw gangs of men and boys forced to work on the roads without receiving any pay – simply the old Corvée – one of the familiar oppressions of Turkish rule, reintroduced into districts which succeeded in putting a stop to it by armed resistance113.
Evans’s position was becoming ever more anti-Austrian, and charged with leaking sensitive information regarding the Habsburg rule in Herzegovina in March of 1882114, he was accused of hostile conduct towards the Austrians and was given three days to leave Dubrovnik115. Subsequently he was arrested for treachery and put in the town’s prison; after six weeks he was released and banned from the territories under Austrian administration, being obliged to return to England116. It was in this way that Evans left Dalmatia, at that time an Austrian territory, where he had resided for five years, only to return to these lands fifty years later, in 1932117, walking on the ‘free’ streets of Zagreb, Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, now part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the 1870s a number of British magazines and newspapers had correspondents in Bosnia, anxious to attain the latest news from the fiery ‘Oriental’ front. Their accounts appeared between 1875 and 1876 in “Fraser’s Review”, “The British Quarterly Review”, “The Edinburgh Review”, “The Cornhill Magazine” and “Good Words”118. The authors focused on the events of the peasants’ revolts, sometimes manifesting a strong philanthropic attitude. Aware that the audience at home knew little about the social and political conditions of the country, or of its ethno-national, racial and religious composition, correspondents often wrote about these specific aspects, too. Many stressed the interior cohesion of the country, frequently drawing attention to the racial identity of the population. Many articles published in this period remained unsigned, as was A Ride through Bosnia, which appeared in “Fraser’s Magazine” in November 1875. It was commissioned “by the Government of the Sublime Porte”, with the task of examining “all the various lines of railway recently constructed for the Ottoman Government by the ‘Societé Impériale’, under the organisation of Baron Hirsch”119. The author also included a sketch map showing, as he writes, “the Railways opened for Traffic” (see Map 3).
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The opening lines of this report provided some general information on the geography and history of Bosnia. Explaining the origin of the name Bosnia, “derived from the river Bosna, which flows through part of the country, emptying itself at the northern frontier into the Save”, the piece continued to examine the history of the subjection of the country to the Turks120. The local population, for this author, did not constitute an object of significant interest, a judgement common to other travellers at that time; only the Bosnian Muslims, referred to as “Bosniak Mussulmans”, aroused some curiosity. The reader is informed of some ‘strange’ religious practices that characterised their community; the cult of patron saints for their households, the latter being an Orthodox custom, was also to be found among these Muslims: “They [Bosniak Mussulmans] mix up a certain amount of Graeco-Sclave Church tradition with their own faith, the custom being common of having patron saints for their household, as St. George, St. Eljas, St. Peter”121. Thus, what linked this travel account with others previously discussed was the recognition of a cultural and religious substratum common to both the Bosnian Mus-
Map 3 Sketch Map of Turkey in Europe Source: Anonymous, A Ride through Bosnia, in “Fraser’s Magazine”, November 1875, p. 551.
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lims and the Orthodox and Catholic Bosnian populations, on the basis of which it would prove possible to point out a certain anthropo-cultural cohesion in the area. The travelogue published in July 1876 in “The British Quarterly Review” also appeared unsigned, and was an account of a Bosnian tour undertaken between the end of 1875 and the beginning of 1876122. In the article entitled The Independence and Integrity of the Ottoman Empire, the anonymous author investigated class relations within the Ottoman Empire, and ‘Ottoman Bosnia’ was investigated as a place where a “feudal system” survived, and, according to the author, continued to regulate social and economic relations within the country, despite attempts by Omer Pasha in 1850 to suppress it. In addition, the author remarked that the Muslim and the Christian peasants lived under the same conditions and that both communities were subject to their Muslim landlords. This article also focused, in particular, on the racial and national origin of the “ignorant and barbarous” Muslim landlords, and, unlike the previous author, this one was particularly interested in identifying this ethnic group in racial terms. Firstly, Bosnian Muslims were compared to the Christians on the basis of their race; secondly, the reader was also informed of their ‘nationality’, which, the reader was instructed, should not be confused with that of the Turks. In fact, the unknown author explained, even if the name “Turk” was often used to refer to their nationality, this was to be considered a form of misinterpretation brought about by the Ottoman tradition of extrapolating nationality from religious affiliation. In the case of the Bosnian Muslims, the author noted, in order to be more precise, it would be necessary to also speak in terms of ‘racial affiliation’ and thus “that the Turks are not Turks, but Moslem Slavonians ”123. 1878-1912: the continuity of the paradigm in a new epoch The travellers who visited Bosnia in the years between the Austro-Hungarian occupation of the country and the beginning of the First Balkan War for the most part supported Austrian involvement in Bosnia; involvement that, with the annexation of 1908, incorporated Bosnia within the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. Such a political perspective was also facilitated by the British government attitude towards Bosnia-Herzegovina after 1880. After the occupation of the country by the Austrians, agreed at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 through the offices of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Derby, in 1880, even Gladstone, in his role as new prime minister, became a supporter of Habsburg interests in the Balkans and consequently in Bosnia124.
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The professional categories to which the travellers to ‘Habsburg Bosnia’ belonged were numerous and varied. Especially after the turmoil of 1882, when Bosnia once again became a site of both Christian and Muslim unrest, prompted by a military law which made all adult Bosnian males liable for conscription into the AustroHungarian army125, we find journalists, diplomats, businessmen, anthropologists, archaeologists and professional travellers coming to Bosnia on the invitation of the Austrian authorities. In this period there were also many more women who visited Bosnia. What mostly distinguished these travellers from those who preceded them was their attention to the relatively new concept of tourism126. They focused on the cultural attractions and the natural resources of Bosnia and tried to promote at home this newly discovered tourist destination. Post-1878 travellers showed little interest in the social, ethnic and religious composition of the country. On the rare occasions when they addressed these topics, they reverted to the interpretative patterns used by previous travellers in describing Bosnia. In those circumstances, the Bosnian population was again perceived from the point of view of their ‘Slavic race’, confirming the paradigm prevalent in the second half of the 1870s. In 1879 Robert Hamilton Lang, a banker of Scottish origins, arrived in Bosnia127. Lang was the first British traveller in ‘Austrian Bosnia’ who openly and unhesitatingly offered his support for the Austrian party in the country. Lang arrived in Bosnia from Vienna by train, a railway line having just recently been completed by the Austrian administration. The focus of his interest was both the contemporary Bosnian situation, with special attention to the civil advances made under the new government, and the historical context of 1878 that had preceded the Austro-Hungarian occupation. In particular, Lang concentrated on analysing the resistance of the local Muslim population to the Austrians and the repressive actions of the new Austrian administration: But from all that I heard and saw, I arrived at the conviction that Austria has no more opposition to fear in Bosnia, and that under a cautious and judicious administration the country will now quietly acquiesce in its change of masters128.
Lang, in his account, was above all interested in the Muslim Bosnian population and the effects of Islam on the behavioural attitudes of this people who, according to him, belonged to the ‘Slavic race’. The religious affiliation of the Muslims, he wrote, led them to be frequently considered “of a less industrious stock”. For this reason, in the last lines of his article, he refers to his desire to observe what effects
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the new administration would have on this population, who, like their fellow Christian countrymen, belonged however to the ‘Slavic race’: “Bosnian Mussulmans and Bosnian Christians are of the same blood and race, and differ only as a Mormon of British origin differs from an English Churchman”129. If Christians happened to be more industrious and prosperous than their fellow Muslims, then, Lang writes, it would be shown “the one religion is more calculated to develop the material interests of its believers than the other”130. Lang followed yet another trend evident in the writings of many travellers to Bosnia in these years, when he referred to the natural resources and the attractions of the landscape that, in his view, characterised Bosnia. Writing about the rich potential offered by the Bosnian rivers for lovers of fishing131, he provided the likely reason for travel to Bosnia to Thomas Wodehous Legh. At the time of his Bosnian tour, in 1890, Legh was a member of parliament for the Conservative Party, having spent five years, from 1881 to 1886, in Paris as an attaché132. The reason for his visit to Bosnia was his intention to investigate the range of fishing possibilities in the country: “My investigations were chiefly confined to the fishing capacities of the country”133. It was very likely thanks to such interests that Legh neglected to write of the local population, only referring to the Bosnian Muslims. He described them as fanatics, a quality that he could deduce from their dress; yet, Legh also emphasized how amazed he was to discover that, as he explained, the Muslims of Bosnia were not “Turks”, a fanatic population par excellence, but “renegade Slavs”. Legh, indeed, went on to explain that the reason for Bosnian Muslims’ fanaticism was their religion and its “transforming power”, and not their Slavic origin: the uncompromising nature of the Mussulman inhabitants is reflected in their very dress. […] The circumstance is all the more curious when it is remembered that the Bosnian Mussulmans are, strictly speaking, not Turks at all, but renegade Slavs, who are unacquainted with the Turkish language, and bear the same names as their Christian neighbours. There could be no more forcible demonstration of the transforming power of Islam134.
Whereas Legh emphasized the importance of Bosnian natural resources, especially this country’s fishing possibilities, Robert Dunkin was the first British traveller who attempted to persuade his fellow countrymen to discover the tourist potentialities of the country. In his book of 1897, In the Land of the Bora, published under the pseudonym “Snaffle”, Dunkin evaluated Bosnia as a destination of innumerable attractions for modern tourism135.
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Dunkin’s interest in tourism distracted him from looking into the other characteristics of the country, for example its religious composition. In chapter twenty one, for example, he completely ignored the existence of the Serb-Orthodox population, whom he erroneously labelled “Greek Catholics”, amazed by the fact that they were defined by their governors as “Orthodox” and that they, too, talked of themselves as such: “Strange to say, these are always spoken of, not only by themselves, but by their Roman Catholic rulers, as the ‘orthodox’”136. “Snaffle”, unlike the previous two travellers who wrote about the racial similarities between the Bosnian Muslims and their fellow countrymen Christians, referred to the similarities in language and dress between the two ethno-religious groups, a reason why, he wrote, the latter should not be called “Turks”: “the majority of the inhabitants of Mostar are Turks, or, to put it more correctly, Mussulmans, for the religion is the only difference. In dress, and even language, there is no distinction between them and their Christian neighbours”137. Some travellers who visited Bosnia before and after “Snaffle” described the tourist potentialities of this region by using the category of ‘exoticism’ for this South-Eastern region. They depicted Bosnia as an ‘exotic’ site, even though at the same time they situated this country within European borders. One case in point is certainly Henri Blowitz, the popular correspondent for “The Times” in Paris. In three decades, beginning from the 1870s, this journalist of Bohemian origin, not hiding his deep Anglophilia, obtained the respect of his colleagues in the international press, as well as several prestigious state decorations by interviewing the leading politicians of his time138. With regard to his account of Bosnia, Blowitz’s aim, as he wrote, was not to relate tales of his travel adventures, but to show to those who still ignored the situation that Bosnia “is the easiest and the most charming thing in the world” and its charm was enormous even without the traveller needing to cross the borders of continental Europe139. 1898 saw the publication of Travel and Politics in the Near East, by William Miller140. It was an historically-informed account, the result of four trips to the Balkans and a very attentive investigation of the Eastern Question141. Miller can be considered one of the most important ‘Balkanologists’ of the 19th century, who investigated the region both as an historian and a journalist142. A scholar at Oxford, Miller opted to undertake a Balkan tour after graduation in classics. It was then that he acquired an interest in the medieval history of these areas and in the East, writing a number of studies that made him an authority within medievalist circles, too. Of
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all the travelogues he wrote, the most important is certainly his Travels and Politics in the Near East, which represents a rich account of his numerous travels in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia. While writing about Bosnia, Miller also addressed the topic of the Bosnians. Just as with his predecessors, the object of his interest was their racial origin; this is evidenced above all in his account of the Bosnian Muslim population which, according to him, was ‘Slavic’ just as were the “Bosnian Christians”, a fact which naturally differentiated them from the Turks, “die Türken”, with whom these Muslims were related only by their religion: Called even to the present day in popular parlance die Türken, the Bosnian Mussulmans are in reality of the same race and speech as the Bosnian Christians and have almost to a man little or no acquaitance with the Turkish language. Like the Pomaks in Mount Rhodope and the Greek Moslems in Creete, they had religious but no racial affinities with the Turks; yet as is usually the case in the Near East, the ties of religion, especially when that religion has been adopted with the zeal of a convert, counted with the Bosnian Mohammedans for far more than the community of blood. But the Bosnian nobles showed repeatedly that, as the Albanians still continue to do, they had no intention of allowing the Sultan’s deputies to interfere with their privileges143.
There are also works which stand out from the ‘mainstream’. Mrs E.R. Whitwell’s144 Through Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Paint Brash, is one such example145. Whitwell probably arrived in Bosnia in 1908, when, as she wrote, “the whole of Europe has to give its opinion, and I may say decision, as to whether Austria may snap up Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bulgaria may assert her independence”146. Her Bosnian tour began in Mostar in Herzegovina, after her trip to Dalmatia, recounting in text and image her observations in the second part of her travel account. Her images, painted “by the brush”, is what made, according to Whitwell, her account more interesting and different from those that preceded it: “Several books have already been written on Dalmatia, but I do not think any have been illustrated by the brush, and I have seen no books on Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that barren, wild country Montenegro”147. Yet, Whitwell’s account reveals the very poor preparation she carried out in anticipation of her visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina. When she arrived in Mostar, she only dedicated a paragraph to the political and geographical context of the country, where she offered some brief information on the local population: The greater part of the population belong to the Greek Church. Then come about 70,000 Mohamedans, some Roman Catholics, Jews, and Gipsies of the Mahomedan
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population are those that strike the eye most, probably becuase of the men’s picturesque dress, and the bazaars which one makes a point of visiting148.
Even Whitwell’s view of the local population was guided above all by her artistic eye. We find neither in this passage, nor elsewhere in her work, any racial schematisation or religious condemnation. Neither do her comments about the veil worn by the Bosnian Muslim women show any conscious political content. Indeed, she did not perceive it as a ‘repressive’ custom for women, as other travellers sometimes did, but simply commented on the oppressive nature of the habit for women on hot summer days: “Many of the women are veiled, it must be a horrid bore to have to go about so muffled up, what must it be in summer!”149
II. Forms of Othering As we have seen in the previous chapter, in the second half of the 19th century British public opinion ‘discovered’ the existence of Bosnia and especially of Bosnians Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim of the ‘Slavic race’. This discovery was, in large measure, due to the presence of British travellers in the Balkans, who in the postCrimean period (1852-1856) were the only British presences in the South-Eastern Europe, sometimes even assuming the role of public opinion ‘informants’150. In the context of British colonial imperialism, among the various methods adopted for constructing the cultural ‘Otherness’, the concept of race is to be considered the most powerful151. Assuming that the cultural construction of difference through racialized notions is an integral part of colonialist politics, as was the case with British and the French colonialisms152, similar dynamics can also be found in contexts that do not necessarily belong to modern colonialism and imperialism, and are placed outside the French and British spheres of direct influence. This is especially true if we recall that “during the high point of imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, racialised notions of national identity were pertinent outside of the colonial context. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries imperialist ideologies had developed a racial notion of national identity to refer to other European nations as well as colonial people”153. In this chapter I wish to explain the role played by discourses of race in constructing a ‘Balkan Otherness’, by focusing on British travelogues of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1870s Eastern Crisis, when this cultural construction took a definitive shape. Yet, race often became intertwined with culture, leading to interpretations of a more ‘socio-cultural’ character: this complex network of opinions will be investigated in the course of the chapter. South Slavs and the Eastern Question Since the late 18th century, the racial classification of ‘other’ groups and communities represented one of the main transformations and developments in the emerging field of anthropology. Using this taxonomic method, the newly established science came to acknowledge the astonishing variety in the human race. Yet, in the course of the 19th century such relativistic judgements by anthropologists became inseparable from pseudo-biological debates concerning the superiority of the European
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races, and especially of the ‘Arians’154. Two issues dominated the debates on this pseudo-scientific cataloguing of different races: on the one hand, the question was whether racial characteristics were hereditary and inherited; on the other, what role did the social habitus exercise in the process of the birth and evolution of different races? As George L. Mosse remarked, such issues were of fundamental importance as they determined how deep and wide the gap separating peoples would become i.e. if this gap was innate and consequently permanent, or rather determined by environment and thus subject to variation155. Such issues thus characterized debates on race throughout the 19th century and their centrality can be observed both among the theorists of the notion of race, and among the travellers, journalists and social scientists concerned with the ‘Other’. In fact, most reflections on peoples considered barbarous and on races perceived as inferior mirrored statements presented in the debate between ‘naturalists’ and ‘environmentalists’156. During the 1870s, these two principles were also to be found in the British travellers’ discussions of race within the Bosnian context, somehow determining the origin of the main racial discourses that entered into the Eastern crisis of the 1870s157. Even though 19th-century travelogues clearly testify that many British commentators considered the South Slavs in the Ottoman territories racially inferior in comparison with the ‘Arians’ and Anglo-Saxons, it is rather difficult to follow this discourse in the evolution of the stereotypes and prejudices. Indeed, the lack of both direct contacts with, and public interest in, the Ottoman areas of South-Eastern Europe render it difficult to highlight an articulated racial discourse concerning the South Slavs of ‘European Turkey’ before the 1870s. Nevertheless, the 1870s Eastern crisis, which brought the discussion of the Eastern Question back into the wider international political agenda, led to the increased presence of British travellers in the Balkans and also contributed to outlining in Britain two different, and opposing, discourses with reference to the South Slavs. These two discursive orientations originated in liberal and conservative circles and were certainly held in order to defend the political positions of their respective promoters. Their evolution can be traced with great clarity through the texts of two Victorian personalities who, during the 1870s Eastern crisis, wrote about the ‘Ottoman Balkans’, Arthur J. Evans and John Mill158. In Victorian England, the political exploitation of racial discourse was certainly consequent to the diffusion of a conviction according to which the concept of race had a strong social, cultural and political significance. In fact, scholars today gener-
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ally agree that race for the Victorians had multiple, albeit often ambiguous, meanings, applied to art, religion, morals and physical appearance. Kennan Malik, who in The Meaning of Race examined the mutual influences between the concept of race and social context, opened his book by stressing this all-embracing aspect of the concept of race in the late Victorian era: In the late Victorian era race indeed did seem to be all. ‘Scientific racism’ claimed to have an explanation for everything from the cause of criminality to the nature of Britain’s special destiny, from the origins of ‘savage’ people in Africa and Asia to the temper of class relations in Europe. Race explained the character of individuals, the structure of social communities and the fate of human societies159.
In the 19th century, in his novel Tancred, Benjamin Disraeli was among the first to publicise this absolutizing meaning of race in the Victorian era160. In a passage discussing the foundations of civility and progress, his character Sidonia, an alter ego of the author and an embodiment of the figure of the sage Jew, stated: “All is race; there is no other truth”161. Disraeli was not the only one at that time to claim the potential qualities and values of race and to assign to it this all-embracing importance. Contemporary with his literary writing were the pseudo-scientific theories advanced by Robert Knox, a wellknown Victorian theorist who left a decisive mark within the field of racial theory by strongly influencing the debates of his contemporaries162. His most famous affirmation appeared in The Race of Men of 1850, which can be compared to Disraeli’s statement as it points out the indissoluble bond between race and civility: “Race is everything: literature, science, art, – in a word, civilization depends on it”163. This same ambiguity and this same wide range of meaning of the concept of race can also be found in the writings of some travellers and journalists who, in the 1870s, took part in the polemic relating to the Eastern Question, discussing the possible future of the ‘Ottoman Balkans’. For most of these authors, both liberal and conservative in political orientation, therefore both ‘Slavophile’ and ‘Turkophile’, the political future of the South Slavic peoples was prescribed by their race. Even if both currents perceived humanity in evolutionary terms, coherent with the Victorian social main-stream tendency to explain this complex social phenomenon by referring to pseudoscience, and by placing at the top of the hierarchical ladder the industrialized countries assigned the status of moral superiority with respect to the rest of the world, their point of views diverged in their different ways of evaluating the racial capacities of the South Slavs. So, whereas from both perspectives the Slavs
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were ‘backward’, a state that imposed on them their moral inferiority, for Whigs the Slavs’ advanced position on the ‘evolutionary ladder’ enabled them to progress and organize in self-governing states when placed in favourable ‘environmental’ conditions164; on the other hand, Tories situated the Slavs among the primitive and barbarous peoples and denied them both the capacity and the possibility of organizing into self-governing states. In this way, the former group justified their support for the national cause of the Slavs in general and of the South Slavs in particular; the latter, on the other hand, offered to British public opinion support for the need for continued Ottoman dominion in the territories inhabited by the South Slavs. During the 1870s, the voice of Arthur J. Evans distinguished itself within the liberal circle. This well-known archaeologis wrote at length in his travelogue about the Bosnian South Slavs, emphasizing also their racial characteristics. In his opinion, the Bosnians’ poetry, which Evans appreciated as highly artistic, both mirrored Bosnian qualities and foretold for them a flourishing future. So, according to Evans, even though the popular poetry of the Bosnians was inferior to the tradition of “our old Teutonic sagas”, it was “spring flowers” which offered “the best proof that the stock is not all cankered, and the surest earnest of fruits to ripen yet”165. In his evaluations of the possibilities of the South Slavic people as seen from their art, Evans echoed the reflections of the racist theorist Robert Knox who, in the 19th century, advanced the racial superiority of the Slavic peoples. In contrast to his contemporaries, Knox did not postulate the unique racial superiority of the Arians, but rather advanced the idea of two equally superior races, one of the Saxons and the other of the Slavs. Whereas the Saxons were the “strongest on the earth”, even though “unfortunately” lacking the ability to think abstractly, a quality that would have made them the only superior race, the Slavs, although “ugly” in their exterior appearance, possessed an exceptional rational capacity and an attitude for transcendental thinking missing in the Saxons. Furthermore, according to Knox, the Slavs had a special penchant for art and music166. The evaluation of the Slavic character in terms of its artistic capacity would return in Evans’s writing some years later, in an essay from 1878 entitled The Slavs and European Civilisation. From the title it is evident that Evans composed this article with the intention to locate the Slavs, scientifically and institutionally, among the civilized populations of Europe, a status he probably thought they had been, and were, consistently denied. Here, together with the predisposition to poetry, Evans also mentioned the Slavs’ talent in the field of music:
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Writing at the present moment, when a new era of liberty is opening on the Slavonic peoples of Eastern Europe, it is impossible not to attempt a forecast of what services these peoples may be expected to perform for civilisation in the centuries to come [...] I must record my conviction that it is on the side of sentiment and the imagination, in the fields of poetry and music, that the Slavs are likely to add most to the heirloom of the Ages167.
In the same lecture Evans also addressed the “liberty” of the Slavic peoples and in so doing appealed to the political ideas of the liberal circles that, in the context of the Eastern Question in the 1870s, supported the national emancipation of some Slavic peoples168. This 19th-century traveller in Bosnia also believed that the liberation of all Slavs could be beneficial to the Europeans, since, if free, this race could advance civility. In an article from 1878, where he discussed the occupation of Bosnia by the Austrians, the idea of liberty for the Slavs was once again presented and the possibility of an independent state of South Slavs led by the already autonomous Serbia was put forward for consideration169. Evans was not the only one to use the concept of race to refer to the future potential of the South Slavs. A similar attitude was to be found in the work of Paulina Irby. Even though less important from the political and institutional point of view than Evans, as she never advanced any concrete national state-plan for the Slavic peoples, in her Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe (1877) she supported the liberation of the South Slavic Christians from the Ottomans, and she openly criticised the Turkish government in the Balkans: Numerous like atrocities there are everywhere and in every place, and for all these misdeeds no one is answerable to anybody, for the government makes no inquiry, and will not even hear. Faim Effendi, the most renowned bloodsucker of the Christians, and the present representative of Bosnia and the Herzegovina at Constantinople has spread a secret proclamation to be read by night to the Bosnian Mussulmans, in which it is declared that the Mohammedans will on no account accept any reforms, but that on the contrary they will oppose them with all their might, and that the utmost violence is to be carried upon the rayah. The Turkish government has during the last few days distributed fresh arms to the Bosnian Mussulmans from 12 to 80 years of age170.
This moral, rather than political, support offered by Irby to the South Slavs can also be observed in her positive evaluation, not very different in this sense from that of Evans, of the potential of the Bosnian Slavic population; like its soil, hills and plains, she described it as “exceptionally gifted”: “The soil of Bosnia teems with various and valuable minerals, her hills abound in splendid forests, her well-watered plains are fertile and productive, her race, under culture, proves exceptionally gifted”171.
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During the 1870s, while this liberal discourse was in the process of being delineated, and was generally favourable to the national emancipation of some Slavic peoples, the conservatives, on their part, continued to support the idea of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The conservative discourse was also justified on the basis of the racial discourse, even though there were some fundamental differences with respect to the liberal one, since it acquired the characteristics of a discourse usually used by the Victorians with reference to the Africans and Irish. The conservatives, in fact, in their stereotypical representations and generalizations about the Slavic peoples, stressed above all those peculiar features that referred to their primitive and barbarous constitution, that obstructed them in their attempts to evolve as a self-governing nation. In 1876, as Evans published his On foot through Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Insurrection, John Mill addressed The Ottomans in Europe or Turkey in the present crisis to the same public audience, exploring the dynamics of the 1870s Eastern crisis. Mill explained the reason for his interest in issues of race, not only of the “Slavs” but also of the ‘Turks’, when he stated that the “present Crisis” had diverted him from his initial intention to publish a work on the “Races, Religions and Resources of the Ottoman Empire”172. Yet, contrary to Evans, for Mill the Slav represented “the greatest failure nature ever made in her attempt to create a civilised man”173. The Slav’s inferiority derived directly from his blood, which happened to be more ‘ancient’ when compared to that of the Turk or the Englishman: “For the Turk is young, and England also is hardly yet in the full flush of her manhood [sic], and we may therefore contrast their fresh young blood with the ancient [...] life-stream of the Slavs” 174. That such an image had a clear political implication – to justify the conservative political choices to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire – emerged clearly from the text when Mill claimed that the future destiny of England within Asia depended on Turkey, the reason why he decided to defend the “Turk” on every “ground”: It is only fair to the Panslavists to say that if there be degrees in their hatred they detest the English a little more than they do the Turks. They see what the great mass of our people and some of our statesmen have not yet realised, that in Asia, England and Turkey stand all fall together. The funeral knell, which booms out its solemn note over the grave of the Turk, will be the signal for our expulsion from India. […] On every ground then, of truth, justice, honour, and national interest, I defend the Turk 175.
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Imagining Bosnian Muslims The racial discourse with reference to the South Slavs in general, that emerged in the 1870s in the works of British writers interested in the ‘Ottoman Balkans’, and in Bosnia in particular, and which offered two opposing and equally politically manipulative images, was not applicable to every ethno-confessional group considered as belonging to the ‘Slavic race’. In fact, in the 1870s, the racial discourse of the British travellers to Bosnia, both Whigs and Tories, referred to the Bosnian Muslims with certain features that distinguished them from the racial perceptions that we have just considered. Independent of the political orientation of the traveller, Bosnian Muslims were represented in British travel writing especially in the years of the Eastern crisis (1875-1878), as violent fanatics with a predisposition to criminality176. Considered the importance given to the Muslim population of Bosnia and their history in the texts analysed, a short digression about the topic would be useful. Balkan scholars agree that the Bosnian Muslims are prevalently descendents of South Slavs who converted during the four-hundred years reign of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans177. They disagree, however, on how conversion took place and why, also because during Ottoman rule conversions followed different patterns at different periods in time and varied from one region to another. The pattern in Bosnia-Herzegovina was thus different from that, for instance, in Bulgaria, and conversion dynamics were always the result of specific political and socio-economic circumstances of the various Balkan countries and regions178. The often simplistic understanding of the Ottoman period reflected in many Balkan nationalist historiographic readings has contributed to crude theorizing about the Islamic conversion process in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indeed, the processual character of the conversions has often been lost. Among the most well-rehearsed arguments to explain the conversions is that the converted were either forced to do so by the Ottomans, or that conversion was a strategy followed by the Bosnian-Herzegovinian gentry in order to retain their property and privileges. While some authors argue that before these landowners adopted Islam they were mainly Orthodox ‘Serbs’, others claim they were mainly Catholic ‘Croats’179. What can be said is that when the Turks conquered Bosnia, many Bosnians converted to Islam, but it was a slow process throughout the late 15th and 16th centuries180. There is little evidence of forced conversion, except in the case of an occasional overly enthusiastic pasha181. However, large-scale Islamization of peasants and town dwellers may not have begun in earnest until the end of the 15th century182.
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One of the reasons why so many Bosnians converted to Islam is that in medieval Bosnia there was no strong Christian ecclesiastical structure to capture the allegiance of the Bosnian peasants. Therefore, when Islam entered the area with its dynamic and well-ordered organization, the Bosnian peasants, most of whom were religiously unengaged because of earlier weak Christian proselytizing, accepted the new faith. Furthermore, opportunism may have played a role in the individual choice of religion. Followers of the state religion in the Ottoman-held regions had political, monetary, and social advantages, and this certainly represented an important factor in accepting Islam. Only Muslims could hope to rise to the highest positions within the Ottoman Empire183. Although conversion was less rapid and widespread than that in towns, Islamization also made inroads in the villages. Many peasants likely found seductive the fact that tax and rent benefits, as well as equal civil status with all other Muslims – no matter how highborn – accrued only to Muslims. The result of all this is evident in BosniaHerzegovina in the mid-1850s, a region on the north-south border of the Ottoman Empire encountered by British travellers. If statistics are generally to be considered with extreme caution, then this is even more valid for the Ottoman Empire, where a general census was not taken. It is, however, possible to say that a relative majority (48.3%) of the Muslim component of the population, still recorded for the year 1870, was re-dimensioned during a decade, representing in 1879 around the 39% of the main population, the relative majority now being composed by Serbian Bosnians (around the 43%)184. Nonetheless, the entire country was not only still inhabited by a large number of Muslims, and therefore characterized by an unusual circumstance for the European countries, but it was also profoundly imprinted by Islamic culture, in every social field, from architecture through dress customs and gastronomic traditions. Yet, it was only in the 1870s that the British public opinion became aware of Balkan Islam, and subsequently of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Islam mentioned above. This is not only attested by British travel writing but also by some other sources, including geographical accounts, edited during the years of the Eastern Crisis. In the “Geographical Magazine” in 1876, in an article entitled Servia, Bosnia and Bulgaria, a report on the percentages of the “Muhammedans” in “Turkey in Europe” appeared. Geographical data were presented (see Map 4), as well as statistics on the “Muhammadans” who inhabited the South-Eastern European regions under Ottoman administration185.
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Map 4 Muslims in Turkey in Europe (1876) Source: “The Geographical Magazine”, October 1876, 3, p. 257.
At the time of this ‘discovery’ of the Muslim component of the Balkan population, in the Western European countries two main attitudes towards Islam predominated. It was either rationalized, seen as one possible way to know the nature of God and the universe, or perceived as an ‘enemy’ and a ‘rival’. Among these two options, the latter often prevailed186. As Edward Said has noted, Islam represented for Western commentators a lasting trauma187, an ‘enemy’ for the West since the time of Crusades, which could hardly be removed. In the Bosnian context, such a Western attitude towards Islam materialized in an image of Bosnian Muslims of Slavic origin as fanatics with a predisposition to violence. Already in 1851, in one of the first accounts dedicated to this region, an anonymous author, writing about his brief travel tour in Bosnia for the periodical “Household Words”, opened his article focusing on the Bosnian Muslims’ violence: “Bosnia has, for a long time, been the most unsettled part of the Turkish Empire. Inhabited as it is by a majority of Greek Christian serf, and a minority of the most arrogant and violent Moslemin […]”188.
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Not very different from that of this anonymous commentator was the view expressed by his later colleagues, British travellers in Bosnia in the 1870s, immediately before and after the Bosnian insurrection, which saw the rayah revolting against the Bosnian and the Turkish authorities. In this period, the violence of the former years was replaced by fanaticism, as becomes evident in the writing of the anonymous author, who, in 1875, prepared his Bosnian account for publication in the well-known “Fraser’s Magazine”. This author, who, although little interested in local society as his trip had at its core technical issues linked to railway construction, also dedicated some passages to the locals and particularly to “Bosniak Mussulmans”, whom he described as “fanatical believers in the Prophet”189. In the same year Humphrey Sandwith, analysing the social dynamics that he thought determined the relationship between the Muslims and the Christians of Bosnia, adopted a language which in many ways resembled that of the previous anonymous commentator. Sandwith pointed out that the country’s leadership belonged the Bosnian Muslim component of Bosnia-Herzegovina and it was for this reason that he also expressed fear for the future of the Bosnian Christian population. Everyone, he thought, tended to think that in Sarajevo there could occur something that already happened in Damascus, when the Christian population was massacred by the Muslim fanatics in power: “There were the same causes at work – the growing wealth and importance of the Christians, increasing daily side by side with the envy, hatred, and malice of the fanatical Moslems”190. Bosnian Muslim violence directed against Christians was also described by the historian William Forsyth. Forsyth, referring to the words of Paulina Irby, described Bosnia as a traditionalist country where Islam was deeply rooted and where the ‘Pravoslav’ population, i.e. the Orthodox, were expected to obey the sometimes humiliating rules of their Muslim fellow countrymen: Whatever may be the theory of equality laid down in Firmans, and Hats, and Iradés, and Hatti-Sheriffs, the Turk never has treated, and never will treat, the Giour as an equal. I will mention an anecdote related by Miss Irby, by way of illustration of this. A Dervish met in the road near Serajevo (Bosna Serai), the capital of Bosnia, a Pravoslav priest on horseback. He ordered him to dismount, saying, “Bosnia is still a Mahommedan country; do you not see that a Turk is passing? Dismount instantly!”191
In the latter author, the alleged fanaticism in the Bosnian Muslims’ character revealed a conceptual proximity with the comments of early commentators. A description from 1887 is syntomatic of this attitude. ‘Ferocity’ marked, according to
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Emile de Laveleye, the Muslims’ character and was present notwithstanding their mixed racial origin: Mussulmans, notwithstanding the different races to which they belong, everywhere resemble one another – Turks, Albanians, Slavs, Arabs, Kabyles, Hindoos, Malays. The Koran impregnates them through and through, and casts them in the same mould: they are kind and, at the same time, ferocious. They love children, dogs, and horses, and never illtreat them, and they hesitate to kill a fly; but, when excited by passion, they will pitilessly butcher even women and children, not being held back either by respect for life or by the sentiments of humanity that Christianity and modern philosophy have given us 192.
Yet there exists one difference between the image of medieval violence that the West ascribed to Muslims for centuries and the specific image of Bosnian Muslims’ violence from the 19th century. In the latter case, violence was sometimes linked to Bosnian Muslims’ racial origin, and was explained by referring to some racial theories that were in fashion in the same years. So, although Islam was the main cause of certain generalisations relative to Bosnian Muslims’ violence, in some cases it was the racial discourse that gave this violence its final shape. Violence and Bosnian Islam: divergent opinions Even though there was a uniformity in the stereotype of Bosnian Muslims as violent, during the Eastern Crisis representations by conservatives on the one side and by liberals on the other distinguished themselves in the different ways they identified the sources of that violence. Consistent with their theoretical background, conservatives considered violence as a hereditary trait, closely connected with the idea of racial nativism; liberals, on the other hand, explained the violence of Bosnian Muslims as developing from the environment, perceiving race as something variable that could change its shape with the mutation of political contexts and socio-cultural circumstances. While the conservative representations focused on issues related to descent, liberals, on the contrary, gave importance to Islam and its quality as a socio-cultural phenomenon, which they blamed for Bosnian Muslims’ violent behaviour. Both representations were also functional to offering cultural arguments to ongoing political struggles, especially when it was about British foreign policy regarding the Balkans. In 1876 H.A. Munro-Butler-Johnston addressed The Turks: their Character, Manners, and Institutions, as bearing on the Eastern Question193 to the conservative audience, skilfully using the concepts of race, especially when related to Bosnian Muslims,
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for political purposes. His book was a political pamphlet that reconsidered the role and place of the Turks after Benjamin Disraeli’s decision to promote the conservation of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The racist image of Bosnian Muslims, that showed them as a violent population and in constant revolt against the Turks, was one of the strategies that Munro adopted in order to support his political programme. Firstly, Munro focused his attention above all on the Turks – seeing them, compared with all other Muslims of the Ottoman Empire – in positive terms, and re-evaluating their collective uses and customs. The author also emphasized that, by doing this, his intention was to show that it was incorrect to group all Muslims within the same category, as such an approach would result in judging the best together with the worst: To mass all Mussulmans in the same category, and then to judge them by the standard of the least worthy and characteristic among them, is about as logical as it would be to judge the Puritans of New England by the standard of the Christians of Abyssinia194.
If Islam did not render Muslims of the Ottoman Empire all the same, what distinguished them one from another? Munro answered this question with an anecdote that placed the Bosnians as protagonists and where the theory of heredity and of racial belonging was of prime importance. In fact, what, in Munro’s opinion, differentiated one Muslim from another was racial affiliation. Munro explained the differences between Muslims of ‘Slavic race’ and those of the ‘Ottoman race’ by emphasising their different predispositions to commit criminal acts; he recounted an anecdote about a “prince Ghika”. Ghika was able in the judicial proceedings to indicate the criminal by identifying his ancestors as members of other Ottoman non-Turk populations. Ghika, it was said, who was a well known connoisseur of human characters, knew that the criminal could not be a Turk, as a “true Ottoman” was incapable of committing an act of “wanton injustice”: And how did Prince Ghika know that the wrong-doer was not a Turk? By this index, as he declared himself, that no true Ottoman could commit an act of wanton injustice. He founded his judgement on a knowledge of the Ottoman character, that character which I have described, and of which justice is one of the main pillars. […] It is not only Prince Ghika who has borne testimony to the Ottoman character: ask merchants and travellers long resident in the East; they all bear consentient testimony to the justice, truthfulness, and honest of the true Turk. One single fact speaks whole volumes: among them it is not the custom to give or require a receipt; the Turk’s word is his bond195.
And if for Munro the ‘Ottoman’ origins of the Turks implied their natural predisposition to justice, the ‘Slavic’ origins of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims
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made them inclined to corruption and criminality. This anecdote of prince Ghika, the author explained, more than just revealing the real character of the Turk also corrected the common tendency to perceive the Ottomans as responsible for the injustices committed, in particular, by Bosnia-Herzegovina Muslims. Islam in BosniaHerzegovina, Munro said, did not change Bosnian Muslims’ Slavic essence, which was, Munro states, the source of their violent and criminal behaviour: This anecdote exposes, too, one of the many common errors and confusions committed by those who place to the account of the Ottoman all the injustices and corruptions committed by the Mussulmans in Bosnia, Herzegovina, or elsewhere. The Sclave feudatories in these countries very generally adopted the religion of the conquering race, and imposed it on their vassals. They did not for that reason cease to be Sclaves, and their new religion in most instances sat lightly enough on their consciences196.
Even though it is clearly stressed that religion was not capable of changing racial character, its role was not completely discarded. According to Munro, a strict observance of religious precepts could sometimes intervene and impact on the configuration of a people’s collective character. As far as the Bosnian Muslims were concerned, Munro stressed that this principle was not valid: “their new religion in most instances sat lightly enough on their consciences”. In fact, in comparison with the ‘noble’ religiosity of the Turks, Munro presented the ‘vulgar’ one of the Bosnian Muslims, prevalently turned towards the outer world: I have been describing the Ottoman character, and that of men brought up from the cradle in the traditions of their race, and in the strict observance of the precepts of their faith, and men [Bosnian Muslims] who have accidentally adopted some of the outward observances of the Mahommedan cult, which they could change tomorrow as easily as their costume197.
Due to the superficiality of the Bosnian Muslims’ religious practice, Munro also thought that they would easily re-convert to Christianity in the event of BosniaHerzegovina becoming an annex of some Christian great power: “The same facility of conversion might, likely enough, be manifested by them again, should their country become the adjunct of a great Christian power”198. This statement was not an invitation to the Great Powers to intervene in Bosnia; rather it aimed to connote the Bosnian Muslims’ character. Indeed, Munro never doubted the necessity to support the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, even if he was aware of the existence of issues that militated against such an approach. On the contrary, it can be said that he rather feared the wave of liberal proposals in favour of the national emancipation of the Balkan peoples. It can also be sensed from his dedication of this book to
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the House of Commons, which for him represented true ‘traditional’ British politics: “to the sense of justice of the British House of Commons I dedicate this little work, as a plea for adherence to the traditional policy of England”. His support for ‘traditional’ politics, which Disraeli in his second term (1874-1880) turned to the defence of national interests, was expressed in his open support for the Ottoman Empire. Munro’s contribution to this political agenda consisted in his work to correct some of the most common ‘misconceptions’ relative to the Turks: some with prejudice, some with prepossession – but the amount of current misconceptions relative both to the character and institutions of this people, seems to me the most remarkable fact connected with the Eastern Question199.
Thus, Munro, on the basis of heredity, showed Bosnian Muslims as a violent and criminal race, and in contrast placed the Turks among the noble people of the world. Both images came to be used for political purposes. The Turks, Munro suggested, thanks to their racial superiority over their subject peoples, were the only group capable of solving the difficult Eastern issues, and especially of dealing with the dangerous races best exemplified by the Bosnia-Herzegovinian Muslims. An ironic commentary on Bosnia such as the following makes one think that the emphasis on the violence of the Bosnian Muslim population was thought to dissuade some European politicians from their intents to assimilate and integrate this country within Western Europe: Whatever may be the final issue of the drama now being enacted in those countries, one thing may be very confidently predicted, and that is, that whoever become the happy possessors of these fair provinces [Bosnia-Herzegovina] may safely reckon, all things considered, upon having quite a pleasant time of it!200
However, sometimes the violence of Bosnian Muslims was traced to environmental or socio-cultural factors, and particularly to Ottoman culture, often identified with Islam. The English writers who defended such ‘environmental’ origins of violence could be found especially in the 1870s, in the years of the peasant revolts in the Balkans; they were liberal in their political choices, openly Slavophile and frequently explicitly against Ottoman culture and the ‘Ottoman occupation’ of Bosnia. Such an understanding of the origin and cause of violence among Bosnian Muslims was certainly influential in the formation of new political ideas in those years. In support of this point we might quote in particular two travelogues, Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe by P. Irby and Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection by Arthur J. Evans, representing as they did
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the highpoint of British writing about Bosnia in the 1870s. In both texts, the violence of Bosnian Muslims, appearing in the context of the peasants’ revolts against local Muslim authority, is presented using an image that dramatically shows the Orthodox population as a victim on the extreme fringes of Muslim society. In the summer of 1875 Evans visited the Franciscan monks of Guča Gora who, mentioning a potential massacre of the Christian population by the “Mahometans” in retribution for the Herzegovinian insurrection, became extremely concerned on seeing Evans and his brother travelling throughout Bosnia without the protection of Turkish guards. In fact, they said that “the insurrection in the Herzegovina had roused Mahometan fanaticism to such a pitch that all the Christians of the neighbours were seriously dreading a massacre”201. Accordingly, they thought these two foreigners should not fear the Turkish authorities, but the “Sclavonic Mussulmans”: the Sclavonic Mussulmans, the representatives of the old provincial Janissarism, the descendants of the Capetans and Begs, who eye the myrmidons of the Stamboul Government with almost as much hostility as they do the rayah, and, true to their conservative bigotry, draw far less subtle distinctions between one Giaour and another202.
The Slavic Bosnian Muslims’ violence towards the Christian population is stressed in Irby’s travel account also. On the one hand, Irby situated it in the autumn of 1875 (“at the present moment of licensed insult and revenge [autumn 1875], we hear of Christians being impaled and flayed alive, and cruelties of the worst ages committed on helpless women and children”); while, on the other, she stressed that such violence could be found even in the more peaceful times in Bosnia, (“in a season of perfect quiet [1871-2] some fierce Mussulmans of Sarajevo swore to cut the throats of the Christians if they dared to hang bells in the tower of their new church”)203. Elsewhere, Muslim violence against Christians found its ideal stage in the city of Sarajevo: The Mohammedans of Sarajevo are three times as numerous as the Christians, and are many of them exceedingly fanatical. They had sworn that it should go hard with the Christians in the town unless the rising in Bosnia was soon quelled204.
Evans showed signs of concern about the Christian population of Sarajevo too: “We were assured from many sides that if the insurrection were to spread a little further, the rayahs of Bosnia would rise also; and fears were entertained for the safety of the Christian minority in Serajevo”, and just like Irby he tended to place the worst violent acts of the Bosnian Muslims within this city, that he described as “the headquarters of Moslem fanaticism”205.
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As these examples show, both Irby and Evans traced the cause of the violent character of the local Muslim population to their religious fanaticism, that, according to Evans, could also be observed in other aspects of their everyday life; for example, in the wearing of the veil by women and in the turbans and Maulouka of the men, “fanaticism”, Evans highlighted, “has struck its deepest roots among her renegade population, and reflects itself even in their dress”. Although Evans and Irby described Bosnian Muslims in terms of race, and belonged to that group of liberal or ‘anti-Turk’ travellers who, in the 1870s, reconsidered the utility and place of the Slavic peoples and manipulated a racial language for political purposes, they did not trace the violence of Bosnian Muslims to hereditary factors. Different from the travellers previously considered, Evans and Irby found the causes in the environment, especially socio-cultural, within which Bosnian Muslims happened to live. Their liberalism and their strong anti-Turk sentiments led them to look for the cause of Muslim violence in the religion of the new adversary, that is the Turks, to whom the Bosnian Muslim population submitted in the 15th century and to whose religion they consequently converted. In fact, this stereotype of the violent Muslim emerged when, at least for these Whigs, the Turk once again became an ‘enemy’, and with this his religion again became associated with an image of violence that, as Norman Daniel remarked, had its roots in medieval times206. Even though Evans and Irby never explicitly traced the violence of Bosnian Muslims to their religion, Islam was clearly their stated reason for other identifiable social phenomena within Bosnia-Herzegovina. Irby was certainly more radical in her opinion when she wrote in the first pages of her travelogue, that she hoped her book would expand on the benefits Islam brought to the country: “Here, as the religion of the ruling caste, Islam has had a trial of nearly four centuries. What fruits has it borne?” They were not many, according to this traveller, as during the centuries of the Ottoman dominion the Bosnian society was reduced to barbarous conditions; moreover, even though its population belonged to a “gifted race” when it was “under culture”, in such “barbarous” conditions it became “uneducated, not one man in a hundred knowing how to read, and the chief town, Sarajevo, which contains [...] not a single book shop”207. Evans, on the contrary, seemed to be quite entertained by this situation, noticing that Islam left a deep imprint among these “Slavonic renegades” and made them become “thorough Turks”. Their typically Oriental uses and customs, viewed by him in the particular context of the Travnik Muslims, were suggested in a scene which referred in all its splendour to a lethargic Orient:
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it is curious what thorough Turks these Travnik burghers make. Towards evening many of these grave merchants seated themselves in the gardens of a café just outside the town, and while alternately purring their narghilés and sipping their coffee, contemplated, without uttering a syllable, the beautiful scene before them – the mountains, the green valley, the foaming millstream murmuring at their feet208.
Both Evans and Irby, by ascribing to Islam responsibility for such social phenomena, clearly exhibited the influence of certain environmental theories and opinions on their thought. It is widely known that the most important promoter of this thought was Charles Darwin, even though, in the latter years, the Darwinists substituted environmentalism with hereditary factors. Darwin was convinced that natural selection and the mutation of the species was caused by the environment and the ecosystem and was due to unorchestrated mutations that occurred within it. He also thought that variety was a consequence of “the direct and indirect action of life, use and disuse”209 or as Michael Banton summarized: Darwin cut the ground from under the feet of the typologists by demonstrating that there were no permanent forms in nature. Each species was adapted to its environment by natural selection, so that people of one racial type who migrated to a new habitat would there undergo change. The ups and downs of history could therefore not be explained in terms of the qualities of particular types210.
This environmental outlook on race was also exemplified in other passages in Evans’s travelogue, albeit not necessarily ascribing the mutation in the Slavic race to conversion to Islam. Evans described some behavioural attitudes of the local Christians, particularly their “hideous tonsure”, depicted as the “vilest” thing in their “demeanour”, as a consequence of their condition of servitude and forced oppression at the hands of the Turks. But, as Evans said, this was not the final sentence and under a “free government”, as the population of Serbia already enjoyed, and under different cultural conditions, this “sluggishness of their deliberation” could easily be adjusted: Yet after all, the hideous tonsure and what is vilest in their demeanour are but accidental badges of servitude and oppression – removable by a few generations of free government. The sluggishness of their deliberation may be quickened by culture; and the causes of suspicion once removed, the hang-dog look of the Bosniac would disappear as surely as it has ceased among the free Serbians, and as it is disappearing at this day among the liberated Wallachian serfs211.
Returning to the violence of Bosnian Muslims, we can conclude by saying that the ‘environmental gaze’ of the travellers Irby and Evans from the 1870s implicitly stated that in different socio-cultural circumstances, this population, belonging to a
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race capable of reaching the highest peak of civilization, would not have developed such attitudes to violence. Such degeneration had been prompted above all by their conversion to Islam. In turn, a re-conversion to Christianity, or at least a life conducted in different socio-cultural conditions, created and fostered by an alternative government to the Turkish, might change the violent character of these Muslim Slavs and cause them to return to their ‘natural’ path, that for these liberals, as we saw in previous paragraph, was civility. This was not a rare hope among the travellers to Bosnia. Already in 1861 George Arbuthnot, for example, described Bosnia as a country that lived in “a state of moral darkness” and thought that the “dissemination” of Christianity was a solution to its recovery: The most effective course, probably, which either the bitterest enemy or the warmest friend of the Ottoman government could pursue, would be to disseminate the seed of Christianity throughout the length and breadth of the land. And I say this advisedly; for on the future conduct of the Porte would depend whether such a course might lead to the establishment of Turkish supremacy, or to its irretrievable overthrow212.
In this way, the liberal commentators left open the possibility of integrating Bosnian Muslims within a national state of Southern Slavs. Already in 1879, R.H. Lang, who was among the first English to visit Bosnia after the Austrian occupation, was anxious to see the eventuality of progress of Bosnian Muslims’ ‘Slavic population’ within the new socio-cultural-political milieu: It will be peculiarly interesting to watch the future fortunes of the Mohammedan population of Bosnia. In Turkey generally the Mussulman element is admitted to be less vital than the Christian; not because the former are believers in the Prophet, but because they are, so to speak, of a less industrious stock. In Bosnia this argument can have no existence. Bosnian Mussulmans and Bosnian Christians are of the same blood and race, and differ only as a Mormon of British origin differs from an English Churchman. Now that both enjoy the same position before the law, there is apparently no reason why the Bosnian Mussulman should not be as industrious and as prosperous as his Christian neighbour. But if in the race of progress the latter should outstrip the former, many will with apparent reason argue that the one religion is more calculated to develop the material interests of its believers than the other213.
III. The Orientalization of Bosnia The ‘Bosnian Orient’ that 19th-century British travellers to Bosnia propagated at home was a cultural construct of the Eastern European space distinct from both ‘Eastern Europe’ and the ‘Balkans’, two cultural paradigms invented in the period between the 16th and the early 20th centuries214. When the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina is examined, in fact, the focus is on a peculiar space that does not fully belong to either of these two ‘mental maps’; rather, it is a construct of ‘Otherness’ rooted in the metaphors of Orientalism. The invention of this ‘authentic Orient’ within Europe was due in large measure to the ‘discovery’ by British travellers, in the course of the second half of the 19th century, of an Islamized Bosnian society, embodied in the figure of the ‘violent’ Bosnian Muslim215, a collective representation that became a lens through which every aspect of this society’s life and people was observed. In the 19th century the boundary between Islam and Christianity continued to be perceived as the principal point of definition: “Despite many attempts to depict […] (Orthodox) Christianity as simply a subspecies of oriental despotism and thus as inherently non-European or non-Western, still the boundary between Islam and Christianity in general continued to be perceived as the principal one”216. Islam, deeply rooted in this country’s urban sphere and recognized by British travellers as an essential feature of both Bosnian culture and society, stimulated travellers to represent this space as more eastern than other parts of Eastern Europe, an Orient comparable to Asia and Africa, also prompting travellers to assume an Orientalist discourse towards it. At the same time, this Orientalist discourse, functional in British travel writing on Bosnia-Herzegovina between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, was rather peculiar, as it came under the influence of the Balkanist discourse. The two faces of the same coin, one (more) Orientalist and the other (less) Balkanist, constituted the travellers’ public discourse on Bosnia-Herzegovina in Britain in this period. Western imaginary spaces and Bosnia-Herzegovina As some recent post-modern scholarly work in geography has demonstrated, space, conceptualised as a product of social relations, can be perceived as a dimension of human existence full of power and symbolism: “as a result of the fact that it is con-
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ceptualized as created out of social relations, space is by its very nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordinations, of solidarity and co-operation”217. This post-modern geographical awareness, elsewhere known as a special “power geometry”218, can also be found in studies that have recently explored cultural and political power relations within Europe. Among the first to work in this field of studies was Larry Wolff, in Inventing Eastern Europe219. Despite numerous critics, Wolff ’s work remains a valid point of departure for all who undertake an investigation of the Western collective representations relative to European geographical space in the last three centuries. Applying the theoretical model developed by Edward Said in Orientalism, Wolff, working mainly on the writings of French philosophes and voyageurs, demonstrated that, in the 18th century, Western Europe “invented” Eastern Europe as its “complementary other half ”. From then on, according to Wolff, Western Europeans opposed an image of the East as backward and barbarous, inhabited by savage and primitive peoples, perceived as culturally and civilly inferior to an image of the West as a space imbued with high moral and civil values. With this process of construction of an Eastern European savage space, Enlightenment-influenced authors also re-wrote Western-European mental maps, leading to a reorientation from a North/South to an East/West divide. Significantly, Wolff locates the origins of a new mapping of Europe at the time of the invention of the Western notion of civilization, an 18th-century neologism that the West used with regard to itself, facilitated by the contemporary construction of Eastern European as the West’s negative complement. Yet, it is not only the evolution of the concept of civilization that is singled out as crucial element for the birth of this positive-negative polarity within Europe; much importance is given to the geographical positioning of Eastern Europe as “Europe but not Europe”. According to Larry Wolff, it was this geographical “ambiguous location”220 of Eastern Europe, often identified with the concept of the frontier, which rendered possible among Western Europeans the invention of a backward and undeveloped space that would mediate between the poles of civility and barbarity. In the 18th century, this uncertainty relative to geographical position was related to the phenomenon of ‘scientific cartography’. While Enlightenment travellers, who followed the pseudo-science of “Philosophic Geography”221, constructed their geographical sentiment freely and under the influence of the modern Orientalism, generally tending to exclude Eastern Europe from Europe proper by locating it within the Asiatic Orient, scientific cartography, uncertain of where to put the exact bor-
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der between the Orient and Europe, frequently contradicted the “fanciful construction” of Philosophic Geography, provoking uncertainty in public opinion regarding the geographical position of the Eastern countries: There was room for ambiguity. The geographical border between Europe and Asia was not unanimously fixed in the eighteenth century, located sometimes at the Don, sometimes farther east at the Volga, and sometimes, as today, at the Urals222.
Thus, the uncertainty of the first Enlightenment cartographers as to the location of the border between the Orient and Europe contributed to the perception of European East as a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. Eastern Europe did not merely define the West by way of contrast, but also mediated between Europe and the Orient due to such ‘in-betweenness’. Eventually, it was this ambiguous geographical position that led to a cultural perception of Eastern Europe as an area of mediation between the poles of civilization and barbarism: “Eastern Europe was located not at the antipode of civilization, not down in the depths of barbarism, but rather on the developmental scale that measured the distance between civilization and barbarism […] Eastern Europe was essentially in between”223. The same concept of ‘in-betweenness’ that Wolff pointed out referring to Eastern Europe, was further explored in 1997 by Maria Todorova, who studied the prevalent Western images of the Balkans and its people, thus significantly moving the investigative focus relative to the social and power relations of European space with respect to Wolff. While placing the Balkans in opposition to Said’s Orient, Todorova also emphasized that even though the principal discourse that constitutes the Balkans as an ‘Otherness’ within Europe originated at the same time as the modern Orientalism analysed by Said, it needs not be considered as its sub-set, but as a discourse that evolved independently. Among the different characteristics that distinguish ‘Balkan Otherness’ from the Oriental, is also the “transitory status” of the Balkans224, an aspect that evokes Wolff ’s thesis on Eastern Europe. So, if, on the one hand, Orientalism perceived the West and the East as two “incompatible entities, antiworlds, but completed antiworlds”, Balkanism, on the other, relying on a figurative language, conceived the median nature of the Balkans as a bridge or a crossroad225: “The Balkans have been compared to a bridge between East and West, between Europe and Asia”226. The presence of British travellers in Bosnia has already been considered with relation to the Eastern Question, as well as with regard to internal turmoil in Bosnia. As we have seen in chapter 1, the 1870s were the years during which Bosnia-Herze-
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govina, together with Bulgaria, became for the British the areas of principal interest in the Balkans, attracting the largest number of travellers. In these years travellers arrived in the region from the North, crossing the river Sava in Gradiška, Broad or Rača and the river Una in Kostajnica227, viewing these rivers as physical and administrative borders that separated the Austria-Hungarian Empire from the Ottoman, but also and above all as a symbolic border that marked the point at which Eastern barbarism came to replace Western civility. The administrative border, which the travellers crossed, was marked by rivers geographically situated in the North and North-West, thus forcing the traveller to move in a NorthSouth direction. Yet, despite this ‘vertical’ movement, British travellers conceived Bosnia as an East-European region such as conceived by Wolff, as if the crossed border compelled travellers, not to a North-South but to a West-East movement. What the travellers left behind, in ‘German’ Gradiška, Brod, Raška and Kostajnica, after crossing the rivers that divided the towns into their ‘Austrian’ and ‘Turkish’ parts, was, in fact, set against what was found in the ‘Turkish’ part of these same towns. Moreover, against a positive image of the Austrian towns through which they travelled was set an image of the Turkish towns they crossed, imbued with a sense of negativity. Indeed, 19th-century British travel accounts in Bosnia are, for this reason, a rich depository of images that indicate how the West used to construct an image of civil and moral superiority, in opposition to one of barbarity and decay in the East. Unlike what has been proposed by Wolff for Eastern Europe, the validity of these dichotomic principles in British travel writing on Bosnia is not evident prior to the 19th century228. The representation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as an Eastern European land does not suggest an origin in the 17th or 18th centuries, but rather indicates how the same discourse developed in various Western European countries at different times, arriving in Bosnia only in the second half of the 19th century. The first traces of such attitudes can be found in 1872 and 1873, when Arthur J. Patterson and Humphry Sandwith reached Bosnia by travelling along the river Una and the river Sava, rivers that in their eyes represented a border line between the West and the East. Nevertheless, these two travellers, while never hesitating to suggest the opposition of West and East, did not describe this East in purely negative terms. Rather, their descriptions of the country are distinguished for their exoticism, offering fundamentally an image of Bosnia as a place of Oriental charm that caught the travellers’ imagination with its rich repertory of highly evocative and picturesque images. Arthur J. Patterson, on seeing the images in the shops of “Turk-
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ish Kostajnica”, was reminded of the scenes that could be usually seen in the illustrations of travel destinations in other Oriental guidebooks: Between the two Kostainicas the river is divided by an island into the Unna and the Unnica [...]. Arrived on the Turkish side of the river, we passed a row of open shops, or rather, booths, for the sale of tobacco [...] and such few wares as the poor and unluxurious Mohammedan population might require. The shops were such as one sees in illustrations of Eastern travel229.
Humphry Sandwith offered a description of the country in even more exotic terms. The Bosnia he found in Bosnian Brod was filtered through a well-known set of images by which travellers from Western European countries typically described some countries of Asia and Northern Africa: “We presently reached the town of Bosnian Brod; there were the once familiar figures, turbaned and cross-legged, sitting under their dilapidated verandahs, or on their little shabby shop-boards, smoking all day long, and fingering their beads”230. Two years later, in 1875, soon after the outbreak of the Bosnian revolt, it was the turn of James Creagh and Arthur J. Evans. They both arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina, entering the country from the North across the river Sava, as their fellow countryman Humphrey Sandwith had done before. Even though the two travellers never met each other, their travelogues published in 1876 testify that they visited Bosnia in the same period, both crossing the country from the North to the South. What also unites them is the similarity of the images of the country and its people that they left behind; indeed both cast the backwardness of the Bosnian towns and even the decadence of their people against the modernity and vigour of their Austrian counterparts. In the work of James Creagh, this process appears in a more explicit way, as the reader can follow step by step the journey of the traveller and his arrival first in German Brod and subsequently in Turkish Brod. What immediately strikes the reader upon encountering the travelogue of James Creagh is the language used in describing Turkish Brod as a complementary part of the German Brod: “The town on the left bank is called German Brod, and that on the right Turkish Brod [...] and although there is little intercourse between them, the later appears a suburb of the former”231. Then, Creagh integrates this image with another that considers the first town as the opposite of the second, describing the landing place in German Brod as “modern”: “The steamer first stops at Turkish Brod [...] and then [...] it is moored to the modern landing place at German Brod”232. At the end, he places the two geographical sites in opposition, comparing the “digni-
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fied easterners” of Turkish Brod with the “Austrian soldiers” of German Brod, the multi-colour of the first with the bi-chromaticism of the second: dignified Easterners, in flowing robes of many colours and voluminous turbans, move slowly along the path near the water; while in Christendom, although it is only separated from this Oriental picture by the narrow channel of the Save, the church steeples of a little German country town overtop the roofs of the houses, and Austrian soldiers, in white tunics and light blue trowsers, lounge on the seats of an ornamental pleasure ground233.
When Creagh finally lands in Turkish Brod all his attention is focused on describing the opposition between the two realities with a significant emphasis. For him, despite geographical proximity, the difference between the two towns and their people is so strong to remind him of the situation that the English observed in Bombay: “The traveller who goes from Southampton to Bombay round the Cape of Good Hope, sees after a voyage of several months, a great difference in the appearance of those two parts, as well as in that of their inhabitants”234. Eventually, the difference of the two river banks is summarized by the author with an image that orientalizes Turkish Brod and westernizes German Brod, beginning with peoples’ customs and outfit: The contrast between German Brod and Turkish Brod is in no way less remarkable. The former, as its name imports, is a small Austrian town; but in the letter [...] the shopkeepers deal in open stalls in front of their houses, and sitting with their legs folded under them on Turkey carpets, smoke long pipes in true Eastern fashion. [...] women completely covered in long white winding-sheets, glide stealthily from house to house; the faithful, believing that cleanliness is the key of prayer, wash their beards and heads at fountains in the courtyards of the mosques. […] A man with a hat is as much an object of curiosity as if he were in Baghdad; and the immediate neighbourhood of Christendom has no effect on the habits, manners, customs, or religion of the Turks235.
Arthur J. Evans is less inclined than Creagh to oppose one area to the other, while being more explicit in describing the Bosnian cities under the Ottoman influence in openly negative terms. When the window to ‘Ottoman Bosnia’ is opened to Evans, after he has crossed the border with the Austria-Hungarian Empire at the river Sava, which he metaphorically calls the “Rubicon”236, (“but for better or worse our Rubicon is passed, and we land on the Turkish shore”), his Western-European mentality causes him to notice a high degree of incivility. In fact, this region is immediately imprinted on this traveller’s mind in negative terms, which can be observed in this image that puts an emphasis on the decadence of the soldier he meets on the street:
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“among a group of turbaned gentry, from amongst which emerges a somewhat tattered soldier, who conducts us to the square [...] and follow him into the narrow street of Turkish Brood to show our pass to the Prefect or Mudìr”. This situation found on the Bosnian streets is opposed to the mode of dress of Artur J. Evans and his brother Lewis that, even though not explicitly described, is perceived by Evans as evidently in contrast to what he finds in the place visited, as it creates confusion among the locals: “Our appearance created as great a sensation as was decorous among the big-turbans of the townlet”. Added to this are the depictions of the crowded Bosnian streets, an Ethiopian maiden, and the konak’s237 front room with no doors or windows, all the elements that create an image of a quite decadent and rather barbarous Bosnia: crowds of Bosnian gamins followed at our heels; and we caught a passing glimpse of a dusky Ethiopian maiden white-toothing us in the most coquetish fashion from behind the door. As the Mudir was not at home, we had to wait in the front room of his Konak, if indeed a place which possesses neither door nor window [...] can be called a room; and taking our seat on the platform or raised floor became the gazing-stock of a motley assemblage, who crowding round in the street, or taking reserved seats in the melon shop opposite, ‘twigged us’ at their leisure.
What Evans describes in negative terms is also perceived as diversity; on the opposite bank river he finds a completely “new world”: “We, too, obtained a breathing space in which to realise in what a new world we were”238. The accounts of these travellers are not the only ones to place emphasis on the systems of binary oppositions that, crossing the river, travellers developed to create culturally diverse worlds within Europe. The same dichotomies can also be found in the works of some later travellers; T.W. Legh, for example, uses the term ‘civility’ to refer to ‘European life’, while the East is once again associated with what is perceived as an extra-European world: We left the Staatsbahn early one morning, and, after a tedious journey, arrived on the following day at Brod, on the banks of the Save. The river, best known to fame as the scene of Canon MacColl’s mythical impalements, still forms the boundary line between East and West, even as in the days of Prince Eugéne and the Janissaries. On the one side are presented the ordinary features of European life and civilisation; on the other are reproduced the familiar scenes of Asia and Africa239.
Legh’s text is interesting for yet another reason too. While Creagh makes use of two rivers, the Sava and Una, as geographical sites where Western civility ends and Eastern barbarity begins, Legh points out a transition sui generis along the admin-
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istrative border between Herzegovina and Dalmatia. This contrast is probably “one of the most striking” in Europe, he writes, as the form of civility that the travellers encounter in Ragusa (Dalmatia) is comparable with that to be found in Italy: The transition from the Herzegovina to Dalmatia affords probably one of the most striking contrasts in Europe. When I had surmounted the last pass, and beheld the blue Adriatic at my feet, I had passed, as it were, into another world. [...] All seemed strange: the villas, the marble palaces of the ancient town, and the unfamiliar spectacle of persons in the garb of modern fashion. Here in Ragusa was civilisation equal to that of the Italy of to-day, and close at hand a country still plunged in primitive barbarism240.
Even later travellers, those who visited Bosnia at the height of the Austrian occupation, had a similar impression; in a passage taken from the account of a woman traveller, M.M. Holbach, the river Sava, in 1910 – that is even after the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Habsburgs in 1908 – is perceived as a wide borderline between the two civilizations, the one East and the other West: It has been rightly said that on the banks of the Save River (which you cross to enter Bosnia) the two great currents of civilisation meet: one flowing from the West, the other from the East – the first advancing as the latter retrocede. The traveller who wants to study the evolution of a people will have here a fruitful field241.
These images presented in British travel writing on Bosnia, opposing East with West, sometimes even showing the moral and civil superiority of the West with respect to the decadence and barbarity of the East, confirm the well-known thesis of the geosymbolical division of European space into an East and a West. Yet, this sharp and immediate entry into this European East, embodied in these travellers’ accounts visually and physically by the river, does not seem to fit neatly within the interpretative patterns elaborated upon in Wolff ’s and Todorova’s studies. If, in fact, in the case of Eastern Europe and the Balkans Western imaginaries relied on the elements of ambiguity, on border mobility and situations of liminality and progressive transition from one reality to another, in this case it is necessary to make a figurative leap. Indeed, the image of Bosnia that British travellers to this country constructed for their home audience can be considered a singular and independent construction within the Eastern-European geographical space. The cultural physiognomy of the image of this ‘Bosnian East’ was indeed in many ways different from the one that Wolff and Todorova analysed for the European East. Even though it originated in opposition to Western Europe, in the travellers’ imaginations it had a different symbolic location, expressed by its own formulas and contents, as well as
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being considered culturally detached from the other countries of Eastern Europe or the Balkans. The Bosnia of these travellers was, in fact, considered a space within Europe more eastern than its East, and its image assumed certain features that were in many ways more similar to ‘Oriental Otherness’ such as analysed by Edward Said than to Wolff ’s ‘Eastern Europe’, enabling us to talk about a type of ‘Bosnian Orient’, or perhaps about a ‘European Orient’. Indeed, in contrast to the operation of mental mapping that according to Wolff came into existence among Western-Europeans as they compared and contrasted Eastern Europe with Western Europe (“the operations of mental mapping were above all association and comparison: association among the lands of Eastern Europe […] and comparison with the lands of Western Europe”242), in the case of British travellers to Bosnia, even though this country was frequently compared with the countries of Western Europe, it was never associated with the other countries of European East, but rather with Turkey, Middle East, Africa and Asia. A similar leap, which pushes the imaginary from the heart of the Balkan peninsula to the core of the Orient of Saidian memory, was prevalently due to the ‘discovery’ by the British of deeply rooted Islamic tradition within this SouthEastern European country. Bosnia is the Orient If we consider what has just been said with regards to some 19th-century British travellers to Bosnia, it strikes us less that Bosnia-Herzegovina in their travelogues was associated with Asia or even with Africa, assuming all the characteristics of an area incompatible with the European West, partly also with the European East. There are indeed numerous examples of travellers in the 1870s who associated Bosnia with Asian and African countries, ‘creating’, from the perspective of mental geography, an ‘authentic East’ within Europe. James Creagh, for example, compared Bosnia to India, an Oriental land for British writers par excellence: “He [the traveller] might wander by land to the centre of Hindustan without seeing any great difference in a mode of life which is so much the same all through the East”. Creagh also associated Bosnia, which he called “Turkey”, with the Indian towns, particularly to Hyderabad: “that Indian fakirs often come to Brod, and feel as much at home as they do in Hyderbad”243. Paulina Irby and Humphry Sandwith were even more explicit in their associations: while observing Bosnia, they were continually reminded of Asia, the ‘most barbarous’ country, according to Irby’s words, and ‘Moslem’, according to Sandwith.
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Thus, Irby observed that Bosnia, even though geographically very close to what she considered “European civility”244, was the most barbarous of all the provinces in ‘Turkey in Europe’ as far as social conditions were concerned. “In geographical position the nearest to European civilisation, but in social condition the most barbarous of the provinces of Turkey in Europe”245. In her eyes the country exhibited “a savage and Oriental aspect” and the travellers who visited it could not stop imagining themselves in “the wilds of Asia”: Bosnia, including Turkish Croatia and Herzegovina […] interposes a savage and Oriental aspect between the Dalmatian shores of the Adriatic and the advancing culture of Serbia, Hungary, and Croatia. Cross the frontier from these lands, and you may fancy yourself in the wilds of Asia246.
For Sandwith, even the Bosnian countryside resembled Asia: “As I ride along the glens and by the slopes of the hills, I am perpetually reminded of Asia”247. He also opposed Bosnia to England in cultural terms, first by associating it with Timbuktoo and then by describing it as very “Moslem”: I scarcely exaggerate when I say that you would see hardly a greater contrast in everything if you were transported from an English village to Timbuktoo. I have travelled to very remote parts of the Turkish empire, amongst the Nomads of Mesopotamia, and the Kurds on the Persian frontier, yet never did I feel myself in a more Moslem and Asiatic country than now, with an exception there was a very fair road248.
Arthur J. Evans also found in Bosnia the familiar sights of Asia and Africa: “Travellers who have seen the Turkish provinces of Syria, Armenia, or Egypt, when they enter Bosnia, are at once surprised at finding the familiar sights of Asia and Africa reproduced in a province of European Turkey”249. And, while, on the one hand, he reported the fact that Bosnians tended to define themselves in opposition to the other bank of the river Sava, where he thought Europe lay, on the other, he engaged in comparing in his own accounts Bosnia to Asia: “The Bosnians themselves speak of the other side of the Save as ‘Europe’, and they are right; for to all intents and purposes a five minutes’ voyage transports you into Asia”250. In the same year, an anonymous traveller, writing for “The British Quarterly Review”, not very differently from Evans traced a comparison between Bosnia and Kurdistan: “The general aspect of Bosnia and Herzegovina is quite as barbarous as that of the wildest part of Kurdistan”251. What emerges from these same accounts is that British travellers did not perceive Bosnia as an Oriental space in a ‘pure’ geographical sense, by associating it with Asia and Africa; in the same years we find numerous textual examples that emphasized
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Bosnia as culturally Oriental, too. This was suggested by an image of this country as a region that persisted in maintaining traditional Islamic and Ottoman customs. The end result was an image of this Orient as a culturally remote country, traversed by veiled women and idle turbaned men and peppered by Muslim mosques adorned with Oriental minarets. The process of orientalization of this still Ottoman region was already present in the name given to the entire Bosnian population: “The streets and the bazaars are crowded with Orientals of different nations; and besides Greeks, Jews, Christians, and Turks, I saw several Indian Mussulmans”252. What placed even more emphasis on this ‘European Orient’ was an image of the country that insisted in preserving its traditional practices and beliefs, that “the immediate neighbourhood of Christendom has no effect on the habits, manners, customs, or religion of the Turks”253, nor do the signs of modernization coming from the other parts of the Ottoman Empire change. Thus, the Muslim population of Bosnia was shown as hostile towards the Turkish hat, known by the name fez, that since 1839254 acted as a symbol of the progressive modernization of the Ottoman Empire: “As to the introduction of fezzes, the Imperial order almost provoked a revolt here; and to this day among Mahometans the fez is almost confined to officials, the rest of the believers going about in the capacious turbans of the East”255. While in this passage Evans referred to the turbans of the higher classes, Sandwith did the same when writing of the lower classes: “towards evening [we] reach the gloomy town of Tchabtji, a small place with a small bazaar, in which big turbaned Moslems sit all their lives waiting for customers who appear rarely to come”256. In some cases men’s turbans were placed side-by-side with women’s veils (“women completely covered in long white winding-sheets, glide stealthily from house to house.”257), or with the maulouka, a traditional Turkish mantle worn by men: In no other European province of Turkey is the veiling of women so strictly attended to. It is said that not long ago the fine egg-shaped turbans of the Janissaries might still be found in Bosnia, and the Maulouka, the most precious of all mantels, which had died out elsewhere, long survived among these Bosnian Tories258.
This image of Bosnia as a bulwark of typically Ottoman and Islamic traditions was enriched by certain Orientalist images that recalled the presumed inclination to idleness and inertia of the Bosnian Muslim population in particular. This image was probably one of the strongest, underlining the idea of Bosnia as a decadent Orient. In Creagh’s travelogue, for example, the traveller admitted feeling lazy in an ‘Oriental’ way: “I sat on a cushion in its verandah, inhaling the soothing fumes of a long
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hookah”; this same ‘dolce far niente’ of “Eastern fashion”, he also noticed in some figures of “shopkeepers” “who deal in open stalls in front of their houses, and sitting with their legs folded under them on Turkey carpets, smoke long pipes in true Eastern fashion”259. A similar effect is identified in two scenes recalled by Paulina Irby, who described the “tcharsia, or bazaar” as a place where “were sitting turbaned Turks, cross-legged, in their shops before the usual paltry stores of water melons, Manchester cottons [...] and little coffee cups”260; Evans noticed and illustrated the same inertia and idleness in a “café” in Tešanj (see Fig. 3), whereas this same image returns in Irby (see Fig. 4): From here I adjourned to a neighbouring café, discovered by entering another stable and climbing another ladder, leaving L… I found myself amidst a bevy of comfortable Turks, who were alternately sipping their mocha and smoking their long chibouks, – for they belonged to the old school, and were robed in flowing dressing-gowns and surmounted with pompous turbans261.
Fig. 3 Turkish Café, Tešanj Source: A.J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875. With an Historical Review of Bosnia and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa, London 1876, p. 117.
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Fig. 4 Bosnian Rayah Paying Tribute Source: G. Muir Mackenzie, A. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, vol. 2, London 1877 [2nd enlarged ed.], p. 310.
In another passage Paulina Irby pointed out an “absence of life” among the Bosnian Muslims; in an occasion of “merrymaking” at Mount Trebević near Sarajevo, she noticed a “striking absence of life” among the Muslim men with “red turbans” and the Muslim women “in white veil”262. But, in the works of these travellers, this same “absence of life” recurred even in the landscape that the Bosnians of every religious affiliation inhabit. Their habitat was, in fact, filtrated through elements that emphasized disorder and filth, thus highly symptomatic of the Bosnians’ indolence: “The streets [Bosnian] are very Eastern, and that is enough to say to all who have travelled eastward; but in deference to those who have not, I may say they are narrow, ill-paved, filthy, and swarming with ownerless and very mangy dogs”263. Even the Muslim graveyard, despite its picturesque character, was seen as a neglected place, whose location next to residential houses was perceived as an anomalous presence unimaginable by an Englishman:
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A striking feature of Banjaluka, even more than of other Turkish towns, is the number of Mohammedan graveyards scattered between the houses; they are eminently picturesque, but quite uncared for, and seem a little out of place to Western eyes among the abodes of the living. Imagine little odd cemeteries here, there, and everywhere among the gardens of out English towns! But the East is the East and the West is the West264.
The Bosnia of the second half of the 19th century, immersed in its ample Islamic context, from which emanated a whole series of Islamic customs and habits, underwent in British travel accounts a process of orientalization. Having crossed the river Sava, travellers arrived “in Eslamiah [where] the long and graceful minarets of Turkish mosques point upwards among the trees”265 and, in a land “of Asiatic despotism”266. This construction of Bosnia as an ‘authentic Orient’ within Europe evolves at the same time as the Western creation of the modern image of the Orient, which, as Edward Said and subsequent studies inspired by him have shown, takes place at the end of the 19th century, exactly when the British travellers here considered visited Bosnia267. The Oriental image of Bosnia is in fact a cultural construct that reflects almost all the characteristics of the Western image of the Orient and for this reason it can not be studied as a phenomenon independent of it. The association of Bosnia with extra-European countries is the first characteristic that joins the Orient analysed by Edward Said to the Orient of the British travellers in Bosnia. This Orientalist attitude did not cease in the 20th century. It continued to morph and be disseminated by subsequent travellers, who came to know this country under the Austrian administration. The representations of Bosnian towns, including Doboj, Jajce, Mostar and Sarajevo were all orientalized beginning with the very name used to refer to them (see Fig. 5, 6): The profound solitude, the virgin-like nature of the vast wilderness, are broken here and there by Oriental towns, mediaeval castles and keeps, and widely scattered, picturesque villages, wherein dwell a dignified and proud people, of inflexible courage, ever ready for war or song […]268.
Travellers encountered the East on the streets of these towns. An Irish traveller, Patrick Barry, came across the first apparition of “the East” in Mostar. “The town of Mostar, except for its pretty situation by the mountains, did not interest me much. For travellers unfamiliar with Asia it opens up the first glimpses of the East”269. And, as others noticed, even though this East lived side-by-side with the West, it did not tend to change its habits: Here, early in the day, you will find the East and the West elbowing one another – smart Austrian officers and strapping Hercegovinians, Albanians with their braided white
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Fig. 5 Street Scene in Jajce Source: M.M. Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings, London 1910, p. 45.
Fig. 6 Banjaluka Source: H.C. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk. Impressions of a Journey Through the Western Balkans, London 1897, p. 117.
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trousers and shaven heads, tall Montenegrins from over the border, and a sprinkling of Dalmatians, easily distinguishable from the rest by their tiny scarlet caps270.
An object of interest is represented by the aesthetic that characterized these “Oriental” places, an aesthetic that contrasted with a “Western school” and was animated by a certain “vitality” which gave place to the “endless variety”: The great bulk of the houses here are not like those “in Europe”, governed by circle and line, after the Western school; Oriental freedom reigns, intolerant of all monotony: everything is lively, and adds to the endless variety. On the near side of the water, to the right, the massive pile of the cathedral belonging to the Greek Church is seen; on the further, just facing us, that of the Konaks; but the real enchantment of the picture lies in the minarets, which rise white and slender in countless numbers271.
Most attention was given to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, also called by travellers the “Damascus of the North”; this city was said to be “the centre of the East” (“At last we reached the town, and found ourselves in the very centre of the East”)272, as well as to contain in its external appearance an aspect of the eternal Orient which remains unaltered despite the immediate closeness of “Austrian Sarajevo” (“Yet side by side with Austrian Sarajevo is Turkish Sarajevo – the unchanged Orient”)273; others stressed that Sarajevo, despite a large number of modern houses constructed under the new administration, continued to be a typically “Turkish” capital (“The number of newly built modern houses, and houses in the course of construction, has not been able as yet to rob Serajevo of its character of a Turkish capital”)274, and as such was betrayed by its “fascinating bazaar and its venerable mosques, purely Eastern at heart”275. For this reason travellers to this city easily identified the “picturesque” sceneries: “Sarajevo is beautifully situated on the slopes of the hills. [...] The distant view of glistening minarets peering out from amongst the foliage of the gardens is very picturesque”276 (see Fig. 7, 8). In addition, for some travellers Bosnian cities exhibited sceneries of “mystery” typical for the East. Cruger Coffin, having visited the most northern Bosnian town, Banjaluka, then entered the Hungarian territories and with a veil of sadness and nostalgia recalled the “mystery” of “the East” that he left behind: “The East, its scenery, mystery, and costumes were left behind; the crown lands of Hungary through which we passed seemed worthless in comparison and the every-day life to which we were returning remarkably tame”277. There are also many negative aspects that the travellers found in the towns of this ‘European Orient’, as they did, for example, in the ‘crowded’ streets: “[Sarajevo]
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Fig. 7 A Street in the Caršija, Sarajevo Source: R. Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Dalmatia, Edinburgh - London 1895, p. 12. ^
Fig. 8 The Carcija, Sarajevo Source: H.C. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk. Impressionas of a Journey through the Western Balkans, London 1897, p. 71. ^
^
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presenting a lively appearance with its richly caparisoned teams, the horses trotting along to the tinkling of multitudes of tiny bells, its groups of begging or fiddle-scraping gipsies, its women in white gowns”278; for some the “crowd” had the power to “dispel” the previously formed visions of Oriental ‘beauty’: “like all Oriental towns, the conception of beauty which we had formed, is dispelled as soon as we enter the crowded and dirty streets”279. Among the negative characteristics of the Bosnian towns the travellers also found dirt: “The dilapidated looking houses, with their wooden kiosks, dingy from age, protruding over the narrow streets, gives to Sarajevo the impression of poverty and dirt that is peculiar to all Eastern towns”280; and disorder, as in the Bosnian shops: “In the little square of the quarter […] are to be seen better-stocked shops – general emporiums, so to speak, where are jumbled together articles of luxury, musical instruments, clothes, saddlery, leather-work, and kitchen utensils”281, sometimes accompanied by an irritating and continuous murmur: “through steep and winding and narrow ways [Sarajevo], over small pavingstones, surrounded on all sides by the many-coloured, noisy, vivacious street-life of an Oriental city”282. And not only the towns were seen by these later travellers as Oriental. The inhabitants, through this same Orientalist rhetoric, were removed from their historical context and described by relying on two Orientalist topoi, boredom and idleness. “Boredom” became the “normal” condition of the Bosnian Muslims (“their normal state of utter boredom”)283; an image that described this people in their everyday life was that which saw them either devoted to their coffees, or to the prayers to their God: “Jaice is peopled with Moslems, squatting in Moorish cafés sipping coffee or quietly praying to Allah”284. The Christian population of Bosnia did not escape a similar process of orientalization. Holbach, for example, described a scene from the church in Mostar, where the devotees behaved “in Oriental fashion”: “In Mostar, the scene within the churches is remarkable, the whole congregation kneeling or sitting cross-legged on the round in Oriental fashion; many, I noticed, like the Turks in the mosques, came provided with prayer carpets”285. Neither the Eastern Europe of the intellectuals studied by Larry Wolff, nor the Balkans of the authors investigated by Maria Todorova, fits the case of Bosnia as portrayed by British travellers. Rather, our heuristic approach focused on a specific regional case leads us to conclude that, for the British who travelled in this Balkan country, it is more appropriate to talk about a real and proper Orient. The image of Bosnia as an Oriental land, associable with Asia and Africa and perceived as a bulwark of Turkish and Muslim traditions, is not in fact an image that suggests am-
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biguity, as happens with Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, but rather a contraposition, even though within Europe. British travellers in Bosnia, beginning with the second half of the 19th century, establish a clear contrast between this ‘European Orient’ and their West. The symbolic location of Bosnia within an East that is more in the East than in the European East, with the process of associating this country with Asia and Africa as well as its representation in terms of ‘Oriental Otherness’, converges in this geographical and cultural orientalization of Bosnia by British travellers in Bosnia between the second half of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century. ‘Balkan-deflected Orientalism’ At this point it is necessary to highlight that even after the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and in the first years of the 20th century, unlike other Balkan regions characterised by a Balkanist discourse, the Orientalist component remains quite strong for Bosnia. This specific Orientalism can be attributed to the prolonged presence of the Ottoman Empire, and to the deeply rooted presence of Islam among the Bosnian population, with all its profound and ‘evident’ implications, from architecture to dress and certain daily practices. Islam, an old source of anxiety for European societies and which was discovered in its Balkanic version in the 1870s, seems to have played the principal role in removing Bosnia from ‘European civilization’, locating it within a more Oriental and less East European or Balkanic space (the latter two, as noted, are intended as sites of ‘in-betweenness’). This consideration fits into a more general debate on the processes of construction of a ‘Self-Other’ relationship. In fact, an analysis of British travel accounts confirms some recent criticism of postcolonial studies; it has been stressed that cultural and political power relations between dominating countries and colonies, as well as between Western and Eastern European countries, have been analysed on the basis of an excessively monolithic and generalising system of opposition286. If it is still useful to interpret the exercise of power through a system of binary opposition (strongweak, superior-inferior), it has also been demonstrated that power-relations assume multiple forms and that this depends either on the context, or on the period, within which these relations are formulated. The modality that prevailed in establishing the ‘Self-Other’ power relationship in the British discourse on Bosnia was that which represented Bosnia not as a ‘land of in-betweenness’, but as an ‘Oriental Otherness’. There are also other elements, that
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characterise the ‘hegemonic discourse’ of British travellers in Bosnia and that similarly exclude the structure of the Balkanist discourse. The ‘masculine’ vision of the Balkans is, for example, in opposition to the Saidian vision of ‘feminine’ Orientalism and this is, as we will see in the next chapter, also true in relation to the discourse on Bosnia. In any case, if it is possible to continue with other examples, it seems that the essential difference concerns the absence of liminality. Disorder, filth, lethargy and idleness, and even some Levantine characteristics, are not absent from the Balkanist discourse, they even build it. What hinders a definition of this discourse of British travellers in Bosnia as Balkanism is the absence first of all of in-betweenness and than of a transitory status. In any case, we should not neglect the Balkanist influences to which British Orientalism on Bosnia was subject from the 1870s. This specific aspect can be observed in the same travel texts by focusing on a certain process of westernization of the ‘Bosnian Orient’, which arose from a series of geographical, political, racial and religious factors. In the late 1870s, the ‘Oriental Bosnia’ of British travelogues assumed certain shades of ambiguity, partly recalling the transitory status typical for the Balkans. The Orientalism that the travellers assumed for Bosnia became obviously subject to Balkanist influences; thus the ‘Bosnian Orient’ acquired some characteristics that for most contemporary Western Europeans of those years were typically Balkanic – and for us Balkanist. To observe this from close up we might best analyse the travelogues of Evans and Sandwith, who, while providing us with numerous examples of Orientalist rhetoric, proclaimed a ‘hybridisation’ of ‘Orientalised Bosnia’ by introducing some typically Western elements; in this way they partly westernized this area of the Orient: Paper cigarettes!– twenty years ago they would have been narghilés, ambery, Oriental, ablaze with gold and jewels, enchantingly barbaric; but their date is fled; the West advances and the East recedes; and now, even in Conservative old Bosnia, the pipe is degenerating into the symbol of a fogy! Sic transit gloria mundi287. I was offered a cigarette, and so perfectly un-Turkish did this appear that I declined it, a flagrant breach of Turkish manners288.
Cigarettes were a symbol, although a negative one, of the western penetration of Bosnia; in these travellers’ eyes this occurred at a very high price: through the decadence of Oriental traditions and the acquisition of degrading Western practices – that Evans refused to accept. A consequence of this was, as the words from Evans’s
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travelogue testify, that a static vision of the cultural areas’ boundaries, embodied in the idea of a river as a distinct border between the two worlds, was placed alongside an image of osmosis between them, rendered by the idea of a mobile boundary. The concept of a country with all the characteristics of the Orient was somewhat re-dimensioned and the perception of a presumed advance of the West towards Bosnia could be observed. The same partial westernization of the Orient can be observed when Evans writes concretely about the uses and the customs of the Bosnian Muslims. Evans focussed not only on the Muslims’ conservatism, or on their fundamentalism, but on what rendered them similar to Europeans, or even different from the Turks and other Ottoman Muslims. The reference to the absence of polygamy in the Bosnia-Muslim community was, in fact, in strong opposition to the cases discussed earlier where Bosnia was presented as a bulwark of Islamic and Ottoman customs: We learnt that polygamy was almost non-existent throughout the provinces. It has been dying out, it is true, in other parts of Turkey, but here it appears never to have taken. What is still perhaps exceptional among the wealthier Turks, the richest Bosniacs have only one wife. Some of them are said to have concubines, but public opinion here denounces the Moslem who concludes more than one marriage289.
Similarly, and in contradistinction to previous examples regarding the process of orientalization of Bosnia from the point of view of the Bosnian-Muslims’ costumes and dress, a certain degree of westernization of these Muslims can be also perceived in descriptions of their way of dressing. Patterson, for example, wrote of a Bosnian Muslim who dressed in “slightly Orientalised, European clothes with a red fez on his head”290. Irby’s look settled on a figure of a “cadi” “with European features”: No one made himself more agreeable than the cadi, a personage who in other places seldom came near us at all. He was a tall, fair man, with European features, and gave one an idea of the knights his forefathers, when they first put on the turban291.
Authors in the 1870s, by writing in this way of the habits of the Bosnian Muslims, seemed to shape an idea of Bosnia as an Oriental and Islamic place moving slowly towards the European West. This operation was rendered possible by the overlapping in travellers’ texts of two different discourses, the Orientalist and the Balkanist, the latter assuming a more definite form exactly when the travellers crossed in Bosnia-Herzegovina292. This process of relative westernization of the Orient in the 1870s was determined also by at least two factors that originated within the Bosnian context and inter-
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sected British travellers’ own prejudices: first, the geographical position of Bosnia, and its proximity to the West, embodied in British travellers’ eyes by the AustroHungarian Empire, from which Bosnia was separated only by a river; second, the travellers’ discovery of the Slavic roots of Bosnians, including the Bosnian Muslim population. As we saw in chapter two, British liberals, during the years of the Eastern Crisis, tried to re-evaluate the Slavs, emphasising their capacity to reach the highest peaks of civilization and to form nations by following the paths of the Western-European nation-states. These travellers assumed the perspective of ‘progressive’ evolutionism which, while preserving the idea of inferiority of the peoples at the borders of Europe, did not deny to those they considered as underdeveloped the possibility to improve in moral terms and to gradually advance towards civility, within both agrarian and political spheres. A similar, progressive, westernization of the ‘Bosnian Orient’ was seen with even more clarity by the travellers who visited Bosnia in the years of the Austrian occupation. The Balkan Peninsula, written by the French author Emile de Laveleye, is an exemplary text in this sense. Laveleye described the contrast between the two banks of the river Sava, the two Brods, relying on the Orientalist rhetoric (“There are two Brods, opposite to one another, on each side of the Save: Slavonic-Brod, an important fortress, as the base of operation of the Austrian armies, which occupied the new provinces; and Bosna-Brod, which belonged to Turkey”), pointing out that the river Sava represented a symbolic border between the two worlds (“Two civilizations, two religions, two entirely different modes of life and thought, are here face to face, separated by a river”); but he did not stop here, as he also announced an imminent end to this centuries-long contrast, that would be seen in the disappearance of the ‘Mussulman character’ under the Austrians: “It is true that during four centuries this river has really divided Europe and Asia; but the Mussulman character will rapidly disappear under the influence of Austria”293. A reason for this latter shift in travellers’ imaginaries can undoubtedly be located in the new Austria-Hungarian administration which, after 1880, the year that saw the return to power of Gladstone, received unqualified support from Britain. The travellers who went to Bosnia in this period identified signals of civilisation almost everywhere294; their descriptions of this country recounted the first steps towards modernization and progress in this ‘Bosnian Orient’. Benjamin Kállay “restored to civilisation” a people which “for centuries” had been “the prey of ignorance, fanaticism, and indeed almost of barbarism”295. We also find frequent enthusiastic comments on the changes that, the travellers noted, had occurred in a short time:
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Nowhere else in Europe has there been so rapid an increase in population and wealth, and the picturesque old towns are taking on an air of activity. While subject to the Turks Bosnia practically vanished from the current of civilization until 1875, when, exasperated by extortion, robbery, rapine, murder, and religious persecution, the people rose in rebellion. The powers of Europe placed them under the protection of Austria, which has give the most remarkable exhibition of administrative reform known to modern history, and has demonstrated the possibility of governing alien races by justice and benevolence296.
If between 1875 and 1878 this ‘Orientalized Bosnia’ underwent a slight process of westernization, Bosnia after 1880 seemed in the travellers’ eyes to be a country much closer to Western European countries than in previous years. The most radical change was the shift of the entire region on the collective mental map: Bosnia was no longer just an Orient associated, both geographically and culturally, with Turkey, Asia and Africa, but also, and increasingly, with Europe. This is clearly seen in the writings of the travellers who asserted that Bosnia could be visited not only “without undergoing any pleasurable privations or extraordinary sufferings”, but also “without quitting Europe”297. A similar overlapping of other discursive formations, such as that of Balkanism, to the Orientalist one can be explained by some recent readings of the Orientalist discourse, that arose from a relation of critical diffidence towards Orientalism conceived by Edward Said. First of all, these studies realised the limits of Said’s interpretation of the concept of discourse, which led to an interpretation of Orientalism as a ‘closed’ and ‘stable’ terrain, without any contradiction. Rather, as some scholars have asserted, in order to avoid conforming all the processes of differentiations it is necessary to re-consider both Orientalism and colonialism in the light of the Foucaultian conception of discourse as ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘inconsistent’298. Lisa Lowe, for example, draws attention to the Foucaultian conception of discourse as an “irregular series of regularities that produce objects of knowledge”299. According to this scholar, although the 18th- and 19th-century Western sources, in which the idea of the Orient originated can be considered substantially the same, fitting within the dimension of ‘regularity’, “the manner in which these materials conjoin to produce the category ‘the Orient’ is not equal to the conjunction constituting the ‘Orient’ at another historical moment, or in another national culture”300. It is evident that Lowe is trying to return to the idea according to which neither the conditions of discursive formations, nor the objects of knowledge, are identical, static, or continuous through time301. Therefore the methodological re-orientation
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offered by Lowe, which focuses on the fluidity of discursive conditions as well as of their objects of knowledge, ends up by conceiving the discourse not just as a ‘closed’ and ‘stable’ system, but as an open terrain or, as she writes, a “multivalent, overlapping, dynamic terrain”, within which discursive formations that are once again determined by historical and cultural factors can intersect: “I encounter the problem of what to call this nexus of apparatuses that is not closed but open, not fixed but mobile, not dominant although it includes dominant formations, and so forth”302. What results from these considerations is that Orientalism is a heterogeneous and contradictory phenomenon, composed of “orientalist situations”, whose variable character depends upon the cultural and historical context and also reveals the complex and unstable nature of this discourse303. On the basis of similar considerations, we can conclude by saying that the dominant discourse in the writings of British travellers on Bosnia is a heterogeneous and complex Orientalism which, between the 1870s and the beginning of the 20th century, underwent a process of being influenced by Balkanism. Due to this, as well as because of its location in the Balkans, this discursive formation has been denominated ‘Balkan-deflected Orientalism’. If we chose this definition, it is because it both announces the Balkanist and Orientalist elements and emphasizes that the prevailing ones are certainly the latter. We have also seen that not only is this valid for the 1870s, but that it continues until the beginning of the 20th century: Orientalism is, in fact, a constant element of the discourse examined. Nevertheless, it is not a ‘simple’ Orientalism, not only because no one discourse, as we saw, is ever ‘simple’, but also because the one pointed out by Said, though with reference to the Middle East and Palestine, cannot be applied to the Balkans without its undergoing some change and transformation. Furthermore, the same discourse could also undergo change due to variations of this same historical context and of the nature of relationships between western and eastern (or south-eastern) societies. In fact, the Orientalist discourse on Bosnia had some peculiar features that distinguished it from Orientalism as conceived and analysed by Edward Said. British travellers produced and applied a peculiar Balkan type of Orientalism, which, in a largely unaltered form, was further up-dated in the last quarter of the 19th century.
IV. Unveiling the Bosnian Muslim woman As already observed in the previous chapter, British representations of BosniaHerzegovina proceeded through an orientalization of the country, yet at the same time showing it to be not completely alienated from the ‘civilized’ West by westernizing some aspects of its cultural life. The two poles of the image were not equal, the Orientalist one being more influential, thus creating a picture crossed by internal tensions as well as subjected to specific dynamics. This is what I hope to demonstrate here through an analysis of the stereotypical image of the Muslim woman in British accounts of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 19th and the 20th century304. The stereotypical image has not been chosen randomly, for, as we will see, the British discourse of Bosnia-Herzegovina was an Orientalist ‘discourse of man’, constructed on the metaphor of the Muslim woman305. Therefore, the Muslim woman in these writings was identified in terms of an ‘Oriental Otherness’ and was represented through a constantly metamorphosing stereotyped image of a woman hidden by the veil, locked in the harem and a victim of polygamy, as well as a corollary image that represented the Muslim woman free from such Orientalist restrictive impositions. Unexpectedly, it was these transformations of the then current stereotypes of the Muslim woman that created, in the second half of the 19th century, a ‘westernized Orient’ similar to that observed in the previous chapter. As Anne McClintock demonstrated, the prevalently male colonial imaginary, in order to exercise its power, used the female body in multiple ways306. Among the various patterns of the female body that were available in the Western imaginaries, this chapter will consider the model constructed through the representation of the veil, the harem and polygamy in the Islamic tradition. Western-European cultures that made use of these Orientalist topoi to represent Muslim ‘female Otherness’ did not interpret them literally, thus stressing their materiality, but they rather perceived them symbolically, as vehicles of their ideas relative to social status of the Muslim woman. In order to employ them as instruments of historical and cultural analysis relative to the British construction of the position of the woman in Bosnian and Herzegovinian contexts, this analysis will use these topoi from this same viewpoint, that is with respect to their symbolic meaning. As Maria Todorova suggested, female ‘Oriental Otherness’ was an atypical phenomenon for the Balkans. In fact, it was not just the Balkans which were perceived by
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Western Europeans through a specific discourse distinct from that related to the Orient, so-called “Balkanism”, but one of the main differences between Orientalism and Balkanism was gender asymmetry. In fact, the feminized Orient, realized and achieved through the metaphoric images representing women either as passionate and erotic subjects or as passive objects, was contrasted with the masculinized Balkans: “Unlike the standard orientalist discourse, which resorts to metaphors of its objects of study as female, balkanist discourse is singularly male”307. A recent application of the postcolonial theoretical experience to the study of the British imaginary representations of the Balkans highlighted the variety of the gendered images that male travellers adopted to link together these two geo-cultural contexts308. By adopting this genre of studies as a methodological framework, I intend to show how the singularly male Balkanism was not the main discursive device that British travellers in Bosnia used to refer to the subtle hierarchical and power relations that in travellers’ eyes linked Great Britain and this country. In fact, through the deconstruction of the image of the Muslim woman, it will be shown that in the case of British travellers to Bosnia-Herzegovina, this Balkanist discourse was substituted with a more specifically female one, decidedly Orientalist in flavour. This latter becomes, in fact, the travellers’ principal discursive device, capable of regulating the relationship between Great Britain on one side and what was seen as Islamicized Bosnia on the other, without yet completely ignoring Balkanism. Orientalism as a male-oriented erotic discourse Edward Said’s reflections on Orientalism and on the ideological organization of Western knowledge of the Muslim East in the age of ‘second imperialism’ are very well known. What Said has shown is that Orientalist writings created and propagated an image of Oriental societies (and of Muslim societies more in particular) as stagnant and unchangeable, backward, hostile and incapable of self-government, the effect of which was to justify Western dominion over the colonised societies309. Although Bosnia was never a British colony, the strong presence of Islam in the country which travellers became particularly aware of during the latter decades of the 19th century, made it possible in the South-Eastern European context to employ a discourse which during that age in Great Britain conventionally represented an Islamic extra-European Otherness. Nevertheless, because of the diversity of geo-political circumstances, the fact that Bosnia-Herzegovina was situated in a space geographically considered South-East-
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ern European, and that its political and administrative status was not that of a British colony, the Orientalism employed here was different to that in British colonies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The best example of this diversity is the image of the indigenous woman. In the largely male accounts of the Balkans here examined, the image of the Bosnian Muslim woman was never that of exagerated femininity, a trait that, as Said argued, characterized the Orient in a general (“the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability”)310, emphasising both its sexual and sensual aspects, but rather one that identified the Muslim woman in her oppressed condition. It might be expected that a consideration of the pecularities of Orientalist discourse for the Balkans should focus on the place, role and representation of the woman. As some canonical studies of the image of Islam in the West have shown, since the Middle Ages, the West based its representation of Islam on the figure of the woman311. This same ‘tradition’, in the 18th and 19th centuries, influenced the corpus of Orientalist knowledge, which continued constructing the discourse of ‘Muslim Otherness’ on the foundations of stereotypical representations of the Muslim woman. It has been often noticed, in fact, that from the post-Enlightenment the West associated Islam almost exclusively with the figure of the Muslim woman: When the Orient was Orientalized (to paraphrase Edward Said), when a vast and complex body of knowledge about the Islamic Other developed simultaneously with Western subjugation of that world, the image of the Muslim woman most familiar in the West today emerged. Relative to the growth of the discourse on Islam in general, the Muslim woman’s character grows all at once […] into one of the overreaching concerns of the discourse312.
Not only. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Muslim woman came to be even strongly manipulated by Western European commentators of the cultures who began to perceive her as essentially different from the accepted European norm. Identified as a victim of the innate violence of Islam and represented as “an abject harem slave, the quintessential victim of absolute despotism, debased to a dumb, animal existence”313, through her stereotypical representations the Muslim woman became functional to the affirmation of Western empires. As Mohja Kahf has shown, the imperialist project began to justify liberal Western politics as a form of salvation liberating those women, perceived as subjugated victims of the backward masculinist Oriental regimes:
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The “rise” of the subjugated Muslim woman concurred with the build-up of British and French empires in the 19th century, which in subjugating whole Muslim societies, had a direct interest in viewing the Muslim woman as oppressed – even as their policies had oppressive effects on flesh-and-blood Muslim women314.
The masculine aspects of Orientalism and the erotic manipulations of colonialism have been first analysed by Rana Kabbani in Europe’s Myths of Orient. In her study of the image of the Orient, in both Western European art and literature, Kabbani has emphasized the way in which the West feminized this imaginary place by associating it with the images of seduction, conquest, and the ravishing and rape of women315. Yet, the roots of such eroticized and feminized images of colonialism, as Kabbani has observed, are traceable to a medieval image of Islam. Norman Daniel has shown, indeed, that most features that determined the medieval and later-medieval Western image of Islam survived in the 19th century316. Among many other characteristics that determined the Western image of Islam, it was above all an inherent violence and lascivious sensuality that the West assigned to Islam in the Middle Ages and that still, in the 19th century, marked emphatically both Islam and the Orient in general317. The prototype of this image can be found in medieval representations of Muhammad, constructed on the basis of the Prophet’s inherent violence and sexual licentiousness, “the two most important aspects of Muhammad’s life, Christians believed, were his sexual licence and his use of force to establish his religion”318. The prophet Muhammad was described by Westerners as an “arch-seducer” who dressed in violet, wore lipstick and “delighted in scented things and coition”319. Giraldus Cambrensis, for example, writing in the 12th century, thought Muhammad’s teachings to be concentrated on lust, thus particularly suitable for Orientals, since they lived in a climate of great natural heat320. This image of Muhammad as immoral and licentious was accompanied by an image that showed him as violent and brutal. According to Western accounts, the Prophet imposed a law of violence in order to be able to impose on his people his own will. Such an image of the Prophet Muhammad was also reflected in that which was, for many centuries, the overall image of Islam prevalent in the West. “The use of force was almost universally considered to be a major and characteristic constituent of the Islamic religion, and an evident sign of error. It was a part of the Christian approach to take this view while embracing the necessity for crusading”321. This process of eroticization and feminization of colonialism, as is evident from the work of Kabbani and her vision of a strongly-feminized Orientalist discourse, had its most significant repercussions in the studies on the French colonial context with
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special emphasis on Algeria. In The Colonial Harem, for example, Malek Alloula has shown the way in which erotic postcards representing Algerian women, sent to France by the French colonizers in the first decades of the 20th century, played an important role in French colonial engagement in Algeria322. The massive production of such postcards, in the age of colonial conquest of Algeria by French troops, Alloula has argued, supported, to a certain degree, the colonialist aggression of the French. This media-driven popularization of the eroticization of the female image, as Alloula has argued, placed greater emphasis on the veil in women’s lives in Algerian Muslim society323. The veil, seen by French as the symbol of Algerian originality and integrity, came to be progressively removed on the postcard representations, acting in this way as a vehicle of Muslim’s woman’s eroticism324. It is not surprising then that, following on Rana Kabbani’s and Malek Alloula’s analyses of the erotic and feminine aspects of colonialism, various studies have more recently been published which emphasize the strongly erotic features of the image of the Muslim woman in the West325. Such is the case with the book by Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman, where not only the Western emphasis on the subordination of the Muslim woman by the Muslim man is mentioned, which she has located as originating in the 17th century, but also the strong sexual characterization, through the harem and the veil, of her image starting in the 18th and 19th centuries326. According to Kahf, both these aspects were rooted in the Western discourse on sexuality, as well as playing a special role within that same discourse. The formation of new models of desire and pleasure among Western Europeans, which Michel Foucault called the “deployment of sexuality”, was accompanied by the birth of new cultural patterns, the most important of which regarded the woman327. Whereas in Western European countries the ideal of femininity was represented by an image of the woman as a “domestic woman”328, devoted to her children and seen as a mainstay of the family, the Muslim woman was seen as her opposed Other, a sort of negative ideal able to instigate corrupt desires and promise illicit pleasures. In this sense, this image of the Muslim woman played the role of counterbalance within the mainstream Western discourse on sexuality and as such she was employed in a fashion similar to the aristocratic woman, who, in most 18th- and 19th-century representations, exhibited an inclination towards sensuality and eroticism and was seen in opposition to the middle-class woman329. The scholarly study by Mohja Kahf, by stressing the feminization and eroticization of Orientalism through the figure of the Muslim woman in particular, had a sig-
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nificant impact on Orientalist and postcolonial studies. It claimed, in fact, that the process of “Orientalization of the Orient” worked on the basis of an image of a strongly eroticized Muslim woman, who was also shown as oppressed by the Muslim man. The same was not the case for Bosnia, however. The process of Orientalization that Bosnia underwent in British travel writing represents an exception in the field of postcolonial studies. In fact, even though Muslim Bosnia was represented by the travellers as a ‘female Oriental Other’, the image of the woman lacked the erotic and sexual features mentioned above. On the contrary, the oppression and passivity of the Bosnian Muslim identity tended to be strongly stressed. Such features were made explicit by a peculiar use of the traditions and customs relating to women in Muslim society such as the veil, the harem and polygamy. Figurative topoi of Western images of the Muslim woman: political implications and historical changes Before dealing with the Islamic ‘female Otherness’ of Bosnia-Herzegovina, I would like to focus in detail on the prototype of this image in the West, when British travellers visited Bosnia, ‘discovering’ Islam in this country and describing it in Orientalist colours of a feminine tonality. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Muslim woman was perceived as a victim of Islam who, as well as being condemned to passivity in a state of powerlessness and oppression, was above all depicted as an erotic and seductive creature. This image resulted from the Western manipulation of the representation of the typically female Muslim customs of wearing the veil and, less typical but equally well known, life in the harem330. Such a portrait of the Muslim woman was firmly rooted in the 17th century, before the first experience of Western colonization. Its principal source of transformations, as well as the first reason for its diffusion in the West, was the publication of the French version of The Thousand and One Nights (1704-1717) by Antoine Galland and the edition of the same text in English331. Compared to the earlier versions of this book, The Thousand and One Nights by Galland was less explicit in matters of sexuality, especially when the issue in focus was female sexuality. In fact, the image of the woman in this text was adapted to contemporary European tastes and so tended to represent the woman as deprived of all those features that, in earlier versions, emphasized her active sexuality332. By taking this shift in the image of the woman into consideration, Mohja Kahf has shown the predominant portrait of op-
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pression, passivity and eroticism of the Muslim woman, especially by focusing on the literary use of the harem and by occasionally referring to the veil333. Yet, it is not possible to think of the Western image of the Muslim woman as unchanged across the centuries. On the contrary, it was a textual manifestation strongly subject to change, whose principal features in the 18th and 19th centuries were determined by both the Western discourse on Islam and that on gender. In the 18th century, Islam lost the cultural strength it possessed in earlier centuries, due to the political and military weakening of the Ottoman Empire. One of the side effects of this change was the absolute domination of Western knowledge, which established itself in terms of Orientalist discourse. It was then that what is considered the last transformation in the representation of the Western woman took place. In the aftermath of the seizure of power by the middle classes and of the coming of modern capitalism at whose disposal the image of the woman was put, this representation took the shape of the domestic woman334. The eroticized and sexualized Muslim woman that emerged in this same period represented the domestic woman’s opposite other, a type of negative female ideal. Lastly, in the 18th century, a political discourse relative to the issues of the political and social liberty of women came into being, which represented a further contribution to the debate relative to the oppression of women in Muslim society and to the need for their emancipation. Western cultural dominance over Islam, that reached its peak with the classificatory organization of knowledge of ‘Muslim Otherness’, together with the transformation of the image of the woman in the West and the birth of a political liberal discourse, are all issues considered among the principal causes of the emersion and development of the 17th- and 18th-century image of the Muslim woman in Western narratives335. The shift in the stereotype of the Muslim woman over time need not be considered as the only possible evolution in the Western image of the Muslim woman. Some scholars have shown, for example, that, in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, some features of this image were also determined by gender issues. The analysis of the differences between male and female travel accounts, carried out by some female scholars, showed that the androcentric postcolonial theory of Edward Said, Rana Kabbani and others seems not to be applicable to travel writing produced by women in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Western male travellers to the East frequently made use of a feminized and eroticized Orientalist discourse to justify their engagements with both colonized peoples and their cultures. In opposition to this theory, female scholars of colonialism and Orientalism have shown that female travel writing tended
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not to advocate this peculiar sexualized image336. It was shown that women who travelled to the East, while perpetuating the discursive mechanisms of power and dominion, offered an image of the Orient which did not mirror the concept of “feminine penetrability”337. In fact, the eroticization of the Orient was not among the primary concerns of female travellers, who, being attracted mostly by the private sphere and interpersonal relations, proposed an image of the Orient and of Muslim women in familial and social terms, frequently offering an image of the Orientalist places reserved for women in both liberal and libertine terms. The harem and the Turkish bath were not described as eroticised sites of female oppression and ghettoization, but as sites of female socialization, just as the Muslim veil was perceived as a ‘site’ of female autonomy par excellence338. Furthermore, it was often underlined that Western-European women, while in the East, frequently used so-called ‘harem literature’ in order to construct an antiphallic, gynarchic model of “what a woman wants” 339. All this allows us to talk about a variation of the image of the woman on both diachronic and synchronic levels340. Similarly, Fatema Mernissi, analysing the same topic in geographical terms, has shown the difference between the image of the Muslim woman in the East and in the West. With a comparative analysis of the image of the harem, Mernissi showed the diversity in the perception of the woman in different geographical areas. A Western image of the Muslim woman as a source of sexual pleasure was pitted against an Oriental image that showed her as an obstacle to male sexual pleasures341. Nevertheless, even though these scholars specified the spatial mobility of the image of the Muslim woman, in the contexts of both gender and geography, no scholar has discussed the way certain geopolitical conditions of those prevalently Muslim countries in Western focus could influence the variety of images of the Muslim woman. Concentration on the specific image of the Bosnian Muslim woman in British travel accounts will provide a specific case for such a study. This specificity is explicit either in the ‘mobility’ of the veil, or in the representation of the harem, which is perceived as a site of female oppression, rather than a site of female seduction. Veiling/Unveiling of the Bosnian Muslim woman In British travel writing on Bosnia, between the second half of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century, the Muslim woman’s veil had the effect of making invisible the woman who wore it342. The verbs, the adverbs and the adjectives accompanying the “veil” made this item of dress quite efficient in its task of erasing the
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female subject. Thus, whereas the adjectives and the adverbs emphasized absence, the verbs created it: In strange contrast to these were the Mahometan women, several of whom we noticed in the streets towards evening. Their whole face was concealed but for the tiniest eyeslits imaginable; but their insatiable bashfulness is not contented even with this, for in passing a stranger they must needs bow the head so that the fringe of the upper veil which curtains the head falls forward far enough to eclipse their last loophole of humanity!343
In these representations, the veil hindered the presentation of all other female features; the Muslim woman vanished as she was identified with an ahistorical and immobile image, showing her as reduced to this item; consequently, her natural condition became that of subalternity. But the absence of the Muslim woman was not only suggested through the linguistic emphasis placed on the veil and the way of wearing it. The same sources reveal other approaches to this item that similarly elided the female presence and that could be summarized under these two statements: the comparison of the Bosnian veil with that of the women of Istanbul (often, in the sources, called “Constantinople”), and the taking to extremes of the Bosnian case. As regards the case of comparison between the Muslim women from Istanbul and Bosnia, the comparison between these two situations made it appear that Muslim women from Bosnia were more frequently veiled than those from Istanbul. The travel accounts by William Miller provide the best example of this approach to the veil and to the elision of the female presence: “Her [the Bosnian woman’s] veiling is practised with far more rigor than elsewhere in the Near East, and the contrast with Constantinople is in this respect more striking”344. The second example is that which sees the use of the veil in Bosnia as a custom taken to its extreme consequences which, according to travellers, because of the strictness with which it was imposed by the local viziers, could not be found in any other country with relatively similar customs and traditions. This represented yet another way by which the traveller elided the female presence from the landscape. The words of T.W. Legh summarize this form of elision in the following way: Bosnia has lost little, so far, of her Oriental character, and the uncompromising nature of the Mussulman inhabitants is reflected in their very dress. Nowhere are the seclusion and veiling of women more strictly enforced, and in no portion of the Turkish dominions did fanaticism obtain a firmer foothold345.
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Fig. 9 A Curious Head-Dress the Author Saw in Doboj Source: With a Camera in Bosnia, in “Wide World Magazine”, February 1902, p. 495.
Fig. 11 Mohammedan Woman Source: J. de Asboth, An official Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina, London 1890, p. 194.
Fig. 10 A Mussulman Woman (From a Photo, by Miss Chadwick) Source: W. Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East, London 1898, p. 100.
Fig. 12 Turkish Women in Mostar Source: M.M. Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings, London 1910, p. 33.
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Fig. 13 Turkish Woman and Child Souce: J.P. Barry, At the Gates of the East: a Book of Travel among Historic Wonderlands, London - New York - Bombay 1906, p. 251.
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Fig. 14 Mussulman Woman of Mostar Source: W. Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East, London 1898, p. 135.
Fig. 16 Turkish family Source: H.C. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk. Impressions of a Journey Through the Western Balkans, London 1897, p. 69. Fig. 15 Mohammedan Woman Source: A.J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875. With an Historical Review of Bosnia and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa, London 1876, p. 71.
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Representations of the Muslim woman as veiled were not only transmitted textually. Occasionally, they were imposed in iconographical terms too. In fact, most travellers accompanied their texts with illustrations that paradoxically tried to create visual representations of those absences. The image of the veiled woman that claimed to be the embodiment of the female subject was actually just its proxy (see Fig. 9-16). The female absence, both textual and iconographic, suggested by the intrusive presence of the veil either in the text or in the image, went beyond the physical absence of the Muslim women. By appealing to this item, travellers alluded to the lack of liberty of women in the Bosnian Muslim society, following in this way a specific discursive tradition today termed “colonial feminism”. In fact, the travellers’ representations manipulated and misrepresented the custom of the veil in order to support their critical stance relative to the social status of the Muslim women of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Discussions relative to the figurative and literal meaning of the veil renewed in the course of the 1990s due to the proliferation of feminist postcolonial studies. But the origins of these debates lay much earlier, with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (16891762), an 18th-century proto-feminist, who resided in Constantinople from 1714 to 1718 together with her husband, ambassador from the Court of St. James to the Sublime Porte346. Most travel accounts written by Lady Montagu’s male contemporaries, while less vague in their interpretations than those of previous years, offered a limitative perspective on the Muslim religion and its practices347. Lady Mary was not only aware of such limits, but also wrote with the intention to correct them. She was able to do that, as she gained access to the harem and the Turkish bath, a place of ‘mystery’ that still, in the 18th century, tormented and preoccupied her contemporaries. What strikes us most forcibly today about Lady Montagu’s accounts are her comments on the practice of the veiling of the Turkish women348. Lady Montagu, in her letters, condemned the “extreme stupidity” of her contemporaries, by claiming that the veil was not an oppressive custom, but a site of liberty which allowed Muslim women the freedom to remain incognito in public areas: You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave, and ‘tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without fear of discovery349.
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It was this viewpoint, introduced and promoted by Lady Montagu, that the scholar Mary Louise Pratt adopted to interpret the reading of the female Peruvian custom of saya y manto by Flora Tristan, another famous Western traveller who distinguished herself for the acuteness of her gaze relative to the female world of the Other cultures350. As Pratt has shown, Tristan’s comments that in Peru the custom of the women to disfrazar (i.e. to masque) their bodies echoed Lady Montagu’s view of the veil and probably originated from Tristan’s readings of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters351. Just as with the veil in Lady Montagu’s writings, the saya y manto of Peruvian women represented a tool of female liberation. On the basis of the perception of religious and social practices such as veil and saya y manto, Mary Louise Pratt elaborated her theory of “feminotopia”, of “idealized worlds of female autonomy, empowerment, and pleasure” that characterized some travel accounts by Western women in South America352. A different viewpoint derives from feminist scholars, who, unlike Pratt, studied the colonial discourse within the Muslim world. By analysing both female and male standpoints, and without neglecting Lady Montagu’s considerations but moving from her criticism of the masculine perceptions of the veil by her contemporaries, Meyda Yegenoglu and Leila Ahmed emphasized the prevalent Western trend to perceive the veil as an oppressive custom towards women: “The veil is taken as the sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire tradition of Islam and oriental cultures and by extension it is used as a proof of oppression of women in these societies”353. Such a discursive device, according to these two scholars, referred to the feminist language that in the 19th century spread in different Western European countries including Great Britain354. Whereas at home the Victorians, in order to resist the demands of ‘first wave’ feminists, adopted the anthropologic experience that originated in colonized countries, strengthening in this way the idea of the biological inferiority of women and the naturalness of their role as domestic women, in the colonies, they regularly appealed to feminist language, stigmatizing in this way the Other and the cultures of the Other355. In the case of Muslim societies in particular, the feminist principles were adopted to bring a charge against Islam. By referring to the veil as an instrument of female oppression, the essentially violent nature of Islam was suggested too356. Such rhetoric did not intend to advance the idea of Muslim women’s emancipation. Rather, while referring to the violent nature of both the Muslims and Islam, it supported a ‘civilizing mission’, one of the most wide-spread euphemisms of the (second) imperialist age. In fact, the image of the
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veiled woman and British accusations of oppressive Muslim customs often tended to justify the colonialist intervention in Muslim societies357. On the basis of these studies, it is also possible to interpret the physical absence of the Bosnian women created by the veil, as an allusion to the absence of female liberty in Bosnian and Herzegovinian contexts. In some passages, the travellers who ‘erased’ the woman by using the veil to show her as a victim of a tyrannical Muslim society, also made textually explicit the association between the veil and the social backwardness of Bosnia: We meet from time to time groups of women. If these are Moslems they carefully cover their faces and persons with a spacious garment, and often crouch down by the road side. If, however, they are Christians they meet your gaze in a natural free manner. With all my love of variety in manners and customs, I must confess that the Moslem system of regarding women as simply the objects of men’s desire is to me inexpressibly odious, and moreover demorilising to any social system358.
Moreover, some travellers did not hesitate to show the same Muslim women as the main cause of such backwardness. In fact, explicit allusions to Bosnian women as the most reactionary party in educational matters are often made, while this point is exemplified by the Bosnian Muslim woman’s custom of wearing the veil: The most reactionary party in educational matters is composed of the Mohammedan women, who usually have the strongest objections to sending their daughters to school with the Christian girls, for fears lest they should be perverted from those strict usages of Islam which are nowhere so severely observed as in Bosnia359.
Analogous reflections are to be found in de Laveleye, who also perceived in Bosnian women, whom he called “ignorant nonentities”, the principal obstacle to the progress of Bosnian Muslims, as well as to their difficult assimilation into Western society: A great hindrance to Mussulman progress is clearly not so much polygamy as the position of woman. She has scarcely any education; she never opens a book, not even the Koran, for she would not understand it. Having no relations with outside things, always shut up like a prisoner in this lugubrious harem, her life differs little from that of a nun. She goes out but seldom: I never met any Mussulman women in the streets of Sarajewo, except the beggars. She knows nothing of what goes on outside, not even her husband’s business. Her only occupation is to embroider, her only amusement to make and smoke cigarettes; she has not, like the man, the kaif in the cafés, and the enjoyment of the beauties of nature. The wife of the artisan or shopkeeper can do nothing to help her husband: her life is, then, completely empty, useless, and monotonous. The Austrian ladies, who live here and know Croat, can easily mix with the ladies of the Bosnian
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Mussulmans, because they speak the same language; but they say that conversation is impossible; these poor recluses have absolutely nothing to say. And it is these ignorant nonentities who bring up the children to a somewhat advanced age! Think of all that woman does in the Christian family, the important place she takes, the influence she exerts, and remember that the Mohammedans lack it all. Does not this explain how it is that they cannot assimilate with Western civilization?360
If the veil represented the most obvious item through which British travellers expressed their ideas relative to the position of the woman within Bosnian society, it was not the only distinguishing issue. Other examples, once again constructed with reference to the customs and usages of Islamic tradition, ‘erased’ the woman from the Bosnian landscape and equally expressed the idea of her inferiority within this society and her lack of liberty under what were seen as the Islamic or Ottoman regimes. Some references to marriage and to the harem exemplify this point. Thomson, for example, recounted details of a “Turkish” wedding in Bosnia where the bride was absent: While I was in Serajevo I was kindly taken by a friend into one of the Mahommedan courts, and while I was there a Turk presented himself to be married. The bride was not present at all, but was represented by a male relative, who took his place before the Cadi with the bridegroom and two male witnesses. In this case both witnesses were men, but it is permissible to have one male and two female witnesses; a woman in Mahommedan law being only equivalent to half a man361.
In similar terms, this traveller referred to the harem as a place of seclusion, as well as to the associated eliding power of the veil: But when once married, a woman’s life is one of absolute seclusion. She is immured in a harem, and scarcely ever goes out: when she does so, she must envelope herself in a long cloak called a feredje, which covers her from head to foot, and a yashmak, or veil, to conceal her face. In Constantinople and in Egypt an aperture is left in the yashmak for the eyes; but in Bosnia not only does it completely cover the face, but not unfrequently a kind of mask is worn over it as well. Even the hands are not supposed to be seen. It is pitiable to watch married women fumbling along by the side of a wall, feeling their way with pushed-out hands covered over with their cloaks. Awkward and ungainly, indeed, is the figure they present, waddling along with loose shoes that flap against the ground, and down at heel white stockings362.
The description by de Laveleye, on the other hand, was solely concerned with the harem. The author stressed the way in which this place, contrary to the earlier writings of his fellow-countrymen who perceived it as a source of pleasure, looked more like a monastic cell:
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When we think of harems we readily imagine them to the places of delight, where all the splendours of the East are brought together. Madame Moreau, who has often visited them, says that, except in the houses of very rich Pachas or Beys, they are more like the cells of a monastery. A bad floor, half covered by a mat and some rags of old carpet, whitewashed walls, no furniture, neither table, chair, nor bed […]363.
Yet, what strikes the reader in both these descriptions of the harem is the lack of the elements referring to this Orientalist site par excellence in terms of sensuality and eroticism364. It is certainly an unusual fact, especially if we recall the power of eroticization, as noticed by Mohja Kahf, that both the harem and the veil exercised in the Western-European representations of the Muslim woman. The relationship between colonialism and eroticism, as well as the manipulation of the female figure within Orientalist and colonial discourses, has already been mentioned. The lack of a British colonial project for Bosnia, therefore, perhaps contributed to the fact that the image of the Muslim woman in British travelogues on Bosnia assumed an asexualized appearance365. Nevertheless, even though the British did not have any intention of colonizing Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is necessary to investigate the reasons for the presence of “colonial feminism” in these texts. What I would suggest is that discursive device, made explicit in British travelogues by an image of the ‘female Otherness’ as both veiled and imprisoned in the harem, was employed not to justify the projects of colonial conquest and commercial expansion, but to render the Balkan Muslim regions a ‘cultural Otherness’ with respect to the rest of the Balkans366. Yet, the cultural alienation of the ‘Muslim Balkans’ from the Balkans-proper in British travel writing on Bosnia was not final and static, and neither was the presence of the Muslim veil constant, especially if we look at travel writing during the 1870s and the following decades. In fact, the veil in those representations had another communicative implication. In the case of the French colonial occupation, Frantz Fanon emphasized a “historic dynamism of the veil”367, or the strategic changes of its function and its instrumental use in different historical circumstances. I would suggest that there was a ‘symbolic dynamism of the veil’ in the context of British travellers to Bosnia during the Eastern crisis of the 1870s and in the period that followed the Austro-Hungarian occupation of that country. For most travellers of this period, especially those supportive of the Austro-Hungarian presence in the country, it is possible to register a variation of the stereotype of the veil. Certain travellers, in fact, very often insisted on placing centre stage the co-existence of the veiled female figure with the un-veiled one (see Fig. 17-19).
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Fig. 17 Mohammedan Girl at Home Source: J. de Asboth, An Official Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina, London 1890, p. 196.
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Fig. 18 Unveiled Mahometan Women at Jablanica Source: A.J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875. With an Historical Review of Bosnia and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa, London 1876, p. 320.
Fig. 19 Unmarried Turkish Girl Source: H.C. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk. Impressions of a Journey Through the Western Balkans, London 1897, p. 73.
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After the veil and sometimes even the harem made Bosnia an ‘Oriental Otherness’ in the Balkans, the absence of the veil for Muslim Bosnian women, which first appeared in the travel accounts of the 1860s and was more present in those written after the occupation of Bosnia by Austria-Hungary in 1878, had the effect of culturally bringing this Orient near to the Balkans. The ‘absent veil’ of some representations suggested a certain degree of liberation for the women of this ‘westernized Orient’ compared with the Orient tout court, as well as making these orientalized women more similar to the European ones. So some travellers, who like William Miller already talked about the veiling in Bosnia, now added to that image one that showed Bosnian women as unveiled: In golden days Jablanica was a centre of the Bogomije faith, that curious, mystic heresy which defied the thunders of Hildebrand, and, by dividing the Christians against each other, made Bosnia an easy prey for the Turk. Scattered up and down the Hercegovina the tombs of the Bogomils, great square blocks of stone still tell of their numbers, and the Mussulmans of Jablanica are said to be their descendants. For here alone in Islam do the women go unveiled – a privilege which their Bogomole forebears reserved to themselves when they embraced the Mohammedan religion at the time of the Turkish conquest368.
Others, like this anonymous author, talked explicitly about the co-existence of these two opposites: [it] seems that the Bosniak Mussulmans, though fanatical believers in the Prophet, have varied to some extent from their co-religionists in Turkey proper. They mix up a certain amount of Graeco-Sclave Church tradition with their own faith, the custom being common of having patron saints for their household, as St. George, St Eljas, St. Peter. [...] In some places they are evidently not so strict in the matter of veiling their unmarried women as the rigid Mohammedans, and polygamy is almost unknown. The married women, however, adhere more strictly to the veil than even the Turkish ladies. On our ride from Vischegrad to Tchelibi Bazar we met a Mohammedan woman on horseback wearing, instead of the ordinary yashmak, a black silk mask embroidered with gold. The eyelets seemed to be covered with a thin gauze of horsehair, and the whole contrivance effectually concealed the face. Throughout Bosnia the females generally are treated with kindness and respect. Adultery is severely punished369.
The veil was not the only element of Muslim tradition that had the effect of partly westernizing this Orient and within limits of rejoining it culturally to Europe and the Balkans. Some travellers’ insistence in showing polygamy as an untypical custom in Bosnia had the same effect: “Among the Mussulmans of Bosnia and the Herze-
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govina polygamy never obtained to the same extent as in the rest of the Ottoman Empire, and one wife is considered a fair allowance for even a Bosnian beg”370. The Bosnia and Herzegovina of those British travellers who visited the country after the 1870s, seemed to have rejoined the Balkans, and surprisingly this happened by passing through a door represented by the veil, polygamy and some other female customs of Muslim tradition. What took place was a certain degree of westernization of the Orient, its symbolical re-location within the Balkans through the use of an Orientalist discursive apparatus. Orientalism was not alone in creating such ‘Bosnian Otherness’. British travellers to Bosnia, in recounting their travel experience in this region and in assimilating these lands to the mainstream European cultural context, superimposed over the feminized Orientalist approach the Balkanist one, making in this way of Bosnia-Herzegovina a feminized land of ‘in-betweenness’. Moreover, the varied form of the stereotypical image of the Muslim woman highlights once again the differences between this Orientalism and the one proposed by Edward Said and Rana Kabbani, as well as reconfirming the necessity of introducing a new discursive paradigm when referring to British travellers in Bosnia between the 1870s and the beginning of the 20th century, which was in the previous chapter defined ‘Balkan-deflected Orientalism’. The deconstruction of the image of the Muslim woman undertaken in this chapter has shown that in the case of British travellers to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Balkanist discourse was substituted with a more ‘specifically female’ Orientalism, becoming, in fact, the travellers’ principal discursive device, capable of regulating the relationship between Great Britain on one side and what was seen as ‘Islamicized Bosnia’ on the other, without yet completely ignoring Balkanism.
V. The Irish Paradigm The construction of a British 19th-century discourse on Bosnia and Bosnians could be also observed from the perspective of the question of Ireland, which lay at the core of British Home Affairs in the 1870s371 when, with the outbreak of the Bosnian and Bulgarian peasant revolts between 1875 and 1876, and the violent Turkish intervention against the rayah that followed, public opinion in Great Britain became interested in the regions of Turkey-in-Europe and British politics became preoccupied with the Eastern Question. There are a variety of English-language writings from the second half of the 19th century that suggest an attitude of cultural superiority towards both Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Most of them place the two countries, when they are compared with England, in a condition of cultural periphery; the English ‘core’ is characterized by the values of civilization, while Ireland and Bosnia are seen as essentially barbarous and their populations as racially inferior372. Moreover, the evidence of a historical analogy between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ireland brought some British travellers and diplomats in the Ottoman Empire to compare these two realities from an economic, political, social and cultural viewpoint. In fact, especially when talking about Bosnia within the Ottoman context, the British frequently made use of the Irish political paradigm. Yet, British travellers and diplomats, although comparing the two peripheral realities on the basis of this analogy, very often established a hierarchical scale of values. This scale not only saw the Bosnians, in comparison with the Irish, as less capable of establishing an autonomous state, but also, in literary and iconographic representations, it placed the Bosnians and the Herzegovinians, both of Muslim and Christian religious background, in a position of cultural and racial inferiority. Such a point of view was strongly influenced, as we will see, by the geo-political position of these two countries: whereas Ireland was under British hegemony and at short geographical distance from London, Bosnia-Herzegovina was not only more distant from England geographically, but revolved around the ‘despotic’ and ‘corrupted’ Porte. Comparing Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina In the 1870s, during the years of the first big Eastern Crisis after the Crimean war (1853-1856), it was neither exceptional nor unusual in both British diplomatic re-
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ports and travellers’ accounts to come upon comparisons between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ireland. The words of H.G. Elliot, British ambassador in Constantinople during the Eastern Crisis, can be taken as an example of this comprehensive operation of comparison between these two countries. In 1875, Elliot thought the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina was “not unlike that of the landlords and tenants of Ireland”373. This same tendency can be noticed even among the travellers who visited Bosnia in the following years. William Miller, for example, a well-known ‘authority’ on Balkan affairs, in his Travels and Politics in the Near East, claimed that “The occupied territory, it must be remembered, is largely agricultural, and the Bosnian and the Hercegovinian peasants have an earth-hunger not less intense than that of the Irish farmer”374. Even J.P. Barry, one of the few Irish who travelled to the Balkans, stopping in Bosnia for just a few days at the beginning of the 20th century, compared the strength of Herzegovina’s peasants to that of his own fellow countrymen. He also reminded his readers of the insignificant size of the Irish potatoes, which were unfortunately damaged during the Great Famine, when compared to those cultivated in Herzegovina: When I look upon these stalwart shepherds and husbandmen, and take in my hand some of their champion potatoes weighing nearly 2 kilos, I think of Sydney Smith’s humorous definition of my own countrymen, and see its applicability here. If an Irishman of that time could be described as a “six-foot machine for turning potatoes into human nature”, the men of Herzegovina must be their first cousins on the strength of the same fare. The relationship, alas, does not extend to the tubers, for the “praties” of old Ireland since the famine must close their eyes with shame in presence of the lusty giants turned out of their furrows by Balkan farmers375.
This comparison was most likely prompted by the effective presence of analogies between the two countries. In fact, both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ireland were countries with a predominantly agrarian character, but there were several other features that rendered possible this alignment in social, religious and political spheres. In fact, in both countries the social divisions coincided with the religious ones, splitting a society that linguistically, and sometimes even ethnically, was unified. Protestant landlords found their mirror image in the Muslim beys376 and agas377, whereas the Catholic peasants of Ireland had their peers in the Christian rayah of BosniaHerzegovina. Furthermore, the Irish ethnic background of some Protestant landlords, and the English language spoken by the vast majority of the Irish population,
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was reflected in the shared ethnic roots of the Bosnians – Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox – and in their use of one common South Slavic language378. Focusing on 19th-century Bosnian and Irish history, one finds two other features that may equally have rendered possible the comparisons between Ireland and Bosnia by the British reading public. First, both countries, throughout the 19th century, were frequently the theatre of ferocious and violent political struggles for administrative autonomy. Whereas the Bosnian Muslim beys and agas first, and later the Serb leaders as well, claimed independence from the Porte, the Irish Home Rulers engaged in similar actions against London. Second, the peasants of both countries, through armed revolts, also showed strong determination to claim their rights, during the last years of the 18th century in Ireland and in the 1860s and 1870s in Bosnia. The historical roots of an imaginary process As a consequence of the conversion to Islam of the native nobility and of the imposition of the feudal military system, during the period of the Ottoman dominion of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Muslim population in Bosnia represented both the landowning class and the popular class379: The political situation was extremely favourable for the Muslims. The conversions had created a situation in which the political and economic power was held by a Muslim ruling class that was nevertheless of a predominantly local Slavic origin380.
In the first decades of the 19th century, these Muslim lords represented the major political problem for the crumbling Ottoman Empire, as they required from the Porte the formal acknowledgment of the administrative autonomy which, in practice, had already existed for years. In the previous decades the local nobility established a law, which, for example, denied the Turkish governor the right to spend any more than three days in Sarajevo, and forced him to settle in Travnik381. The situation worsened in the 1830s as a wave of armed rebellions organized by the Bosnian lords, brought one of the rebels, Husejn-kapetan382, to demand an end to the Ottoman reforms in Bosnia, as well as administrative autonomy. The Grand Vizier crushed the Bosnian lords’ rebellion in 1850-1851, through the mobilisation of Omer Pasha Latas, one of the most effective governors he had. It is well known that by the year 1703, as a consequence of the plantations and land confiscations in the 16th and 17th centuries, the vast majority of Ireland’s landowning landlords were of English or Scots origin. The accumulation of land and wealth
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in the hands of the Protestants or Anglo-Irish ascendants, at the expense of the existing Gaelic Irish and Old English landowners, excluded Irish Catholics from political and economic leadership positions. The new political and economic structure of the country also altered the social composition of the state: land, which in the previous period had provided the basis for complex social and familial ties among the different social classes of the same confessional and cultural identity – Irish Catholics – at the beginning of the 18th century divided the society economically, socially and linguistically. The landlord Protestant class, in most parts of Ireland, was linked to its Catholic tenantry by economic, rather than social, ties, and yet was also separated from them by religion and culture. From the beginning of the 18th century, Ireland was marked by strong social and religious divisions. But the Protestant landlords of Anglo-Irish descent, who by the 1780s owned over 95 per cent of all productive land, represented during the 18th century one of the major political preoccupations for the British ruling class. Due to their accumulation of wealth, they tended to be particularly protective towards their own interests, managing between 1779 and 1782 to achieve commercial freedom and extensive constitutional concessions. This not only guaranteed the Protestants some economic and political freedom from London, but also became the means through which they could and would claim autonomous status for Ireland. At the end of the 18th century, Ireland was indeed proclaimed a separate Kingdom and a United Kindom of Britain and Ireland was brought into existence. This special status was suspended with the imposition of the Act of Union (1801) – and from that point onwards Irish Protestants became progressively marginalized within the British imperial governmental system, losing most of the rights acquired during the 18th century383. Claims for autonomy in both countries had their roots in the status of administrative quasiautonomy that Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ireland had acquired in the previous centuries, from the Ottoman, and the developing British, empires respectively. Furthermore, the peasants of both countries, through armed revolt, also demonstrated strong determination in claiming their rights. Indeed, in 19th-century Bosnia, the major tensions were not provoked by the lords’ rebellions, but by the uprisings organized by the Christian peasants, both Orthodox and Catholic, who at that time represented more than half of the total population and from the 1850s onwards expressed their social hardship by way of armed revolt384. Ottoman reforms, first introduced in 1839 and built upon in 1856, did not manage to improve the conditions of the Bosnian Christian peasants, who looked for support in neighbouring Serbia and Montenegro. In the revolt of 1875-1878 this support was not only moral, but also
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armed, and helped to fulfil Serb nationalist politicians’ dreams of a unified state of Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, under the leadership of the latter385. In 19th-century Ireland, major protests against the British administration were not organized by the Protestant landlords, but by the Irish peasant population of the Catholic faith. Whereas the Land Acts (1870-1909) progressively expropriated the Protestant landlords from their landholdings, weakening their residual authority derived from those properties, Catholic Ireland was strengthened thanks to the emancipation of 1829, and the Land Acts, which were thought to improve the agrarian conditions of the Catholic tenants386. Although most peasant protests spread throughout Ireland in the 19th century, the first took place some decades earlier, at the end of the 18th century, when, following the example of the American and French revolutions, the Catholic population organized an armed revolt in order to express their political discontent and frustration. The political dominion of one social class with a common faith, requests for administrative autonomy from the central government, and growing peasant discontent expressed through organized revolts, considered along with an historical context that often sees the landowners and peasants united by the same language, if not by the same ethnicity, all constitute elements that justify the comparisons of Bosnia and Ireland observed in the writings of some British diplomats and travellers. Reading Bosnia-Herzegovina through the ‘Irish lens’ These comparisons of Bosnia and Ireland by British travellers and diplomats, justified on the grounds of some actual analogies between the two historical realities as was just seen, were very often followed by the establishment of a hierarchical order between them. The inferior position that Bosnia occupied on this scale was the consequence of the much better social, political and economical situation in 19thcentury Ireland. In fact, the constant improvement of the agrarian conditions of the Irish tenants, especially after The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, approved by the British parliament under the leadership of William Gladstone in 1870, can be seen as a significant moment of transition in Irish history. The approval of an act that not only regulated tenants’ rights, but also established a new hierarchical order between the landowners and the tenants, was the result of a two-decade campaign which emerged from the Great Famine and represented the first in a series of acts promoted by Gladstone, which in the years to follow changed Irish society with positive effects on its rural economy:
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[it] provided for compensation for disturbances of tenants evicted other than for nonpayment of rent, and made provision for compensation for improvements in the case of a departing tenant. Its so-called ‘Bright clauses’ allowed tenants to purchase their holdings387.
In addition, the revival of the Home Rule movement took place in Ireland in 1870. After the initial period beginning in the 1820s, the movement’s demands for the autonomy of Ireland were expressed as a call for the restoration of the Irish parliament and promoted initiatives for the ‘emancipation’ of Irish Catholics from penalising religious legislation. By the 1870s, the movement had gone through a series of significant transformations. First, in 1874, it underwent its first coherent political formulation by assuming the form of a political party; then, it was influenced by both Protestant Toryism and radical republican movements. Thus, events in the 1870s made the movement a pluralist phenomenon which, on the one hand, continued to represent the Catholic population’s desires for national, religious and social emancipation, already evident in the 1820s, while, on the other, for the Protestant population of Ireland, it represented the only way of protecting their largely secular interests388: For almost half a century – from the early 1870s to the end of the Great War – Home Rule was both the single most important feature of Irish political life and major influence within British politics389.
Against this Irish background, we can mention the condition of unaltered hardship of the Bosnian peasants as well as the absence of any kind of organized or structured political struggle in modern terms in Bosnia. The minor armed rebellions of the Bosnian nobles in the 1850s, which claimed administrative autonomy for Bosnia, but originated in Bosnian protests against Ottoman reforms, were definitively suppressed in 1851 by the Vizier’s mobilisation of Omer Pasha Latas. On the other hand, the well-known Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, promoted in Bosnia after Omer Pasha’s repressive actions, failed to improve the Bosnian peasants’ conditions of life. The unaltered social and economical situation of the Bosnian rayah led them, in the 1870s, to look for support from neighbouring Serbia and Montenegro. It was thanks to the revival of the Home Rule movement and the promotion of the Land Acts by the British parliament, which played an extremely important role within the Irish political, social and economic life, that the British tendency of the 1870s to read and interpret Bosnian events through an ‘Irish lens’ was established. Indeed, British representations of the ‘Bosnian Other’ and of Bosnian politics,
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which in the decades of the Eastern Crisis originated around the image of the Irish and their political initiatives, took their definitive shape from the significantly better social and political conditions prevalent in Ireland. Indeed, in their representations of Irish and Bosnian cultural and political life, British diplomats and travellers established a hierarchy, reserving for Bosnia an inferior position. The examples of this particular hierarchy involved the spheres of politics, culture and race, by both radically denying that the Bosnian had the ability to establish an autonomous state, and by focusing on the different stages of cultural evolution reached by the Bosnian and Irish populations. Eventually, in order to create this ‘Bosnian Otherness’, the British efficiently adopted the pseudo-science of racial differentiation, which in these same years was used in Europe with reference, among other groups, to the Irish and the Jews, and helped to create a racist attitude towards a number of peoples within Europe. An example of the British denial of political autonomy for Bosnia-Herzegovina, more resolute than that regarding Ireland, can be seen in the writings of Benjamin Disraeli. After the 1874 elections once again secured Disraeli’s position as prime minister, in July 1875, at the outbreak of the Bosnian revolt which provoked rumours about the possibility of this state’s autonomy being advanced by Russia, Disraeli wrote to Lady Bradford-Buckle that “autonomy for Ireland would be less absurd” than for Bosnia390. With the Conservative victory in the elections, the English government became particularly hostile towards the Home Rulers’ requests, declining several bills prepared by their party. The “happy” period of the agrarian reforms promulgated by Gladstone in 1870, which represented the first real step towards the consolidation of the tenants’ rights in Ireland, was practically over and it would have been necessary to attend to it on the occasion of his next mandate as prime minister, in 1880, in order to guide the new legislative acts in this direction. In fact, Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative party engaged in a much more severe policy with regard to the regulation of the landowner-tenant relationship. Yet, even though the British politics of this period were oriented towards the suppression of the privileges acquired for the Irish Home Rulers during the Gladstone period, Disraeli persisted in perceiving autonomy for Bosnia as much less probable than autonomy for Ireland. A similar reaction, although of less significant political weight, is to be found in James Creagh’s travelogue of 1876. Creagh was an Irish-born British army officer, who, at a very young age, was sent by his father to England to continue his “anglicization” as he was becoming “a wild Irishman”391. He was enlisted as a Captain in the First
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Royals, fought in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and later served in India. Creagh’s Bosnian visit was part of his journey through Hungary and the Balkans in the summer of 1875. On his return to England he published in two volumes, in 1876, Over the borders of Christendom and Eslamiah. Creagh’s opinion on the version of ‘Home Rule’ in Bosnia is not very different from Disraeli’s: “Home Rule in Bosnia”, wrote Creagh, “would be attended with insurmountable difficulties, compared to which a similar form of government in Ireland would be harmonious and edifying”392. Both Disraeli and Creagh, in so arguing, were clearly under the influence of the contemporary Conservative political line, which, after 1874, opted for a policy of ‘non-intervention’ with regard to the Ottoman Empire. This policy was thought to protect British interests in the Near East by maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire393. The main catalyst for this new approach was the fresh role that Russia assumed in Europe after its territorial successes against the Turks from the 1830s onwards. According to the supporters of this policy of non-intervention, the integrity of the Ottoman Empire would halt Russia’s territorial expansion into the Balkans, whereas British commercial supremacy, as well as economic and geopolitical influence, in India would be assured. But we should not exclude on the one hand the possible role that the changes in Irish society, such as the Land Acts and the political activity of Home Rulers in the 1870s, might have played in influencing both Creagh and Disraeli. On the other hand, they would not have been alone in doing so. Richard Moncktone Miles, better known as Lord Houghton, for instance – in whose words we also find evidence of the Bosnia-Ireland comparison – cited in a conversation with William Gladstone in 1876, as an argument against autonomy for Bosnia and Bulgaria, the absence of any basis for Home Rule or Tenant Rights in these two countries394. Another argument that might be presented as a valid cause for the formulation of these hierarchies is the change of the formal status of Ireland after the Union of the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain in 1801. Even though the Act of Union did not fully guarantee Ireland the status of a decolonized country, provoking serious difficulties for contemporaries and historians attempting to define Ireland’s precise place in the British Imperial system after 1801, it is also true that from then on Ireland, at least formally, ceased to be considered a ‘Dominion’, or dependent kingdom. According to most scholars, what happened after 1801 was that the formal union of the two kingdoms, which allowed Ireland to have representation in both Houses of Parliament in London, was not accompanied equally by economic or administrative
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integration. For example, it is well known that free trade between Ireland and Britain was enacted only in 1824, separate currencies persisted for another two years, and excise duties and taxation remained sharply at odds until 1853. On the administrative level, the situation also remained dramatically unaltered for years, and yet is somehow more complicated to define: a “mess”, in the words of Fitzpatrick395. Despite the legislative Union, the Irish administration remained distinctively colonial in both form and function: on the one hand, as in India after 1858, annexation was followed by direct rule under a ‘Lord-Lieutenant’ or ‘Viceroy’, whose powers remained ill-defined in the absence of a Parliament over which to preside396; on the other, the hybrid Irish administration differed significantly from that of England or Scotland as the Irish government was remarkable in the extent to which centralization, uniformity, inspection and professionalism spread throughout the system before 1850397: In these respects, Ireland was not only exceptional within the United Kingdom but akin to a colony, efficiency in government being valued above the liberty of the subject and the sanctity of property398.
Furthermore, there were also some visible signs of the Imperial and colonial ‘engagement’ which was clearly manifested through the army; that is in actions by the so-called ‘army of occupation’ such as suppressing riots, illegal assemblies, and rebellions. On the other hand, the British presence trebled in Ireland in the period of 1841-1911, and of those scant numbers, nearly half lived in the vicinities of Dublin and Belfast. Finally, Anglicization was also pursued through education in the English language, as well as through renewed settlement. These strong ambiguities discouraged scholars from defining Ireland’s place in the 19th-century Empire, although some recent publications are likely to provoke further analysis from both Irish and imperial specialists399. However, several have noted Britain’s enduring disposition to govern Ireland like a Crown Colony. The Union itself had been largely prompted by fear of French invasion, and Ireland’s proximity to Britain conferred on it a strategic importance comparable with that of Gibraltar or Aden. Governments became gradually less preoccupied with Ireland’s strategic role ‘as the Bonapartist threat receded’; and by the 1880s it was sometimes suggested that the Empire’s strategic interests could be defended without military occupation of the western island400. Lastly, one can also perceive some scholarly controversies regarding the question of the presence of colonial qualities in Irish thought and imagination. According to some
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scholars, Edward Said’s specification of “Ireland’s colonial status, which it shares with a host of non-European regions: cultural dependence and antagonism together”, is based upon a premise incapable of historical verification. Said assumes that “Irish people can never be English any more than Cambodians or Algerians can be French”, citing confirmation in the record of Irish protest against the British government401. As some scholars argued, the political expression of Irish attitudes towards the Empire was far more various and discordant than this acknowledges. Ireland had its rebels, its ‘mediators’ and ‘collaborators’, or ‘shoneens’, its imperialists, and its self-confident metropolitans402. Thus, almost the only historical certainty regarding the Irish status within the Empire was the parliamentary unity between England and Ireland due to the Act of Union of 1801. This formal shift, while controversial (especially when one considers the minimal changes on an administrative and economic level, and the continuity of the English view of Ireland as a colony), might have been a contribution to a qualitative difference in the British image of Bosnia and Ireland between 1875-1878. Furthermore, the process of modernization of the institutions in Ireland promoted by the British parliament might have represented further valid evidence for assigning this country its supremacy on the hierarchical ladder. In fact, the inferior status assigned to Bosnia could be linked to the truth that, in British eyes, the Bosnians still lived under unenlightened ‘oriental despots’, whereas Ireland had been ‘brought’ onto the path of ‘civility and progress’, thanks to the enlightened reforms promoted in Ireland by the British institutions. The origins of this British attitude can be traced back to the 1840s, after “humanitarianism” had become a vital component of Britain’s national and imperial identity403. This attitude was symptomatic of the imperial idea that by promoting humanitarian work in the colonized or quasicolonized countries, the British would both protect their own insular interests and liberate the conquered populations from moral, religious and political darkness. There were also those who argued that possession of Empire, wealth and power, brought obligations, irrespective of British interests, wherever opportunities existed to promote the welfare of less fortunate societies. Speaking in Parliament on the East India Bill in December 1783, Edmund Burke offered an eloquent statement of Britain’s obligations as the possessor of power over other peoples: all political power which is set over men, and […] all privilege claimed […] in exclusion of them, being wholly artificial, and […] a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or other exercised for their benefit. It is true with regard to every species of political domination, and every description of commercial privilege […] then such rights or privileges, or whatever else you choose to call them, are
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all in the strictest sense a trust; and it is of the very essence of every trust to be rendered accountable; and even totally to cease, when it substantially varies from the purpose for which alone it could have a lawful existence404.
In the mid-19th century, the apparent failure of humanitarian expectations reinforced a pessimistic view of ‘non-European’ capacity and racial hierarchy. Its persistence in Ireland, on the other hand, which this comparison with Bosnia from the 1870s would suggest, is not to be considered as a residual effect of the events of the 1840s, but rather a result of the different type of formal relations that England established with her colonies and subject territories in the 19th century. Indeed, the changes in the political conditions in Ireland, which British administrators considered to be a result of the Act of Union of 1801, were numbered among the reasons that made modernization a continuing process within Ireland. Finally, this constant modernization could possibly be seen as a reason for the elevated perception of this region by the British, and its location in a higher position within the imaginary hierarchical scale established by the Empire’s diplomats, politicians and travellers to Bosnia-Herzegovina. This different perspective is suggested by two iconographical sources, published in the British satirical magazine “Punch” between 1878 and 1882 (see Fig. 20). The end of the Eastern Crisis, which began with the Bosnian revolt in 1875, was formalised three years later at the Congress of Berlin. It was decided that Bosnia-Herzegovina, while still in theory under Ottoman dominion, would be occupied and administrated by Austria-Hungary. The Bosnians and Herzegovinians did not hesitate to express their discontent regarding the Great Powers’ decisions and, by organizing protests in the big cities and by resisting militarily, to try to prevent the Austrians from immediate occupation405. Liberal Europe followed these events with apprehension, whereas the English satirical magazine, “Punch”, commented with its usual cynicism. On 31 August 1878, the British middle-class could follow the new crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina leafing through the pages of this magazine. Yet, this image, besides accusing the Great Powers of throwing the country once again into turmoil by focusing on the allegorical representation of Austria as an insensitive policeman ready to answer with force, also revealed some 19th-century racist attitudes on the part of the British towards the Balkan populations. Certain features in this representation of two children, “Bozzy” and “Herzy”, betrayed, in fact, the significance that the Bosnians and the Herzegovinians assumed in British popular imagination in the years of the Eastern crisis. Indeed, these images drew upon principles of the ‘white racism’, that, in the second half of the 19th century, was also focused on the Irish.
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Fig. 20 A nice time of it; or the new constable and the naughty boys Source: “Punch, or the London Charivari”, 31 August 1878, p. 86.
In the last decades of the 19th century, a small but dedicated group of social science pseudo-scholars set out to uncover the minute differences that distinguished the “races” of Britain. This pseudo-research proceeded by measuring the “Index of Nigrescence” – the amount of residual melanin in the skin, hair and eyes – in the peoples of Britain and Ireland406. The results of that Index reached the conclusion that the Irish belonged to an inferior race. Though the Irish were defined as a noncoloured population, “coloured” being a category that facilitated racism towards the peoples of Asia and Africa on the basis of similar pseudo-scientific analyses, after the 1860s it was widely thought that certain cultural and physical features marked the Irish, baptized as “Celtic Calibans”407, as an inferior race. An English traveller to Ireland in 1783 declared: “Shoes and stockings are seldom worn by these beings who seem to form a different race from the rest of mankind”408. Besides focusing on Irish culture, which often included mention of the “barbarism” of Irish accents, British
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racism towards Ireland often alluded to aspects of the Irish physiognomy. The Irish were, in fact, often characterized as having animal, particularly simian, or infantile features, resembling either children, or monkeys and apes409. Thus, the racial inferiority of people from Bosnia-Herzegovina is expressed in “Punch” by employing some very similar cultural features that were also used to mark the ‘Irish race’ of ‘Celtic Calibans’. “Bozzy” and “Herzy” are seen as two naive children, completely bare-footed and wearing a few pieces of tattered clothing, who, in order to defend themselves from the Austrians, use old knives and stones. The image is an iconographical transcription of the analogies that existed in the British representations of these two populations, a sign of the cultural attitude that characterised some 19th-century British commentators. Yet, while these ‘white racist’ representations of the Irish continued throughout the 19th century, in the decades of social and political change they underwent some modification. Although this transformation of the British view might appear not particularly significant, it betrays an evolution in the Anglo-Irish relations of the last years as well as a different way of representing the Irish. Such an attitude is again exemplified in “Punch”. In an illustration from 18 February 1882, an Irishman called “Master Paddy”, certainly in opposition to the simple “Paddies” of the previous years, wears a suit of two pieces while in his hand he carries a farmer’s cap (see Fig. 21). The hat is rendered ridiculous by a falling twig, his shoes are untied and his clothes ill-fitting, but “Master Paddy” is without doubt in much better condition than his brothers from the travellers’ account that we cited above and who, like the Bosnians and the Herzegovinians in the 1870s, appeared in the British iconographical representations as half naked, bare-foot and armed only with stones. On the contrary, this Paddy is a figure who highlights the new status that the Irish acquired within British society, after the modernization of Irish institutions began in the 1870s. Although elements of ‘white racism’ persist – infantile features, primitive weaponry and the wearing of rags – betraying the continuity of the British tradition to represent the Irish as inferior, this image of the Irish is also a testimony of the shift in British collective representation. This image emphasizes – in all its tragic irony – that the English perceived the Irish as slightly superior to the Bosnians. This image confirms iconographically the thesis of this chapter with regards to the ‘hierarchization’ of the two countries’ representations by the British. Captain James Creagh represents another evident example of the negative perception of the Bosnians when compared to the Irish410. Writing in his autobiography
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Fig. 21 Essence of parliament Source: “Punch, or the London Charivari”, 18 February 1882, p. 75.
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many years after his journey to the Balkans, Creagh mentions the reasons for his visit to the frontier provinces of European Turkey in 1875. Lines that at first seem to suggest the innocent curiosity of a traveller for “the costumes, the suggestive dances, the dominant and subject populations in the dominions of both the Sultan and the Emperor”411, are in stark contrast to what the textual analysis of Creagh’s earlier travelogue Over the borders of Christendom and Eslamiah reveals. In a different way from the illustrations in “Punch”, although using the same language and rhetoric, Creagh’s text relates the Irish to the Bosnians on the grounds of their common experience as two subjugated populations412. Both are perceived as barbarous and underdeveloped peoples, essentially different from the English and the Turks, who embody the values of ‘civility’. Having set up his discourse according to the specific coordinates of ‘civility’ and ‘barbarity’, Creagh assumes extremely critical attitudes towards the Westerners who describe the Turks in their roles as ‘tyrants’ and ‘oppressors’. The best example of this is represented by a passage of Creagh’s travelogue in which he reports on the troubles in Bosnia-Herzegovina using as a paradigm an event that took place at the port of Shannon: Every misfortune is attributed to the Turks, and we hear so often that they are tyrants and oppressors, that people generally believe they are so. The Home Rulers are not ashamed to declare that the English Government drove the ships out of the Shannon; and as there are people silly enough to accept that trumpery statement as a matter of fact, it is not surprising that less enlightened dreamers should impute their own ignorance, incivility, and want of enterprise to any cause except to that of the levity and barbarism from which it all arises413.
The passage, besides forging an image of ‘barbaric Otherness’, by assigning to the population of Bosnia the attributes of ignorance, incivility and want of enterprise, involves the Irish home rulers on the basis of the characteristics that, according to Creagh, they share with the Bosnians. By relating the Irish and the Bosnians to each other, Creagh also establishes a hierarchical scale of values between them, and clearly states the superiority of the first with respect to the second. In fact, the definition “less enlightened dreamers” condemns the Bosnians to a status of inferiority when compared to the Irish. The adjective “enlightened” reveals the core of Creagh’s political thought: the negative delineation of the Bosnians in comparison to the Irish derives from the fact that the former are perceived as the descendents of a despotic political system, whereas the latter are the subjects of a powerful Empire which can boast that it upholds institutions based on Enlightenment principles, those indicated by the word “enlightened”.
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Paradoxically, for Creagh the despotic Turkish system in Bosnia does not preclude the moral superiority of the Turks with respect to the peoples they subject, and it is this same system that he perceives as a weapon with which to combat the tendency towards rebellion of the local population: God knows the Turkish Government is not the most enlightened administration in Europe; but it has fearful difficulties to contend with, and its despotic and paternal rule certainly prevents the Bosniacs from tearing each other to pieces414.
Creagh thus justifies the despotic Turkish regime when it is directed towards a population that, like the Bosnians, suffers from never having been in contact with Enlightenment principles: A constitutional form of government given to the provinces of European Turkey would be as useless to them as a knee buckle to a Highlander. For many years to come they must be governed despotically; but the offices of a despotism ought to have great powers, exercised under a wholesome inspection, in order to prevent their being disgraced by caprices of cruelty or corruption. Otherwise, the terror of summary and equal justice being unfelt, the ignorant peasants, constantly stirred up by unprincipled agitators, ascribe leniency, or even delay, which they think is hesitation, to fear; and object, like the misguided people of Herzegovina, last summer, to pay the taxes415.
Creagh’s discourse on Bosnia, and on Bosnians in general, fits perfectly into the political context of those years, and is also a direct consequence of his cultural formation as well as of his Irish origins. He formulates the image of the Bosnians, and of the Irish, from the viewpoint of his vision of the Eastern Question and the question of Ireland. As a descendant of an Irish Protestant family of landowners, he sided with the political opponents of the Home Rule movement which, although at its origins strongly influenced by the Protestant Irish, in the 1870s under the influence of the militant and extremist fringes of the Young Irelanders and the Fenians was changing into a movement that defended almost solely the interests of the Irish Catholics. His conservative political attitudes, and his adhesion to Benjamin Disraeli’s political line, indicated his inclination towards the protection of the interests of the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, it was these two different political attitudes that led James Creagh to assume negative sentiments, in his travel account from 1876, towards both the Irish Home Rulers and the ‘Bosnian home rulers’ of every ethnicity. There exists a largely unobserved relationship that unites Bosnia, Ireland and England in a triangular relationship. Through comparisons, hierarchizations, ironic illustrations and remarks of another nature, the result is that Ireland and Bosnia, at least in the eyes of some 19th century British observers, often happened to be
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close to each other. Nevertheless, this unexpected relationship affected more than the field of travel books, magazines and newspapers which, as we have seen, in the 19th century relied on a racist language. Indeed, some comparisons between the two countries by British politicians testify that the question of Ireland might have influenced certain decisions by British politicians regarding the Eastern Question and specifically in relation to the Bosnian crisis of 1875. The most interesting example of what has just been said is to be found in a series of diplomats’ correspondences published by the “Slavic review” in 1924-1925 under the title of Russo-British Relations during the Eastern Crisis. These documents not only offer a precious testimony of the Russo-British relations during the Eastern Crisis of the 1870s, but also provide details of the correspondence between Russian diplomats in England and Russian politicians. Their critical view, although obviously not disinterested, of the British political scene during the years of the Eastern Crisis, represents an inestimable source of information for those wishing to write a history of British official collective representations. According to one document of 14 October 1875, Count P.A. Shuvalov – the Russian ambassador to London – confessed to Aleksandr Jomini that Lord Derby and Benjamin Disraeli were not in favour of an autonomous state for Bosnia-Herzegovina416. In another diplomatic document, dating from 13 January 1876, Shuvalov reported to the Russian prime minister Gorchakov that Disraeli’s nervousness towards the reform program of the insurgents in 1875, in which land reform figured prominently, was partly due to the possibility of setting precedents for the Irish agrarian campaign417. The veracity of the latter document can be accepted on the grounds of certain events that actually occurred during the 1870s Eastern Crisis: whereas Russia played the principal role during the first two international attempts, in 1875 and again in 1876, to resolve the Bosnian crisis, their failures were mostly due to British political decisions418. According to the historiographical reconstructions of those events, it seems that this second document refers to the first serious attempt by the Great Powers, that is today known to historians as the Andrassy Note, to restore the peace in Bosnia419. The document, elaborated in Vienna by the Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and by the Russian ambassador to Austria, was issued on 30 December 1875. It required the Porte to grant the two rebellious provinces religious liberty, to abolish tax-farming and to help the peasants of the area to buy land from
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their lords and thus reduce the agrarian discontent which had led to the revolt. The Andrassy Note, as we can see, clearly focuses on the regulation of the land in Bosnia, a clause that, in the minds of Disraeli and Lord Derby, recalled certain Irish tenants’ requests that the British were not yet ready to concede. As is known, the attempt to solve the Bosnian crisis by the Andrassy Note failed. Among the various causes is the weakness of the Porte – above all its financial weakness – to enforce reforms in the rebellious provinces in the face of opposition of many of its own officials. Nor can we neglect the contradictory role played by Great Britain during the period of negotiations. Whereas proposals were readily accepted by the other Great Powers, the British government agreed to them only hesitantly, and refused to demand their acceptance in writing by the Porte. This British action seemed to have encouraged the Turkish government first to pretend modifications of the Note and, second, to respond to its requests. In light of these events, Great Britain could be seen as indirectly responsible for the failure of this initial attempt to end the Bosnian crisis at its outbreak – and the question of Ireland can be seen as one of the motives for such political decisions. Apart from these political effects, this study also takes into account other research fields which assess and analyse collective representations, mental maps and the construction of a ‘cultural identity of Europe’. At this point it is necessary to consider Maria Todorova’s well known thesis presented in her work, Imagining the Balkans, which proves that a negative image of the Balkans was deeply rooted on different levels of Western society, dividing Europe into two opposing poles; the Balkans representing the land of ‘in-betweenness’ within Europe and the Orient, but always conceived as ‘the negative Self ’ of Europe, its Eastern Other420. This chapter, with its comparative approach, confirms the validity of certain remarks of Todorova’s study, while claiming that in order to understand better the complex network of cultural relations within Europe, the opposition in the term ‘EastWest’ applied by Todorova needs to be integrated into a ‘centre-periphery’ scale of relations. By doing so, this chapter substituted the opposition with a graduation. On the basis of a ‘centre-periphery’ approach, it emerges that at least for the British observers of both Ireland and Bosnia there is no strict opposition between a ‘Europe’ and a ‘non-Europe’, and the cultural relations within Europe rather follow a gradual scale that descends from the ‘centre’ to the ‘periphery’. The position on this scale is obviously influenced by the cultural relationship between both East and West, and, similarly, South-North and, as we have seen, quasi-colony/ not-colony.
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The British imaginary view perceives Ireland as a periphery at a shorter distance from the ‘civilised’ Britain, while the Balkans, or at least Bosnia, which in geographical terms represent their heart, is not solely the ‘negative Other’ within Europe, but rather one of her more distant peripheral lands. The fact that the Bosnians were compared to the Irish, and Bosnia to Ireland, also shows – as regards mental maps – that in the 19th century the British adopted different discursive strategies for defining Bosnia as an European country in both cultural and political terms. So, even though the country in many ways was perceived as ‘Orient’, it was an Orient which orbited within the European cultural space. This latest point is also demonstrated by the fact that the British, during the Eastern Crisis (1875-1878), in order to define Bosnia and the Bosnians within a political and cultural context, very often associated them with Ireland and the Irish.
VI. Travellers and the public arena Chapter five has shown in what way representations of Bosnia and Bosnians sometimes entered into direct contact with the British internal and foreign politics, influencing it or being influenced by it. Such an analysis is far from suggesting that the relationship between politics and literature was simple, linear and direct. On the contrary, it proceeded in a circular way, starting from the political stage and returning to it – through the corpus of travel writing. What emerges is that the role played by travellers in the public arena was very complex and varied, as they acted sometimes as agents and other times as recipients of the disseminated information. The travelogues, that underwent changes related to British internal and foreign policy, also influenced this same policy with their language and content. In this chapter I intend to illustrate this intricate and complex relationship between travel writing and internal and foreign politics in more detail. Although it is impossible to completely separate these two areas and to deal with them as if they were two autonomous fields, I decided, for solely analytical purposes, to divide the chapter into two sections in order to show the influences of one area on the other and vice versa. From politics to literature The so-called ‘Eastern Question’ corresponds to a series of events that took place between 1774 and 1923 and whose essential defining factor was the progressive disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the rivalry of the Great Powers to establish their control and influence in the Balkans and the coastal countries of the eastern (to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean), and southern, Mediterranean. British interest in Ottoman issues in general, and in the Balkans in particular, arose at the end of the 18th century and reached a new height in 1856 with the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War. In comparison to the Habsburg Empire, Russia and France, London was last to become involved in the Eastern Question – discounting Italy and Germany, which both became involved in the period after national unification – when the two historic allies, Russia and Austria, had already begun to enlarge at the expense of the Ottoman Empire421. The British did not have any territorial claims in the ‘Ottoman Balkans’, but they decided to become involved in the Eastern Question after Russian successes against the Turks in Asia and above all because Russia, taking the protection of the Ortho-
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dox and the Slavic populations in South-Eastern Europe as a pretext, was emerging on the Balkan stage422. This decision was certainly conditioned by the growth of Great Britain as a colonial power. Indeed, towards the end of the 18th century, Britain had become the leading nation in global industry and commercial activity; furthermore, with the defeat of Napoleon and the acquisition of overseas territories, she also became the most powerful colonial nation. All this influenced the tendency of British foreign policy to consolidate the so-called Pax Britannica. Protecting the route to India was certainly important, as was controlling the isthmus that divided the Mediterranean from the Indian Ocean. In Europe, on the other hand, this same objective was pursued through the preservation of the system of ‘balance of powers’. Already in the 1830s it was decided in London to promote both the politics of integrity and the inviolability of the Ottoman Empire, an objective that was given even greater force in 1856 by Palmerston, who laid the foundations of a Crimean policy of support for a reformed Turkey as a bulwark against Russia423. This programme was also adopted as official orthodoxy by successive British governments and remained part of the British political agenda until 1874, when, with the election of Benjamin Disraeli as prime minister, British policy focused its Liberal emphasis on the need for Ottoman reform and the danger of Russian reaction, and a pro-Ottoman policy came more to be associated with conservative imperialism and the desire to protect British interests in the Near East424. This was also the framework of British foreign policy within which the politicization of British travel writing in the Ottoman Empire, and consequently in BosniaHerzegovina, took place. The first half of the 19th century was indeed a dividing line not only for British policy in the Near East, but also in the quality of British travel writing on the Near East and the Balkans, which came to have a more strongly politicized character425. Indeed, henceforth it was strongly influenced by the political bias of the author who, at least until 1876, when the “Bulgarian and Bosnian atrocities” significantly altered British public opinion towards the Turks, rarely disagreed with the official pro-Ottoman policy and therefore was explicitly supportive of the Ottoman Empire426. In British travel writing on Bosnia this perspective also emerged when travellers thought that a Turkish withdrawal from Europe was imminent. Indeed, John Gardner Wilkinson, in his account of Herzegovinia, re-considered in positive terms the role and attitudes of the Turks and their capacity to reform their country in a European manner427. Even when British travellers, down to 1875, perceived Bosnia as a place with a distinct physiognomy, many understood this country to be a constitutive part of the
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Ottoman Empire. Not all travellers expressed this opinion with the same transparency; such an attitude was advanced by George Arbuthnot when discussing the economic dependency of Bosnia on the Ottoman Empire. Arbuthnot considered the potential utility of Bosnian natural resources, which he found in a state of abandon and negligence due to the political lethargy of the Ottoman Empire (“Dense forests too, of average growth over the mountain sides as we approach the Bosnian frontier […], would prove most remunerative to the government were they properly worked”), and he predicted a flourishing economic future for Bosnia should the Ottoman Empire be morally redeemed: Should Turkey, however, arise from her lethargy, should genuine civilisation spread its branches over the land, we may then confidently anticipate a glorious future for her south-Slavonic provinces [i.e. Bosnia-Herzegovina!], doubting not that they will some day become ‘the noblest jewel in their monarch’s diadem’428.
Some years later we find a similar attitude in the writing of James Creagh. What distinguishes this traveller from George Arbuthnot was a declared conservatism, evident in his pro-Ottoman stance. Creagh’s Irish origins and Protestant descent perhaps best explain this particular aspect of his political opinions. Indeed, even though he left Ireland at a very young age, acquiring his education in England, his autobiography from 1901429, as well as his travelogue from 1876, attest, as we have seen in the previous chapter, to the fact that he never forgot Ireland and that he interpreted his Bosnian tour, particularly the political and social problems he could observe there, through the lens of an Irish political paradigm. In fact, Creagh assumed a conservative political attitude towards both the question of Ireland, where he favoured the retention of the political status quo in the relationship between London and Dublin, and the dynamics of the Eastern Question and the relations between the centre and the periphery of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike from Arbuthnot, who made only veiled references to the continuity of an Ottoman presence in Bosnia, Creagh openly supported the Turkish government in the country, even hoping, as we saw in the previous chapter, for a despotic government that would maintain order among the “ignorant peasants”. In the cases of both Arbuthnot and Creagh, pro-Ottoman political perspectives influenced their view of the Turkish military and political classes, towards which they expressed feelings of professional esteem and class solidarity430. The reason for Arbuthnot’s Bosnian tour was Omer Pasha Latas’s military campaign, the military manoeuvres and strategies of which he greatly appreciated. Creagh, on his side, was convinced that most Turkish pashas were of a rank equivalent to European gentle-
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men: “Many Turkish Pashas, like Mustapha, are inferior to no gentleman in Europe either in soldier like bearing, high sense of honour, or courtesy and elegance of manner”431. But not all Turkophile travellers of these years manifested this same point of view. Wilkinson, for example, considered the Turks a barbarous people and doubted their capacity to become “civilised before their rule ceases in Europe”432. Whereas Turkophile travellers often stressed what they perceived as positive in the Turks, they frequently also demonized the enemies of the Ottoman Empire – and not just Russia. In the Bosnian case this becomes evident in the descriptions of the local governors, described as “Bosniacs”, who at the end of the 1840s organized a series of revolts, seeking more autonomy for Bosnia within the Ottoman Empire. The anti-conformist and hostile positions that these local governors assumed towards the reforms and laws introduced by the ‘enlightened’ Sultans were first mentioned by Archibald Paton: “The Bosniacs, the last to embrace Islamism, opposed a more determined resistance to the European reforms of Sultan Mahmoud than any other of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire”433. The Bosnian pashas were then stigmatized by James Creagh in the personage of Djezzar-Pasha of Acre434, whose image as a “butcher” hinted at the violence of the “Bosniac Turks” who sought greater autonomy for Bosnia within the Empire: Djezzar, Pasha of Acre, known, from his cruelties, as the Butcher, was a Bosniac. He cooperated with Sir Sydney Smith and Nelson against Napoleon: and the Emperor confessed that the determination of the old Slav changed the destiny of the French nation in the East. Through such men as these, but more particularly through the Janizaries, the Bosniac Turks exercised a powerful influence, which intimidated even the Pashas, who although nominally governing the provinces, feared to interfere with an old feudal aristocracy that flaunted standards which had been handed down from father to son for many generations, and even fought among themselves like independent princes435.
It is widely known that major political problems facing the Ottoman Empire included the ever-more insistent requests for administrative autonomy by the semiindependent Muslim agas and begs, appointed to the regional government of the vast Ottoman Empire. Their cries of protest, that sometimes took the form of real armed revolt, reached Istanbul after the Sultan’s attempt to modernize the imperial administrative, economic and judicial system, prompting provincial reform acts that were openly hostile towards local governors and the customary practices they implemented. An example of this can be seen in the armed rebellions by Ali Pasha of Ioannina in northwestern Greece in 1820 and by Muhammad Ali Pasha in Egypt in the 1830s, as well as the many revolts organized by the Bosnian local nobles some
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years later436. The latter revolts were no less convinced in their actions than those elsewhere in the Empire, reaching their most decisive expression between the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s, when a violent clash between the local forces and the Sultan’s envoy, Tahir Pasha, who was sent to Bosnia in 1847 with the instruction to reform the army, took place. In 1850 this revolt required the intervention of one of the Sultan’s most valorous men, Omer Pasha, who between 1850 and 1851 managed to re-introduce order in the country, forcing into exile numerous begs and agas who had participated in the revolt. Omer Pasha was often mentioned and sometimes even celebrated by British travellers in Bosnia between the 1860s and the 1870s437. These historical events served as a setting, a background, for most of the travellers’ observations, and these revolts fit completely with a more general Turkophile approach, making of the Bosnian elites the enemies of the Empire, placing them in opposition to the noble Turkish elites. It was the Bulgarian and Bosnian atrocities, beginning in 1875 and 1876, which first caused British public opinion to change and which would later also ruin the dominant Turkophile position in Britain. Challenging the established conservative political position, some liberals began to defend the national cause of the Slavo-Christian populations in Bulgaria, in Bosnia, in Serbia and above all in Montenegro438. In 1876 William Gladstone produced his challenging pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East439, which placed him at the head of a widespread and intense public demand that the government reverse its pro-Turkish policy and replace it with one encouraging the emancipation of European peoples subject to Ottoman rule440. In May 1877, he even spoke on the South Slavs’ behalf in the House of Commons, pointing out that the populations of Balkan countries would ultimately determine “their abiding condition” themselves: A portion of those unhappy people are still as yet making an effort to retrieve what they have lost so long but have not ceased to love and to desire. I speak of those in BosniaHerzegovina. Another portion – a band of heroes such as the world has rarely seen – stand on the rocks of Montenegro, and are ready now, as they have ever been during the 400 years of their exile from their fertile plains, to sweep down from their fastnesses and meet the Turks at any odds for the reestablishment of justice and peace in those countries. Another portion still, the 5,000000 of Bulgarians, cowed and beaten down to the ground, hardly venturing to look upwards, even to their Father in heaven, have extended their hands to you; they have sent you their petition, they have prayed for your help and protection. They have told you that they do not seek alliance with Russia,
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or with any foreign power, but they seek to be delivered from an intolerable burden of woe and shame. That burden of woe and shame – the greatest that exists on God’s earth – is the one that we though united Europe was about to remove441.
Richard T. Shannon has noted that the principle of national self-determination applied by Gladstone to the Slavic populations had also been made possible by the political programmes he had sketched out in 1858, during his campaign against the Crimean policy. It was at that time that he stated the national emancipation of some Balkan states, especially (the future) Romania, “was a better investment than the Crimean policy of propping up Turkey”442. Yet, finding little or no support for his Eastern policy initiative among the public, Gladstone completely abandoned it – until 1876, when he returned to this policy, but only after he became aware that the public mood, provoked by accounts of the Turkish massacres of Bulgarians in spring 1876, was running strongly against the government443. These were changes of great political importance which can be easily traced through the travel texts of these years, which retained a politicised character but were no longer Turkophile. Many of the texts were increasingly characterised by Slavophile tendencies. An anonymous author, whose travelogue on Bosnia was published in “The British Quarterly Review” in October 1876, appealed to the Great Powers, asking for their support for the Slavic populations of the Ottoman regions, people who had risen up against their Ottoman oppressors (“The lands which have risen against their oppressors, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Crete, must be for ever set free from his yoke. So to set them free is the duty of the great powers of Europe” 444). In the closing lines the author of this article assumed a highly ‘British’ tone, urging his own fellow countrymen to distrust the Turks: From north and south and east and west, from hill and dale, from town and village, the cry must go up, as it has begun to go up, that we will not be partakers in other men’s sins, that we will not endure the Turk as our ally, or the friends of the Turk as our rulers445.
The pro-Ottoman policy and empathy with the Turkish rulers, an attitude that had dominated the mindset of many British travellers after 1856 and was also prevalent among British travellers in Bosnia, disappeared from the pages of now more Slavophile British writers in the ‘Ottoman Balkans’ from 1876. Henceforth, these same travellers conceived of the future of Bosnia within the context of a South-Slavonic state, led by Serbia. Arthur J. Evans, more than any other author, promoted the idea of a South-Slavic state, to be led by Serbia and within which Bosnia would be integrated. In his ap-
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proach this traveller was not only guided by his own impressions formed from his travels, but also by W.E. Gladstone, who, from 1877, openly supported the emancipation of Bulgaria and Montenegro446. Yet, even though Evans was openly proSlavic from his first travels in the Balkans, he did not immediately support the idea of national independence. The evolution of his political thought can be traced, starting from his first trip to Bosnia, crowned in 1876 by his well-known travelogue Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on foot during the Insurrection447. When Evans set off for Bosnia, as well as his firm knowledge of the archaeology, history and ethnography of the area, he also possessed a number of liberal political ideas which were significant in helping to form his interpretation of events448. Indeed, according to him, the oppression of the rayah was caused by an antiquated and corrupted feudal system; he criticized every type of authority that such a system produced and revealed the system that had determined the living conditions of the Slavo-Christian population throughout the centuries; eventually, he determined that the main cause of misery for the rayah were the agrarian reforms, actually instruments in the hands of the Ottoman authorities that aimed to enrich the rich and further penalize the poor. Reading Evans’s travel account when aware of his liberalism, it is impossible to agree with some recent historiographical interpretations advanced by authors from the former Yugoslavia. Evans, for example, in their view intentionally omitted a reading of the Bosnian revolt in national terms, preferring to provide an account in agrarian and fiscal terms, in order to reassure the British public which perceived a threat to British imperial interests in Panslavism. Furthermore, it is interesting to observe that, at the height of Yugoslav socialism in the second half of the 20th century, there was also recourse to a teleological reading of the same travelogue, ascribing to Evans the capacity to foresee the future socialist destiny of Yugoslavia449. In a more recent case, Evans’s account has been interpreted in explicitly Croat-nationalist terms: Evans has been accused of writing under the influence of the Serb nationalist agenda, as well as having played an active role in stirring up the insurrections in favour of an Anschluss of all the regions inhabited by Serbs with Serbia. Furthermore, in the same text Evans has also been judged responsible for the “holocaust” of Croats during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s450. It is evident that these readings are heavily politicised and as such must be read with deep scepticism. At the time of writing his account of Bosnia, Evans neither assumed any definitive political position with respect to the national and state question of the South Slavs,
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nor adhered to any political project relating to that issue. This made it impossible for him to read the facts through the perspective of any of the local national movements, rather leading him to read them through different interpretative patterns, prevalently liberal in orientation. It was only in 1878, two years after the publication of his travel account, that Evans reformulated his ideas and came to support the idea of a state of all South Slavs, an idea which can be easily traced in most of his later writings. That his choice of such an ideological course was not immediate can also be deduced from the fleeting appearance of yet another political project regarding Bosnia-Herzegovina, that would subsequently disappear from his writings and can be explained on the basis of a different political and cultural attitude. In the Preface to his Illyrian Letters from 1878 – a collection of letters written by Evans from Dubrovnik between February and November 1877, when he was Balkan special correspondent for the “Manchester Guardian” – he defended the Austrian presence in Bosnia, a presence which had been touted for many years and was then becoming real and visible. It has been suggested that Evans, on reaching a better understanding of the Balkans, thought that the South Slavs were not fit and prepared for their own national project451. Yet, it is difficult to support this point of view, especially if we consider that Evans, only a few short weeks later, on 23 February 1878, held a lecture at Sion College, where he explicitly referred to the great potential of the South Slavs, who were, according to him, capable of reaching the peaks of civility452. Moreover, setting Evans’s observation in the geo-political context of those years, it can be seen that his articles for the “Manchester Guardian” were written at a time when Russia was waging war against Turkey453, and when the problem of Russian expansion in the Balkans was represented as a project detrimental to Great Britain and the established equilibrium in international relations. It is therefore reasonable to state that Evans decided to back Austria-Hungary temporarily against Russia, encouraged as he was by his intention to defend the interests of his own country. This seems to be clearly confirmed in the statement where Evans claimed that the enlargement of Austria was “the only consummation that can prevent Russia from ultimately advancing to the shores of the Adriatic”454. These words are indicative of a further cultural attitude, as important as liberalism, in giving shape to Evans’s Bosnia: Evans was the son of an imperialist mentality and his political position was shaped according to the interests of the British Empire, an attitude that made him, even if just for a few months in 1877 during Gladstone’s campaign, a valiant defender of British interests.
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Moreover that Evans, at the time of his trip to Bosnia in 1875, had not yet formulated his pro-unitary state model for the South Slavs, can be further deduced from a proposal, advanced in the Introduction to Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on foot during the Insurrection, to establish an independent Bosnian state, in order to rescue this country from the reigning corruption of the Ottoman Empire: “Why not, then, sever the connection with that sink of corruption altogether, and erect an independent State under an European guarantee?”455. And Evans even offered a model for this state: The democratic genius of the people would suggest a Republic as the best form of government, but the divided state of the country would preclude such a government to begin with; and a Principality, after the model of free Serbia, might combine parliamentary government with the coherence of a monarchy456.
This suggests that Evans travelled and wrote about Bosnia in 1875, not with a predetermined vision for a future Bosnian state, but with ideas still plastic and unformed, open to review and reformulation. What, most likely, led Evans to develop his position on the national cause of the South Slavic peoples, was Gladstone’s election campaign, begun in 1876 a few months after the publication of his travel account. Whereas Gladstone, with his public discourses and political pamphlets, favoured independent Bulgarian and Montenegro states457, Evans began to offer public speeches and articles supportive of a single state of the South Slavs under the leadership of Serbia. Evans arrived at this idea progressively, as is evident from his two articles: The Slavs and European civilisation, from February of 1878 and The Austrians in Bosnia, from October of the same year458. In the first article Evans aimed to locate the Slavs within the context of all the other civilised European populations, as was also confirmed by the title of his essay, in order to justify Gladstone’s and his own national projects to a wide audience. It was for this reason that he stressed above all the moral qualities of the Slavs. Subsequently, with the second mentioned article, where he comments on events relating to the presence of the Austrians in Bosnia, Evans, for the first time explicitly, advances the idea of an independent state of the South Slavs under the direction of Serbia. Other travellers, including Humphry Sandwith and Paulina Irby, whose Bosnian tours were already discussed in the first chapter, altered their perspectives in a similar way in the 1870s. Even though their political thought was not articulated, and as such is not easy to locate and analyse over the course of its development, these
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authors, like Evans, supported the South Slavic national cause, at times also offering a state model that would incorporate Bosnia-Herzegovina. Once more Serbia was chosen as the lead state, thanks in large measure to the fact that she was the first Balkan state of South Slavs that undertook a campaign for independence and emancipation from the Ottoman Empire, conquering ever more administrative and political autonomy as well as prestige within Europe. It was not only a question of Realpolitik, but also of the cultural promotion of Serbia abroad that strengthened its international diplomatic support. The inexhaustible activity of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and his profitable relations with the leading international intellectuals of his time such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Leopold von Ranke, who also wrote extensively about topics related to Serbian history and literature, certainly played an important role in this promotional activity 459. Such general conditions certainly contributed to the diffusion of the pro-Serb political tendency among the cultural and political elites of certain Western European countries. This is especially true in the case of Humphry Sandwith during his time in Bosnia; in his travelogue Sandwith saw the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina joined with Serbia, clearly expressed when he wrote that “probably Bosnia will be incorporated with Servia”460. Pro-Serb positions characterised Paulina Irby’s writings, too. Unlike Sandwith, Irby first formed her opinions favouring the state of Serbia, which she thought ought also to include Bosnia, during Gladstone’s electoral campaign. This missionary worker justified the adhesion of Bosnia to a “Free Serbia” on the basis of the Bosnians’ race. Irby considered all Bosnia, or better all the Bosnians, as descended from the same race, elsewhere defined as “Slavonic”461, an identity also shared by all Serbs who inhabited South-Eastern Europe: “Its [Bosnia’s] race is identical with that of Free Serbia, Old Serbia, and Montenegro, and with the Serbs of Hungary and Dalmatia”462. The same pro-Serb bias was to be found in a book from 1886, The Growth of Freedom in the Balkan Peninsula, whose author was the British diplomat James G.C. Minchin463. This book gathers the articles that Minchin, a British consul in Belgrade, wrote for “The Times” and “The Morning Advertiser” during his travels to Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Minchin’s travelogue was an analysis of both political and economic aspects of these countries. As with most liberal travellers from the 1870s, Minchin supported the national emancipation of the South Slavs, which, according to him, should be led by Serbia. This was also one of the most obvious reasons why this diplomat held to account the Austrian
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administration for the decline of the Bosnian society and economy: “It will be seen, therefore, that the commercial advantages derived from Austrian occupation are not obvious. The same remark may be made of Austrian law, Austrian police, and Austrian officialism in Bosnia”464. For Slavophile British liberals, the Serb national project was not the only available national project for South Slavs in the 1870s. In the course of the 19th century the Croat and Yugoslavist national projects, which frequently included Bosnia-Herzegovina within the boundaries of the proposed states, gained momentum. Nevertheless, the Serbian option prevailed, due to several reasons, among which Serbia’s autonomy within the Ottoman Empire since 1830 and, from 1878, this country’s achievement of full independence from Istanbul. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that British travellers who offered their support for the Serb national project, also became sympathetic to the plight of the Bosnian and Serbian Orthodox populations at this time. In particular, this emerges in the writings of Sandwith, Irby and Mackenzie, whose biographies reveal, and whose travelogues confirm, their close collaboration with the Serbo-Orthodox population during their Balkan stays. Sandwith, a Turkophile who in the 1870s converted to a Slavophile position, adhered to the Serb national cause and participated in the ceremony celebrating the coronation of Prince Milan of Serbia. A year later he returned to England to seek financial concessions for Serbian railway from London, with little success. Furthermore, when Serbia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1876, he went with great haste to Belgrade to provide assistance to Serbian refugees and wounded soldiers. He also appealed to English charities for relief funds and wrote a series of letters to “The Times” and other British newspapers in support of the Serbian cause465. The decision by Paulina Irby and Georgina Mackenzie to promote education within the Serbian-Orthodox female community of Sarajevo has already been considered in chapter one. The Pan-Slavistic tendencies of these women, which led to their arrest in 1858, crystallized in their philanthropic work, albeit exclusively for the Bosnian Orthodox population. Observations such these confirm that the personal experiences of travellers in Bosnia and more generally in the Balkans certainly played an important role in the formation of their political positions with respect to the region. The shift from Turkophile to Slavophile attitudes, that took place among travellers to Bosnia in the 1870s, did not mirror official British foreign policy: under the
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influence of Disraeli’s conservative ideas, Britain promoted, both for the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, a pro-Ottoman policy aimed at weakening Russian influence in South-Eastern Europe. It was for this reason that, in the 1870s, conservatives opposed the liberal policy which supported administrative autonomy for the Slavo-Christian populations of the ‘Ottoman Balkans’, perceived as yet another step towards increased Russian influence in the area. The same political programme conditioned certain decisions by the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 too, when Bosnia-Herzegovina was ceded to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, following an agreement between Vienna and London. The Austrians satisfied London’s requests to reduce the dimensions of the new Bulgarian state formed by the Treaty of San Stefano in early 1878, that functioned as a Russian satellite466. In exchange, Britain offered her support to the Austrians in their request to be granted a frontier region of the Ottoman Empire, namely Bosnia-Herzegovina, a subject land which had been a matter of negotiation among the Great Powers for a number of years467. Several British conservative travellers, favourable to the Austrians in Bosnia and clearly attuned to Disraeli’s policy, can be identified in the period following the beginning of Austrian administration in Bosnia. Gladstone’s coming to power in 1880 did not change the pro-Ottoman policy established by Disraeli; Gladstone, indeed, opted for a policy of collaboration with Turkey, readily accepting even the conditions advanced by the Austrians at the Congress of Berlin. Consequently he abandoned the emancipatory projects being advanced by both the South Slavs and the Bulgarians, projects he had supported during his election campaign and which in some way aided his return to power. Gladstone’s political approach to the Ottoman Empire did change in 1882; nevertheless this did not prevent him from altering his attitude to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Balkan provinces468. He remained convinced of the need for an Austrian presence in Bosnia, or at least supported the status quo after 1882; his policy helped to spread pro-Austrian feelings among British travellers in Bosnia, regardless of their political persuasion. In the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin and before the beginning of Gladstone’s period of government, very few British ventured to travel to Bosnia. Apart from Arthur J. Evans, who, until his expulsion from Dubrovnik in 1882, often travelled to Herzegovina and supported the Slavo-Christians in their revolt against Austrian rule469, there is only the Scottish traveller Robert Hamilton Lang. Lang was the first British traveller to Bosnia who expressed an opinion in favour of the Austrian pres-
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ence in the country; not only did he stress the first successes of the new administration, but he also emphasized the support offered to it by the local population and in particular by the Bosnian Muslims, who had initially put up resistance: The state of feeling in the three leading sections of the population is curious to mark. The Bosnian Begs are beginning to understand that there is no chance of the re-establishment of Turkish rule, and comprehend that if they had not the Austrians over them they would probably have the Servians or Montenegrins, which would prove a much greater calamity470.
After 1882 the number of British travellers to Bosnia increased; all the while their positions became ever more pro-Austrian. Frequently they hoped for the complete and permanent annexation of Bosnia to Austria-Hungary. This is certainly the case with William Miller, who in 1898 perceived the annexation to be a necessity, since, in his opinion, non-annexation would cause the country to return to an earlier, lessdeveloped, time and a barbarous condition, provoking overall discontent in the population471. Some years later, when the annexation of Bosnia to Austria-Hungary appeared imminent, Ellinor F.B Thompson expressed a similar opinion. Thompson, who published her account of Bosnia in 1907 for the journal “Nineteenth Century”, recognized that the best alternative for Bosnia would be “self-government”, but she also claimed that the country, still strongly divided, was not sufficiently prepared for such a situation. In these circumstances, and before the outbreak of the Balkan wars, Thompson opined that the best prescription for the country was continuity of “the present Bosnian Administration”: the inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina are still, after thirty years of peaceful occupation, denied a direct voice in the government of their country, and are reduced to that Oriental and least satisfactory means of protest, the filing of endless petitions; and more that this, all discussion of Bosnian affairs in the Delegations is said to meet with strong official discouragement. It may be better, in the abstract, for a people to work out its own salvation, but the most confirmed believer in national independence must admit that the Provinces are not ready for self-government, if indeed self-government could ever be a possibility here, while the inhabitants remain divided among themselves. In the meantime, till the war which, sooner or later, must break out in the Balkans has effected changes impossible now to foresee, the present Bosnian Administration, with its high proportion of capable and conscientious officials, seems on the way to deal successfully with many of the problems bequeathed to it by its Turkish and Austro-Hungarian predecessors472.
It is clear that British foreign policy exercised a significant influence on travellers’ political readings of life and society in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. This
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point of view emerges most evidently in a general evolution of British travellers’ political positions. Initially, these travellers were characterised by a pro-Ottoman approach; then they underwent moments of Slavophile support, subsequently complicated by the intervention of Austria-Hungary. Travellers’ perspectives, therefore, alternated from those favourable to a Bosnia within the Ottoman Empire to those supporting national independence for the South Slavs within the ‘Ottoman Balkans’, associating the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina first with the Principality, and then with the state, of Serbia. Lastly, in the post-1878 travelogues, general support for the Austrian presence in Bosnia is evident. From literature to politics In the post-Crimean years the Balkans almost disappeared from the British political arena, as they rarely represented an issue of either parliamentary discussion or political pamphleteering. Even though Britain’s role was crucial in the creation of postCrimean political conditions for the area, “Britain had no official commitment to the nations of the Balkans, and they figured only seldom in the calculations of British Eastern policy”473. The lack of other political or cultural references meant that, between the 1850s and the 1870s travel accounts were the only source of public information on the Balkans474. A point also endorsed by the fact that, in the 19th century, British travel accounts became rich in information and data, becoming perhaps the most prized of all European travel accounts475. One of the most important achievements of these travelogues was that they introduced the British public opinion to “the plight of the subject Slavs”476. As Wendy Bracewell has shown, in the period between the Treaty of Paris in 1856 and the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ in 1876, these accounts also assumed the role of chief public opinion maker and assisted in the formation of British foreign and internal policy. Bracewell focused, in particular, on the political implications of these texts during Gladstone’s election campaign, which started in the months following the Bulgarian massacres. Gladstone’s campaign of 1880 was based in large measure on the defence of the Bulgarian national case, stressing, as he did, the sufferings of the Balkan Christian population, holding Turkish tyranny to account477. Yet, as Bracewell has noted, travel accounts had set up this problem in the same terms for many years, causing Gladstone to utilize this material to justify his political decisions478. The voices of the two missionary women, Irby and Mackenzie, were those that Gladstone chose to quote most frequently, to recount the miserable con-
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ditions under which Christians lived in South-Eastern Europe479. Furthermore, on the occasion of his speech to the National Convention on the Eastern Question in December 1876, which marked his return to the political scene and the beginning of his period of support for state independence for the Ottoman provinces within Turkey-in-Europe, Gladstone also quoted Arthur J. Evans, and his discussion of the Bosnian peasants’ revolt and its violent repression by the Bosnian irregular troups, the bashi bazouks480. The lack of interest on the part of the British public in the postCrimean years does not mean that travel accounts of this area, while rare, did not have a relevant role in British society nor that we must not attribute an important historical role to them. The Orientalist discourse on Bosnia-Herzegovina, originating in the 1870s and continuing until the first years of the 20th century, and representing both the general population of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bosnian Muslim women as ‘westernized Orientals’481, can be also quoted as an example of the close relationship established in the 19th century between travel writing, public opinion and British foreign policy. In fact, such an image intersected the decision by Disraeli’s government to support the occupation of Bosnia by Austria-Hungary during the Congress of Berlin. In 1878 Disraeli backed the advancement of the Austrian interest in Bosnia, bringing the country within the Western sphere of influence. Furthermore, as we have already seen, some Slavophile positions held by travellers and journalists toward the Balkans were manipulated by travellers in their accounts of the Eastern Crisis482. Yet, we can find other similar points of connection between travel writing on Bosnia and British policy, especially among those travellers who visited Bosnia after 1878. In fact, the political support offered to Austria by the British government was also justified on the basis of a travellers’ discourse that promoted and positively evaluated the new administration with a rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, now applied to the Austria-Hungary Empire. Modernization of the country through the abolition of slavery, suttee and thuggee, as well as the benefits in the Anglicisation of education and the opening of Indian trade, were all used by the British to justify imperial dominion especially in India, but also in South-East Asia and China, and were now re-formulated in order to fit an European context, within which it was necessary to justify Habsburg dominion in the Balkans, and particularly in Bosnia483. The historical context within which Bosnia found itself not only provided the premise for the use of this discourse formed in the context of the British Empire, but also pro-
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vided the pretext to celebrate this same Empire and its enterprises in India. Robert H. Lang, for example, while writing about the beginning of a new, hopefully more prosperous and peaceful, era for Bosnia-Herzegovina under the new administration, also celebrated “the rule of England” in India which he appreciated for its ‘impartial’ management: “All philanthropists should rejoice that Bosnia, with its antagonistic sects, has passed into the hands of a Power from which may be hoped as strict impartiality as the rule of England secures to India”484. For some other travellers, the new imperial context for Bosnia served to emphasize the public services constructed by the English in India. J.P. Barry, finding himself within an “admirable network of cross-country roads” in Bosnia, recently constructed by the new administration, used this circumstance to recall British construction work or, as he writes, “our roads and bridges” in India, in their quality of “the finest monuments of our public works”485. If the comparison between India and post-1878 Bosnia created the pretext to express favourable judgments of the British administration in India, it is also true that the similarities of some cultural traditions in India with those in Bosnia were used to stigmatize Indian culture. In the text by Harry Thomson, The Outgoing Turk, the author addresses the position of woman in Turkey, Egypt, Bosnia and India. In the author’s opinion, and on the basis of his personal knowledge of these four situations, he insisted that India, with regard to the “seclusion” of married women, was “stricter” than either Turkey, Egypt, or Bosnia. Indian women, Thomson claimed, were not just secluded within the domestic walls after the marriage, but were also driven “behind a purdah or curtain”. Thomson also revealed some other elements of the Indian culture that in his eyes were symptomatic of a more general lack of respect for the female sex486. As we can see, the comparison of the Indian and Bosnian contexts could be useful for very different purposes and it aimed to compare as well as contrast both situations, not just Bosnia with India, but also vice versa. In any case, even if these comparisons could have very different effects, the preeminent one regarded the Austrian administration in Bosnia, which was generally favoured by these travellers. Their praise for Austrian administration was often inserted within the coordinates adopted by the rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’; this is particularly evident with those authors whose main aim was to illustrate the improvement in living conditions in a Bosnian state that until recently had existed, in their opinion, in barbarous conditions. Henri Blowitz belongs to this category of authors; in 1894 he announced to his readers, “I desire to reveal, in the course of this plain narrative of my trip, the chang-
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es which have taken place in a country which hardly fifteen years ago was as inaccessible as any corner of Central Africa”. He pointed to Baron von Kállay487 as a figure responsible for this success. According to Blowitz, Kállay “has created an entire province and restored to civilisation a people which for centuries had been the prey of ignorance, fanaticism, and indeed almost barbarism”. Finally, Kállay would be the man who made of Bosnia “the model State of the Balkans”488. Strong praise for the Austrian enterprise in Bosnia had the effect of expressing the author’s full support for the Austrian administration there. William Miller, writing four years later, expressed a very similar view. Already at the beginning of his account Miller announced that at the core of his analysis would lie the successes of the new Austrian administration in Bosnia, referred to by him as “constructive work”, and in particular the work carried out by Benjamin Kállay. Miller’s travelogue has an additional characteristic to those presented in Blowitz: he used his travel text to celebrate his own British government and in particular the figure of Lord Salisbury, who, he wrote, advanced the plan for the integration of Bosnia into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a matter which had demonstrated the advantages in this valid experiment not only “for its own sake”, “but also because it is calculated to serve as a model for the future guidance of statesmen dealing with the Eastern Question”489. In addition to these two travel texts, which unusually placed the praise of the state of affairs in Bosnia as the main focus of their narration, there were numerous travel texts that engaged in long and detailed descriptions of Bosnian public services, which had undergone processes of ‘modernization’ after 1878. These descriptions clearly expressed travellers’ pro-Western and pro-Austrian perspectives being thus politically exploited. Positive evaluations of the improvement of public transport, of the educational system – to which Great Britain had contributed – , as well as the development of tourism, were expressed. Furthermore, special emphasis was given to the improvement of civil conditions and particularly the increased cohabitation of Christians and Muslims in the towns and villages. It was in any case a rhetoric that evolved progressively over time; at the beginning, in the years immediately following Austrian occupation, travellers focused above all on the administrative system, as can be seen in 1879 with the case of Robert Hamilton Lang. Lang evaluated the new administration in positive terms, emphasising the progress achieved by the Austrians in the area of administrative management of Bosnia. Therefore, it is not surprising that Lang also focused on the nature of the
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relationship between the locals and the new administration, as well as on the political principles that inspired and would continue to inspire the Austrians in their management of Bosnia490. For these purposes he engaged in different investigations either during his stay in Bosnia, or before his departure for the country. In Sarajevo he established contact with members of the new administration, and particularly with Baron de Krauss, an important source of information on the new administration in Bosnia. In England, on the other hand, he referred to diplomats’ texts, and especially to documents by the English consuls in Sarajevo, William R. Holmes and Edward W. Freeman491. The paradigms formed and suggested by Lang were subsequently built upon by later travellers. As Lang had done, these travellers, in an acritical manner, extracted images for their own use from the Bosnian historical and cultural context. Thomas Wodehouse Legh, for example, whose many congruencies with Lang have been shown in chapter one, depicted the newly constructed railway now under the management of the military authorities as “one of the most conspicuous achievements of the occupation”: The narrow-gauge railway connecting Brod with Sarajevo constitutes one of the most conspicuous achievements of the occupation. It is under the management of the military authorities, who are reported to conduct their work with unwonted success and capacity492.
Other travellers lingered on the public roads, that, as Miller wrote, were “urgently needed”, as “in no respect has the decline of Turkish administration been more marked than in its capacity to make and keep the roads”493. Patrick Barry was certainly exemplary in this sense; as we already saw, he admired the recently constructed Bosnian roads to such a degree that he regarded them worthy of comparison with the Indian roads, constructed by the British raj administration. Much importance was also attached to the improvement of tourist services. We already saw in chapter one that, from the 1890s, British travellers engaged in promoting Bosnia among their fellow countrymen as a tourist destination. Legh, for example, in his autobiography from 1941, complained that, despite improvements under the Austrians, Bosnia had not yet become a tourist destination: “It was surprising that so far tourists had not discovered Bosnia, more especially since the Austrian Government had established excellent inns in most parts, the roads were admirable and there were no brigands”494. It was the traveller Robert Dunkin who distinguished himself in this cause, promoting the possibilities for Bosnian tourism in Britain. In 1897, af-
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ter his camping and hunting tour in Bosnia, Dunkin evaluated Bosnia as a tourist destination of great merit; his account, focusing on the modernization and development of amenities undertaken by the Austrians, re-evaluated the Bosnian tourist potential, with improved roads and railway system as well as better public security495. The topic of public security was tackled with more determination by Arden John Hulme-Beaman in 1893. Hulme-Beaman, who made a visit to the prison of Zenica during his Bosnian tour, admired its “perfect functioning”: “Like everything else the Austrians have done to Bosnia, the Zenitza establishment is a perfect model”. He not only praised the Austrian official who designed the prison, but also honoured the Irish model which had inspired it: “He [the Director Emil Taaffer]496 had been sent by the Austrian administration on a tour of inspection to all the prisons of other countries, and had come back firmly convinced of the superiority of the Irish convict system”497. It is obvious that the example of an Irish prison has a double political meaning in this traveller’s account, on the one hand celebrating the Austrian administration in Bosnia and on the other displaying patriotic pride in the face of Irish dissent and revolt. The same pride could be found in the travelogue of Harry P. Thomson, who in 1896 thought that Bosnia had been transformed both technologically and in improved civic conditions; and he expressed special appreciation towards the newly-established educational system. He also remembered Paulina Irby, who had contributed to a renewal educational impulse in the country, thus making of England a leader among nations in providing these people with means necessary in their “bitter struggle for liberty”498. The Balkanist discourse, which in these same years was taking shape, can be found in the accounts of these latter travellers too. References to the ‘other time’, ‘ethnocultural mixture’ and the generally ‘hybrid’ nature of the country testify to a progressive affirmation in British travel writing on Bosnia of at least some elements of Balkanism taking shape in these same years. In 1898 William Miller referred to the racial and cultural hybridization that characterised the regions of the peninsula, and to the contradictions that applied a similar hybridism. The most important of the travelogues written by him is the afore-mentioned Travels and Politics in the Near East. This text is an important testimony of his numerous travels in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and, as well as being an account of the historical and social contexts of these three countries, it is also significant in that it offers a global image of the Balkans, representing for scholars in
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the West an example of the process of stigmatization and stereotyping of this geographical area by Western Europeans499. First, Miller complained that the Balkans remained little known both to his fellow countrymen and to the Germans, becoming an object of public interest only when a scene of conspiracy or a site of a bloody event: It is no exaggeration to say that many regions of Africa are more familiar to the cultured Englishman or German than the land which lie beyond the Adriatic. Only when a newspaper correspondent reports from time to time that some fresh conspiracy has been detected against the King of Servia or the Prince of Bulgaria, that the Greeks are fighting against the Turks or paying their creditors […] does public attention turn for a moment to the Balkan States500.
Yet, even though Miller complains about the fact that Westerners know only of the negative aspects of the social and political life in the Balkans, paradoxically, it was he who also contributed to the diffusion of such an image, by defining the Balkans as a “land of contradictions”: In short, the Balkan Peninsula is, broadly speaking, the land of contradictions. Everything is the exact opposite of what it might reasonably be expected to be; the traveller finds himself in the realms of romance, where all his wonted ideas are turned topsyturvy, and soon falls into the native distinction between what they do ‘in the Balkan’ and what they did in ‘Europe’501.
Just as William Miller contributed to Balkanism, emphasising typical Balkan contradictions, travellers to Bosnia did the same by focusing on the linguistic, cultural and racial mixture of this specific region502. ‘Snaffle’, for example, wrote of the numerous and different languages heard on the streets of Mostar, a fact that reminded him of Babylonia503. The mixture of languages in Herzegovina leads us to another traveller, Robert Munro, who in the same year as ‘Snaffle’, 1894, was in Bosnia to attend a conference on archaeology and anthropology, witnessing there a mixture of customs, races and religions: Nor are the ethnological elements and varied costumes displayed by the to-and-fro crowds less novel. To distinguish between the representatives of the different races and religions requires some local experience and historical knowledge504.
The result of Munro’s trip to Bosnia was his book of 1895, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia, re-published in 1900 in an edition that dedicated more space to historical and archaeological aspects, while keeping the account of his Bosnian tour intact. According to Munro, the mixture of “racial characters” in
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this country was even more pronounced and astonishing when one considered that the “Mohammedans” of Bosnia were “Slavs by blood”: The confusion of racial characters, so far as these may be indicated by dress and general appearance, is increased by the fact that most of the present-day Mohammedans are Slavs by blood. Formerly Christians, of the sect known as Bogomiles, they ultimately adopted Mohammedanism in self-defence in preference to Roman Catholicism505.
What, according to Munro, united all these inhabitants was the fact that they did not live in the present moment but in the past of their forefathers: “But whatever be the race or creed of the modern Bosniac, – Slav, Semite, or Turk; Christian, Jew, or Moslem, – he still lives, moves, and has his being in the traditional world of forefathers”506. The proximity of culture and politics is also expressed in some observations on the policy of religious cohabitation promoted by the new Austrian administration and deemed a success by some travellers. In this case, a political viewpoint favourable to the Austrian administration in Bosnia overlapped with the Balkanist perspective. Even though Miller perceived the peninsula as a “land of contradictions”, Bosnia, surprisingly and thanks to Austria-Hungary, was seen by this author as a land of order. It is important not to misinterpret these statements: Bosnia did not represent a Balkan exception; on the contrary, if Bosnia was a site of order, it was only thanks to the Austrian presence. The thesis of intrinsic disorder and of typically Balkan conflicts was thus reconfirmed in the case of Bosnia through its acceptance of order imported from abroad. It was also thought that this work of reconciliation and good administration had planted deep roots in Bosnia, having made of her a land that was no longer a terrain of conflict and “fanaticism”. Peaceful cohabitation among the different religious groups was perceived as one of the achievements of the new administration. HulmeBeaman expressed it in the following terms: “Moslems and Christians live in entire fellowship in Bosnia, and all my inquiries failed to establish the existence of any trace of fanaticism from one end of the province to another”507. According to Henri Blowitz, after the military element had been substituted with the civil, cohabitation resulted thanks to the tolerance of the new administration towards the sacred places of the Bosnian Muslims: The civil element has been substituted for the military element, and pacification has succeeded conquest. The greatest effort is made to reassure all minds. Not a single minaret has disappeared, not a muezzin is deprived of his resources. On the contrary, the school of the Sharriat is opened, and, under the direction of a reis elo oulemas […] teaches the law of the Prophet […]508.
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It is clear that such a representation of Bosnia was not just a product of the travellers’ imagination. After 1878, the Austro-Hungarian administrators successfully contributed to the improvement of economic and sometimes even social life in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a matter also recounted by the travellers509. Nevertheless, it is impossible to discount the imbalance in the travellers’ views, stressing only the positive aspects of those years, and neglecting, or totally disregarding, the negative ones. Whereas, on the one hand, the new administration was determined in its efforts to develop the Bosnian economy, it was, on the other, more cautious about doing anything that would create significant social change in Bosnia. The latter did not represent an issue that preoccupied travellers in their writings. Furthermore, the construction of the new railway system and roads, so often recounted by the travellers, was certainly imposing and of great importance, but was thought to be primarily for military purposes and was also part of a greater drive for economic improvement. A similar point can be made about the issue of cohabitation of the different religious communities and ethnic groups. On the one hand, it is true that the Austrians tried to promote the politics of cohabitation in Bosnia, and Benjamin Kállay, also often mentioned by the travellers, played in this a role of primary importance, trying to develop Bosnian nationhood as a separate and unifying factor. Nevertheless, this project had little or no support from the Catholic and Orthodox populations, who, in the second half of the 19th century, came under the influence of national movements and took their ideologies from Serbia and Croatia, respectively. Kállay’s hopes to promote the construction of a ‘Bosnian nation’, that would include the entire population notwithstanding its religious affiliation, was thus strongly resisted510. Such issues, and many others besides, were not discussed by our travellers, who were above all interested in promoting the Austrian ‘civilising mission’ in this country. From this particular perspective, too, we can see that travel writing was politically conditioned, and also actively contributed, to the support of both political practice and theory. The relationship between parliamentary politics, foreign policy and travel writing was very close indeed.
Notes According to Omer Hadžiselimović, the first English travellers who left a written record of Bosnia were, in the 16th century, Henry Austell and a certain Mr Fox, and, in the 17th century, Peter Mundy and Henry Blount. See Predgovor, in O. Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka, Sarajevo 1989, pp. 11-24. This thesis was also confirmed by Daniel Goffman’s work, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642-1660, Seattle - London 1998. Hadžiselimović’s work has been translated into English At the gates of the East: British travel writers on Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 16th to the 20th centuries, New York 2001; here I refer to the original version of this text. On the topic of British travellers in the regions of the former Yugoslav republics until the 18th century, see also the work of Veselin Kostić.
1
On travel routes through the Balkan Peninsula before the 18th century, see V. Kostić, Kulturne veze između jugoslovenskih zemalja i Engleske, Belgrade 1972, pp. 271-343.
2
On this topic, see Omer Hadžiselimović’s considerations on Peter Mundy’s Bosnian tour, in Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit., p. 35.
3
Omer Hadžiselimović’s meticulous bibliographical work on British travel writing on Bosnia-Herzegovina between the 16th and the end of the 19th century, has shown how this country, between 1634 and 1848, was missing from the pages written by British travellers in the Ottoman Empire. Some rare information that circulated in that period, in British encyclopaedias, newspapers and geographical maps, reported information of a more general kind. Hadžiselimović has noted that travellers’ disinterest in Bosnian society coincided with a more general ignorance among the English public towards the Balkan region. See Predgovor, in Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit.
4
In considering British travellers in Bosnia between 1844 and 1912 the following texts have proved useful: Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit.; A. Čuvalo, Historical Dictionary of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lonham - London 1997; B. Jezernik, Wild Europe. The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travelers, London 2004; V. Jovanović, Engleska biografija o Istočnom pitanju, in M. Frajnd (ed.), Belgrade 1978; N. Malcolm, Bosnia (A Short History), London 1994; J.B. Allcock, A. Young (eds.), Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans, Bradford 1991; Q. Hoare, N. Malcolm (eds.), Books on Bosnia. A critical Bibliography of works relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina published since 1990 in West European languages, London 1999.
5
In the 1830s, Britain organized defensive strategies to protect her imperial hegemony by adopting a reformist and protectionist policy towards the Ottoman Empire. See M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question 1774-1923 (A Study in International Relations), New York 1966.
6
On the development of British interest in the Balkans in the 19th century, see M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford 1997, pp. 89-115.
7
It is, perhaps, useful to clarify that the phenomenon of British travellers in Greece, in the 1820s, led to only a marginal interest in other Balkan regions. See C.M. Woodhouse, The Philhellens, London 1969; also Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., pp. 94-95; V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination, New Haven - London 1998, pp. 14-27.
8
On the public role of British travellers during the ‘Eastern Crisis’, see W. Bracewell, Opinion-makers: The Balkans in British Popular Literature, 1856-1876, in Jugoslovensko-britanski odnosi/Yugoslav-
9
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British Relations, Belgrade 1988, pp. 91-117; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., pp. 95-102; B. Jelavich, The British Travellers in the Balkans: The Abuses of Ottoman Administration in the Slavonic Provinces, in “Slavonic and East European Review”, June 1955, 33, pp. 396-415. For more in general on British public interest in the ‘Eastern Crisis’ in the 1870s, see Anderson, The Eastern Question cit.; R. Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875-1878, Oxford 1979; R. Shannon, Gladstone and Bulgarian Agitation 1876, Hamden 1975. An exhaustive bibliography on Eastern Question debates in the 1870s can be found in Jovanović, Engleska biografija o Istočnom pitanju cit. In 1894, for example, an international conference of anthropologists and archaeologists was organised in Sarajevo, where some English delegates also participated. On this, see H. Kapidžić, Kongres evropskih arheologa i antropologa u avgustu 1894. godine, in Prilozi za proučavanje istorije Sarajeva, vol. II, Sarajevo 1966, pp. 265-286.
10
On the image of Bosnia-Herzegovina in an extra-European context see O. Hadžiselimović, Snowy Domes and Gay Turbans: American Travelers on Bosnia 1897-1941, in “East European Quarterly”, 2002, 36.1, pp. 27-38; S. Buzov, Ottoman Perceptions of Bosnia as Reflected in the Works of Ottoman Authors who Visited or Lived in Bosnia, in M. Koller, K.H. Karpat (eds.), Ottoman Bosnia. A History in Peril, Madison 2004, pp. 73-93.
11
Peter Burke has noted for example, with reference to iconographical sources and, at the same time, referring to issues of broader significance, that stereotypical images of Otherness document above all the culture of those using them. P. Burke, Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, London 2001.
12
E. Said, Orientalism. Western Representations of the Orient, London 1978. The authors who first applied the Saidian paradigm to the study of the Balkans also noted the methodological difficulties inherent in such an application: M. Bakić Hayden, R. Hayden, Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics, in “Slavic Review”, 1992, 52, pp. 1-15; M. Bakić Hayden, Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia, in “Slavic Review”, 1995, 54, pp. 917-931; J.B. Allcock, Constructing the Balkans, in Allcock, Young (eds.), Black Lambs and Grey Falcons cit., pp. 170-192.
13
On the origin and evolution of ‘colonial discourses’ see F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iversen (eds.), Colonial Discourse. Postcolonial Theory, Manchester 1994; P. Williams, L. Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York 1994; D.A. Washbrook, Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire, in R.W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. V, Oxford 1999, pp. 596-611.
14
On the subsequent implications of Orientalism and the impact of Edward Said’s work within the field of post-colonial studies see M. Sprinkler (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Oxford 1992, J.M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester 1995; G. Prakash, Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography, in “Comparative Studies in Society and History”, 1990, 2, pp. 383-408.
15
Said’s work faced frequent, and sometimes even very radical, criticism; see H.K. Bhabha, The other question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism, in Id. (ed.), The Location of Culture, London - New York 2004 (1994), pp. 94-121; L. Mani, R. Frankenberg, The Challange of Orientalism, in “Economy and Society”, May 1985, 14.2, pp. 174-191, J. Clifford, On Orientalism, in Id. (ed.), The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge 1988, pp. 225-276; A. Behdad,
16
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Belated Travelers, Cork 1994; L. Lowe, Critical Terrains (French and British Orientalisms), Ithaca - London 1991. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Eassays, Delhi - Oxford 1987; Id., Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge in India, Princeton 1987; M. Mellino, La critica postcoloniale. Decolonizzazione, capitalismo e cosmopolitismo nei postocolonial studies, Rome 2005; R.J.C. Young, Introduzione al postcolonialismo, Rome 2005 (or. ed. 2003).
17
L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford 1994; K. Petkov, Infidels, Turks and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind, ca. 1400-1600, New York 1997; M. Confino, Re-Inventing the Enlightenment: Western Images of Eastern Realities in the 18th Century, in “Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes”, September-December 1994, 3-4, pp. 505-522; C. Dupcsik, Postcolonial Studies and the Inventing of Eastern Europe, in “East Central Europe”, 1999, 26, pp. 1-14. There are also some more recent works: L. Wolff, Inventing Galicia: Messianic Josephinism and the Recasting of Partitioned Poland, in “Slavic Revies”, 2004, 63, pp. 818-840; E. Adamovsky, Euro-Orientals and the Making of the Concept of Eastern Europe in France, 1810-1880, in “The Journal of Modern History”, September 2005, 77, pp. 591-628; A. Drace-Francis, A Provincial Imperialist and a Curious Account of Wallachia: Ignaz von Born, in “European History Quarterly”, 2006, 36.1, pp. 61-89.
18
Bakić Hayden, Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia cit.; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit.; D.I. Bjelić, Uvod, in D.I. Bjelić, O. Savić (eds.), Balkan kao metafora: izmedju globalizacije i fragmentacije, Belgrade 2003, pp. 17-38. See also K.E. Fleming, Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography, in “American Historical Review”, 2000, pp. 1218-1233; A. Hammond, The Uses of Balkanism: Representation and Power in British Travel Writing, 1850-1914, in “The Slavonic and East European Review”, July 2004, 82.3, pp. 601-624.
19
The critique of the construction of Western European mental maps of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe is a very rich field of study which has recently developed in various directions. For some indications, see W. Bracewell, A. Drace-Francis, South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts, Boundaries, in “Balkanologie”, 1999, 3, 2, pp. 47-72; S. Petrungaro, L’Est europeo, o a est dell’Europa. In margine a un dibattito intorno a mental maps, confini e balcanismo, in “900. Per una storia del tempo presente”, 2004, 10, pp. 77-86; G. Franzinetti, The idea and the reality of Eastern Europe in the 18thcentury, in “History of European Ideas”, 2008, 34, pp. 361-368.
20
Some principal studies include Confino, Re-Inventing the Enlightenment cit.; F.B. Schenk, Mental Maps. Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung, in “Geschichte und Gesellschaft”, 2002, 28, pp. 493-514; H. Lemberg, Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert: Vom “Norden” zum “Osten” Europas, in “Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas”, 1985, 33, pp. 48-91.
21
On the relationship between the ‘West’ and Islamic societies, see W. Montgomery Watt, MuslimChristian encounters. Perceptions and misperceptions, London 1991; R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Cambridge MA 1962; N. Daniel, Islam and the West, Edinburgh 1980 [or. ed. 1960]; B. Lewis, Islam and the West, Oxford 1993. More specifically about the British Ottoman case, see F. Turhan, The Other Empire. British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire, New York - London 2003.
22
See footnote 9.
23
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Other forms of British popular literature before 1912 mentioned Bosnia-Herzegovina only rarely. Vesna Goldsworthy, for example, analysed just three sources, including a poem by George G. Byron, a drama by Edward M. Forster, and a novel by Dorothy Gerard, which referred to Bosnia Herzegovina between 1821 and 1911. Also for this ‘quantitative reason’ it was decided to focus principally on travel writing as a form of popular literature that influenced British public opinion regarding Bosnia and Bosnian issues. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania cit., pp. 22, 65, 127.
24
J. Buzard, The Grand Tour and after, in P. Hulm, T. Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Cambridge 2002, pp. 37-53.
25
R. Shannon, Gladstone and British Balkan Policy, in R. Melville, R.J. Schröder (eds.), Der Berliner Kongress von 1878, Wiesbaden 1982, pp. 164-165. See also R. Shannon, Midlothian: 100 years later, in P.J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion, London 1985, pp. 88-101.
26
“Rayah” was originally used to refer to all non-Ottoman subject peoples (Muslim as well as Christian); by the 19th century it generally meant non-Muslim subjects only.
27
It was in the 16th century that writing became an essential part of travel. On this subject, see: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Cambridge 2002, and particularly the Introduction by P. Hulme, T. Youngs, pp. i-xiii. A short history of travel writing can also be found in the Introduction to E.J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveller. From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, New York 1991, pp. 122. On travel texts in modern era see, for example, M.C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel in America 1576-1624, Cambridge 1995, p. 2; J. Black, The Grand Tour in the 18th Century, Phoenix 1992; J. Pemble, The Mediterranean Passions: Victorians and Edwadians in the South, Oxford 1987.
28
On this point, see Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., pp. 89-115.
29
As widely known, this was a conflict between Russia and a coalition composed of Turkey, France and Sardinia, caused in large measure by the struggle for control of the Balkan peninsula and the Mediterranean.
30
In the 1820s, British travellers in Greece showed only marginal interest in other Balkan regions. See Woodhouse, The Philhellens cit.
31
See above note 4; and see Predgovor, in Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit. Ratimir Gašparović also showed that British maps of Bosnia in the 19th century were still very rare and the first, which appeared in 1823, was an extremely thorough map by a certain Batty (probably Captain Robert Batty, d. 1848) that only mentioned a few important places, rivers and very few mountains. This map was labelled The Danube from its Source to the Black Sea with the adjacent Countries (London 1823), as quoted in R. Gašparović, Bosna i Hercegovina na geografskim kartama od prvih početaka do kraja XIX vijeka, Sarajevo 1970, p. 171.
32
For biographical data on Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article /29429, accessed on 25 October 2004.
33
Sir John Gardner Wilkinson is also the author of numerous archaeological texts relating to his Egyptian investigations and excavations. Here, one work that rendered him a real authority within archaeological circles interested in the Egyptian ancient past is worthy of mention: J. G. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, London 1837.
34
Id., Dalmatia and Montenegro (with a journey to Mostar in Herzegovina and remarks on the Slavonic nations), 2 vols., London 1848.
35
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For biographical data on Andrew Archibald Paton, see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21553, accessed on 25 October 2004.
36
A.A. Paton, Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic, including Dalmatia, Croatia, and the Southern provinces of the Austrian Empire, 2 vols., London 1849. Paton wrote a number of books on the topic of Balkan politics during his diplomatic mission in South-Eastern Europe: Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic, Leipzig 1861, The Bulgarian, the Turk and the German, London 1855, and The Youngest member of the European Family, London 1845. On Paton’s Dalmatian trip, see three articles by I. Mardešić: Društvo i književnost dalmatinskih gradova prve polovine 19. stoljeća u djelu engleskog putopisca, in “Radovi Filozofskog fakulteta u Zadru”, 1991, 21.2, pp. 289-301; Politika i estetika kod britanskih putopisaca o Dalmaciji u 19. stoljeću, in “Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu”, 1997, 36, pp. 155-167; Kako Englezi doživljahu Hrvate?, in “Lettre international”, 1993, 3, pp. 81-85.
37
Currently belonging to the territories respectively of Croatia and Montenegro, at the time of Paton’s appointment both towns were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
38
See Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit., p. 17.
39
Paton, Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic cit., vol. 2, pp. 162-164.
40
Information on Edmund Spencer’s biography are taken from Travels in European Turkey, vol. 1, London 1851; V. Kostić, Rijeka i okolica u starim engleskim putopisima/Rijeka and the Rijeka Region in Old English Travel Books, Rijeka 2006, p. 58. On Edmund Spencer’s tour in ‘Turkey in Europe’, see also Z. Levental, Britanski putnici u našim krajevima, Gornji Milanovac 1989; B. Momčilović, Britanski putnici o našim krajevima u XIX veku, Novi Sad 1993.
41
Spencer, Travels in European Turkey cit., vol. 1, p. 4.
42
Ibid., p. 5.
43
Beyond the complex and changing historical reality of both the ‘Haiducs’ and the ‘Ouskoks’, the author refers in this context to the bandits and the robbers of the hinterland and the coast. For a reconstruction of the social history of one important group of these, see W. Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj. Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the 16th-century Adriatic, Ithaca (NY) - London 1992.
44
Spencer, Travels in European Turkey cit., vol. 1, p. 5.
45
Kostić, Rijeka i okolica u starim engleskim putopisima cit., p. 58. At home Spencer was known through his authorship of another travelogue on South-Eastern Europe: Travels in France and Germany in 1865 and 1866, including a Steam Voyage down the Danube, and a ride across the mountains of European Turkey from Belgrade to Montenegro, 2 vols., London 1866. Edmund Spencer was very likely the author of an article on “the Slavonians” in Eastern Europe, published for the “United Service Magazine” and signed by a “Captain Spencer”, The Slavonians in Eastern Europe, in “United Service Magazine”, 1875, 3, pp. 226-235. Spencer’s travelogues regarded not only the Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, but also Western and Central Europe: Sketches of Germany and the Germans, with a glance at Poland, Hungary and Switzerland, in 1834, 1835, and 1836, 2 vols., London 1836.
46
Omer Hadžiselimović has emphasized that some passages from Spencer’s travelogue were copied from A. Boué. See A. Boué, La Turquie d’Europe, т. 2, Paris 1840; Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit., p. 18.
47
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For George Arbuthnot, see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article /608, accessed on 13 September 2007.
48
Omer Pasha Latas was a Slav from the Lika region, who had also served as a sergeant in the Austrian army on the Militärgrenze. In the 1850s he was in Bosnia as an employee of the Sultan, engaged in crushing the Bosnian begs’ and agas’ rebellions. At the beginning of the 1860s, when George Arbuthnot accompanied him on his military mission, it was the turn of the Christian groups to rise up in rebellion. See G. Šljivo, Omer-Paša Latas u Bosni i Hercegovini 1850-1852, Sarajevo 1977.
49
Beg or bey means lord or landowner, belonging to the higher of the two categories of landowner that existed in ‘Ottoman Bosnia’.
50
The following is one of the rare references in Spencer’s travelogue to the revolt of 1850: “The accounts we received at Novi-bazar, all tended to prove that the insurrection of the Mussulmans of Bosnia was becoming more general; as yet it was confined to the interior of the country, in the vicinity of Bania-Louka and Svornik; still, as several of the most influential chiefs were known to be again in the field, accompanied by a host of fanatic priests, everywhere stirring up the people against the rule of the reforming Sultan”. Spencer, Travels in European Turkey cit., vol. 1, pp. 294-295.
51
G. Arbuthnot, Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha and the Christian rebels, London 1862.
52
Ibid., p. 122.
53
H. Sandwith (ed.), Notes on the South Slavonic Countries in Austria and Turkey in Europe, Edinburgh - London 1865, p. 25.
54
Apart from the essay by Omer Hadžiselimović on British travellers to Bosnia-Herzegovina which has already been quoted, the most exhaustive work on the topic of Eastern and Western European travellers in Bosnia between 1850 and 1878 is the essay by M. Ekmečić, Slika o Bosni i Hercegovini u evropskoj putopisnoj literaturi od 1850 do 1878, in “Balcanica. Godišnjak balkanskog instituta”, 1977, 8, pp. 301-320. See also the study on French travellers in Bosnia by M. Šamić, Francuski putnici u Bosni i u Hercegovini u XIX stoljeću, Sarajevo 1981 and on American travellers in Bosnia by Hadžiselimović, Snowy Domes and Gay Turbans cit. The study by Božidar Jezernik on Western travellers to the Balkans also dedicates some sections to British travel writing on Bosnia: Jezernik, Wild Europe cit.
55
See, for example, the famous travelogue by Boué, La Turquie d’Europe cit.
56
See, for example, the travelogue by J. Roskiewicz, Studien über Bosnien und die Herzegoina, Leipzig - Vienna 1868.
57
See the travelogue by A. Gil’ferding, Pezdka po Gercegovine, Bosnii i Staroj Serbii, St. Petersburg 1859.
58
See, for example, M. Mažuranić, Pogled u Bosnu, Zagreb 1965. Matija Mažuranić’s travel account on ‘Ottoman Bosnia’ also appeared recently in an English edition: A Glance into Ottoman Bosnia, London 2007.
59
Ekmečić, Slika o Bosni i Hercegovini u evropskoj putopisnoj literaturi cit., pp. 302-303.
60
Ibid., p. 304; with regard to this argument Ekmečić quotes the French traveller Masnie de Clerval who, in 1856, wrote that Bosnia was a quite neglected matter.
61
Ibid., p. 301. M. Ekmečić writes about the same issue in his Introduction to the Serbo-Croatian edition of Illyrian Letters by A.J. Evans. See A.J. Evans, Ilirska pisma, trans. M. Drecun, Sarajevo 1967, pp. 5-9.
62
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
137
G.L. Mosse, Il razzismo in Europa: dalle origini all’olocausto, Milan 1992 (or. German ed. 1978), pp. 22-23.
63
The first Pan-Slavic Congress met in Prague in 1848, under the leadership of the Czech historian František Palacky. Some years later, in the 1860s, the Russian variant of Pan-Slavism gained more notoriety. For the renewal of interests in the Slavs within the French context, see Adamovsky, EuroOrientals and the Making of the Concept of eastern Europe in France, 1810-1880 cit.
64
Leopold von Ranke also wrote on the history of Bosnia, and his work was translated into English, see L. von Ranke, Die letzten Unruhen in Bosnien, 1820-1832, and in the English edition The History of Servia, and the Servian Revolution. With a Sketch of the Insurrection in Bosnia, London 1853.
65
This issue has not yet been studied from a comparative prospective. See C. Jelavich, B. Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920, Seattle - London 1977; A.M. Thiesse, La creazione delle identità nazionali in Europa, Bologna 2001 (ed. or. 1999); I. Banac, Bosnian Muslims: From Religious Community to Socialist Nationhood and Postcommunist Statehood, 1918-1992, in M. Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambridge 1996, pp. 132-133.
66
See, for example, I. Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Ithaca - London 1993, pp. 75-90.
67
See also A. Sillitoe, Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel 1815-1914, London 1995.
68
The two previously published editions were from 1840 and from 1854, like the above referenced edition. As is also evident from the title, ‘European Turkey’, and consequently Bosnia-Herzegovina, did not represent a significant object of interest; rather, Murray was more interested in the South and East of the Ottoman Empire: A Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, and Constantinople, London 1840 and Handbook for Travellers in Greece, describing the Ionian Islands, the Kingdom of Greece, the islands of the Aegean Sea with Albania, Thessaly, and Macedonia, London 1854. Not even the next editions of the same guide, down to 1900, refocused their attention on the geographical area known by the name ‘Turkey in Europe’: Handbook for Travellers in Turkey in Constantinople, the Bosphorus, Dardanelles, Brousa, and plain of Troy, London 1871; Handbook for Travellers in Turkey in Asia including Constantinople, the Bosphorus Plain of Troy, Isles of Cyprus, Rhodes, & c., Ephesus, and the Routes to Persia, Bagdad, Moosool, & C., 2 vols, London 1878; Handbook for Travellers in Turkey in Constantinople, Brousa, and the Troad, London 1893; Handbook for Travellers in Turkey in Constantinople, Brousa, and the Troad, London 1900. In this context see W.B.C. Lister, A Bibliography of Murray’s handbooks for Travellers 1815-1914, Dereham 1995.
69
The eyalet was an Ottoman province, from the beginning of the 16th century.
70
Millet was an Ottoman Turkish term for a confessional community in the Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century, with the Tanzimat reforms, the term started to refer to legally protected religious minority groups other than the ruling Sunni. More specifically on the millet system in the Ottoman Empire see P.F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354-1804, Seattle - London 1993. On the ‘re-birth’ of the millets in this period see R. Mantran (ed.), Storia dell’impero ottomano, Lecce 1999, pp. 535-538.
71
A handbook for travellers in Turkey (1854) cit., p. 128.
72
As Barbara Korte has observed, the diffusion of tourist guides in England started with Murray’s Hand-Books and Murray’s Red Guides in 1836; then, in 1846, they were accompanied by the Ger-
73
138
Neval Berber
man Baedeker guides, that were offered to English readers in translation in their mother tongue. B. Korte, English travel writing from pilgrimages to postcolonial explorations, Basingstoke 2000, p. 85. For H. Sandwith (1822-1881), see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24647, accessed on 25 October 2004.
74
H. Sandwith, A Narrative of the Siege of Kars, London 1856.
75
Id., The Hekim Bashi, 2 vols., London 1864.
76
Id., A Trip into Bosnia, in “Fraser’s Magazine”, 1873, p. 713.
77
Ibid., p. 698.
78
J. Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah (A Journey through Hungary, Slavonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Montenegro, to the North of Albania – in the summer of 1875), 2 vols., London 1876.
79
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 63.
80
Ibid., p. 112.
81
Ibid., p. 110.
82
The text by James Creagh does not belong to this group, as he was in Bosnia in the summer of 1875, thus immediately before the outbreak of the insurrection.
83
For Adeline Paulina Irby (1831-1911), see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49020, accessed on 25 October 2004. See also D. Anderson, Miss Irby and Her Friends, London 1966, and, by the same author, The Balkan Volunteers, London 1968.
84
For Georgina Muir Mackenzie (1833-1874), see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49019, accessed on 25 October 2004.
85
G. Muir Mackenzie, A.P. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, 2 vols., London 1877 (2nd enlarged ed.).
86
Gladstone assessed this book as “the best English book I have seen on Eastern matters”. See the entry Mackenzie, Georgina Mary Muir, in http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49020, accessed on 25 October 2004.
87
The first two books by Georgina Mackenzie and Paulina Irby were published anonymously: Across the Carpathians, London 1862 and Notes on the South Slavonic Countries in Austria and Turkey in Europe cit.
88
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic cit. In 1868 the Serb edition of Irby’s and Mackenzie’s accounts was published: G. Muir Mackenzie, A.P. Irby, Putovanje po slovenskim zemljama Turske u Evropi, trans. Č. Mijatović, Belgrade 1868.
89
The monograph by Dorothy Anderson is an excellent account of Paulina Irby’s philanthropic activity in the South-Eastern Europe, D. Anderson, Miss Irby and Her Friends, London 1966. An article by Omer Hadžiselimović is dedicated to the same topic: Two Victorian Ladies and Bosnian Realities, 1862-1875: G.M. MacKenzie and A.P. Irby, in Allcock, Young (eds.), Black Lambs and Grey Falcons cit., pp. 1-7. See also the early works by J. Lazarević, Engleskinja u srpskom narodu, Belgrade 1929; P. Mirković, Miss Adelina Pavlija Irbi – Srpska dobrotvorka, Sarajevo 1921; V. Čubrilović, Mis Irbi u bosanskom ustanku, in “Pregled”, 1933, 118, pp. 627-630. For more on missionary work undertaken by women in 19th century England see R. Seton, Open Doors for Female Labourers:
90
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
139
Women candidates of the London Missionary Society, 1875-1914’, in R.A. Bickers, R. Seton (eds.), Missionary Encounters, Richmond 1996, pp. 50-70. Priscilla Johnston, in 1872, joined Paulina Irby in her work with Bosnian Orthodox girls. She was the grand-daughter of the first Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the well-known anti-slavery leader. Anderson, Miss Irby and Her Friends cit., pp. 72-73.
91
Numerous travellers to Bosnia in later years mentioned in their accounts Irby’s missionary work in Bosnia-Herzegovina. See, for example, A.J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875. With an Historical Review of Bosnia and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa, London 1876, pp. 254-255; R.H. Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia, in “The Fortnightly Review”, 1879, p. 658; H.C. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk. Impressions of a Journey Through the Western Balkans, London 1897, p. 30.
92
Bashi bazouks were irregular troops that became famous for their ruthless behaviour.
93
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces (1877) cit., p. 47.
94
In the chapter “Bosnia in 1875” there are three sections, each separately marked, dedicated to the uses and customs of the three main ethnic groups in Bosnia, as well as a subsection that reports on the Bosnian Jews. Ibid., pp. 8-20.
95
Ibid., p. 7.
96
Ibid., p. 8.
97
Ibid., p. 9.
98
William Forsyth (1812-1899) was a member of parliament from 1874-1880 and member of the Conservative Party, as well as writer of legal treaties, novels and, thanks to his long and very frequent travels at home and abroad, also of travel accounts. On William Forsyth see http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/9935, accessed on 13 September 2007.
99
W. Forsyth, The Slavonic Provinces south of the Danube, London 1876, pp. 77, 90.
100
Ibid., pp. 81-82.
101
For Arthur J. Evans (1851-1941), see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33032, accessed on 25 October 2004. As far as chronology, routes and travel accounts of Evans’s Balkan tours until 1882 are concerned, details are based on the text by A. Brown, Before Knossos. Arthur Evans’s travels in the Balkans and Crete, Oxford 1993; J. Evans, Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and his Forebears, London 1943.
102
In particular, see A.J. Evans, Over the Marches of Civilised Europe, in “Fraser’s Magazine”, 1873, 7.41.
103
Evans, Time and Chance cit., p. 15.
104
Id., Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit.
105
Ibid., pp. 19-20.
106
Both quotations from A.J. Evans are taken from Ibid., p. lviii.
107
Also “The Times”, in that same period, had its correspondent: William J. Stillman. Stillman published his articles in a volume entitled Herzegovina and the Late Uprising: The Causes of the Latter and the Remedies, from the Notes and the Letters of a Special Correspondent, London 1877.
108
140
Neval Berber
Most of the articles that Evans wrote for the “Manchester Guardian” in this period were later published in his book Illyrian Letters, London 1878.
109
On this point see chapter 6.
110
As a result of these studies, in 1880 Evans published a long essay divided in four parts: A.J. Evans, Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum, I-II, in “Archeologia”, 1885, 48, pp. 1-105, and III-IV, in “Archeologia”, 1886, 49, pp. 1-167.
111
It is not known what title Evans planned to give to the volume.
112
In Evans, Time and Chance cit., p. 223.
113
In the Austrian indictment Evans was also charged for having visited the insurgents’ sites and for having aided them financially. See Wilkes, Arthur Evans in the Balkans cit., pp. 39-41.
114
During his stay in Dubrovnik Evans criticised the Austrians for their unjust conduct towards the South Slavs. Evans, Time and Chance cit., pp. 216-239.
115
Information relative to Evans’s arrest are taken from J.J. Wilkes, Arthur Evans in the Balkans 187581, in “Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology”, 1976, 13, pp. 25-56, in part. p. 41 and from Evans, Time and Chance cit., particularly the chapter Paradise Lost, 1881-1882, pp. 239-259. I also wish to mention an article by Evans where, after his return to England in 1882, he cites Austrian censorship as the main reason for his arrest in Dubrovnik, A.J. Evans, The Austrian war against publicity, in “The Contemporary Review”, 1882, 42, pp. 383-399.
116
In reality, in 1890 Evans went to Serbia and Macedonia to interview some Serbian and Macedonian political leaders for “Manchester Guardian”, and on his return to England, he crossed the Habsburg territories, but only hurriedly and incognito. See Wilkes, Arthur Evans in the Balkans 1875-81 cit., p. 51.
117
As Sven Mønnesland and Matjaž Vipotnik remembered, English newspapers such as “The London Illustrated News” and “The Graphic” also had correspondents in Bosnia during the 1870s. The articles by Ronald Cambell in “The London Illustrated News” were accompanied by illustrations by Melton Prior. Cf. S. Mønnesland, M. Vipotnik, 1001 dan/days: Bosna i Hercegovina slikom i rječju kroz stoljeća/Bosnia and Herzegovina in pictures and words through the centuries, Oslo 2001, pp. 112ff.
118
Anon., A Ride through Bosnia, in “Fraser’s Magazine”, November 1875, pp. 549-550.
119
Ibid., p. 555.
120
Ibid., p. 557.
121
Anon., Independence and Integrity of the Ottoman Empire, in “The British Quarterly Review”, July 1876, 64, pp. 78-98.
122
Ibid., p. 88.
123
On this see R.J.W. Evans, Introduction: Austria-Hungary and the Victorians. Some Views and Contacts, in R.J.W. Evans, D. Kováč, E. Ivaničková (eds.), Great Britain and Central Europe 1867-1914, Bratislava 2003, pp. 11-23, and the final chapter of the book.
124
H. Kapidžić, Hercegovački ustanak 1882 godine, Sarajevo 1973.
125
On the rise of modern tourism in Britain see H. Berghoff, B. Korte, R. Schneider, C. Harvie (eds.), The Making of Modern Tourism. The Cultural History of the British Experience 1600-2000, New York 2001, pp. 109-131.
126
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
141
Robert Hamilton Lang (1836-1913) was an archaeologist who worked for some time in Cyprus under the supervision of Sir Charles Thomas Newton. We also know that during his Bosnian trip, he was a general director of some tobacco factories based in Romania. On Lang, see the entry Sir Charles Thomas Newton, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20051, accessed on 13 September 2007; Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit., p. 84.
127
R.H. Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia, in “The Fortnightly Review”, November 1879, p. 663.
128
Ibid., p. 671.
129
Ibid.
130
Ibid., p. 668.
131
He would later, after the death of his father in 1898, succeed to the peerage, entering the House of Lords. He was to gain influence in the parliamentary struggles during the second decade of the 20th century. For Legh (1857-1942), see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20051, accessed on 13 September 2007.
132
T.W. Legh, A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in “The New Review”, 1891, pp. 471-472.
133
Ibid.
134
‘Snaffle’ (aka Robert Dunkin), In the Land of the Bora, or Camp Life and Sport in Dalmatia and the Herzegovina, 1894-5-6, London 1897.
135
Ibid., p. 190.
136
Ibid., p. 189.
137
Blowitz’s full name was Henri Georges Stephan Adolphe Opper de Blowitz. For Blowitz (18251903) see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39898, accessed on 28 August 2007.
138
H.G.S.A.O. Blowitz, A Trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina, in “Nineteenth Century”, 1894, 36, p. 626.
139
For William Miller (1864-1945), see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35024, accessed on 28 August 2007.
140
W. Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East, London 1898.
141
Miller’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as “an authority on Balkan affairs” for his contribution to Serb and Bulgarian medieval history, which appeared in the fourth volume of the Cambridge Medieval History.
142
Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East cit., p. 88.
143
Withwell probably signed her publications with her father’s, Edward Robson Whitwell’s, initials, while her real name was Janet Mauriel Whitwell. Whitwell was already an accomplished artist when she married the diplomat Sir George Russell Clerk (1874-1951) and her Bosnian account was probably written before she married. On Janet Mauriel Whitwell, see http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/32443, accessed on 28 August 2004.
144
E.R. Whitwell, Through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Darlington - London 1909.
145
Ibid., p. 1.
146
Ibid., p. 2.
147
Ibid., p. 51.
148
142
Neval Berber
Ibid., p. 69.
149
On this topic see chapter 6.
150
T. Barringer, Images of Otherness and the Visual Production of Difference: Race and Labour in Illustrated Texts, 1850-1865, in S. West (ed.), The Victorians and the Race, Hants 1996, p. 34. See also A. Wohl, Race and Class: Parallels in Racism and Class, in http:/landow.stg.brown.edu/Victorian/ race/rcov.html, accessed on 15 September 2007.
151
Said, Orientalism cit.; F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, London 1967 (1963).
152
J. Solomos, L. Back, Introduction: Theorising Race and Racism, London - New York 2000, p. 15.
153
R. Johnson, British Imperialism, London 2003, pp. 108-109.
154
Mosse, Il razzismo in Europa cit., pp. 22-23.
155
N. MacMaster, Racism in Europe 1870-2000, Palgrave 2001, pp. 1-11.
156
Racial stereotypes were integral part of colonial politics. Michael Crowder for example showed how the colonial stereotype of Africans helped to justify the partition of Africa. Africans were regarded as people without history or culture, “indulging in abhorrent practices such as human sacrifice and cannibalism […] politically decentralised, living in small villages, often naked, dominated by witchcraft, living in terror of their neighbours”. M. Crowder, West Africa under Colonial Rule, London 1968, pp. 11-12.
157
J. Mill, The Ottomans in Europe; or, Turkey in the Present Crisis, London 1876.
158
K. Malik, The Meaning of Race. Race, History and Culture in Western Society, London 1996, p. 1.
159
Tancred or The New Crusade, published in 1847, completed the trilogy by Benjamin Disraeli entitled Young England. See B. Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Young England, 1804-1881, London 1904.
160
According to Douglas A. Lorimer, in this statement Disraeli wanted to emphasize the racial qualities of the Anglo-Saxons and thus claimed the superiority of England in the world. See D.A. Lorimer, Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities, 1850-1914, in S. West (ed.), The Victorians and the Race, Hants 1996, p. 14.
161
A synthesis of the Victorian polemics regarding the definition of the concept of race can be found in Mosse, Il razzismo in Europa cit., pp. 73-85.
162
Quoted in Ibid., p. 7.
163
On the Victorian conception of society in evolutionary terms, see Malik, The Meaning of Race cit., pp. 84-91.
164
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection cit., p. 140.
165
Mosse, Il razzismo in Europa cit., p. 76.
166
A. Evans, The Slavs and European Civilisation (A lecture delivered at Sion College, 23 Feb., 1878), London 1878, pp. 26-27.
167
I refer to W.E. Gladstone who during his campaign election between 1877 and 1878 favoured Bulgarian and Montenegrin national independence. See also chapter 6.
168
Evans, The Austrians in Bosnia cit., pp. 495-504. See also chapter 6.
169
Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces (1877) cit., p. 39.
170
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
143
Ibid., p. 1.
171
Mill, The Ottomans in Europe cit., p. 4.
172
Ibid., p. 65.
173
Ibid., p. 42.
174
Ibid., p. 7 (my italics).
175
For an excellent historical study about violence in ‘Ottoman Bosnia’, see M. Koller, Bosnien an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Gewalt (1747-1798), Munich 2004.
176
The historiography on this topic is vast; for an introduction, see Malcolm, Bosnia cit.; S.M. Džaja, Konfessionalität und Nationalität Bosniens und der Herzegowina. Voremanzipatorische Phase 1463-1804, Munich 1994; F. Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims. Denial of a Nation, Oxford 1996; I. Lovrenović, Kulturna povijest Bosne-Hercegovine, Sarajevo 2004; for this theme more generally, see H.T. Norris, Islam in the Balkans. Religion and Society between Europe and the Arab World, London 1993.
177
For a discussion of the complex background of the Muslim minority in Bulgaria, see K.H. Karpat, The Turks of Bulgaria: The History, Culture, and Political Fate of a Minority, Istanbul 1990; for Albania see S. Skendi, The Millet System and its Contribution to the Blurring of Orthodox National Identity in Albania, in B. Braudel, B. Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, New York 1982, pp. 243-245.
178
On Serbophile and Croatophile hypotheses, see P. Ramet, Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslavia, in Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and east European Politics, Durham 1989, pp. 299-328.
179
The Ottomans approached Bosnia and nibbled away pieces of its eastern reaches from the end of the 14th century. In 1451, Vrhbosna (contemporary Sarajevo) fell. Then in 1463, the final push into Bosnia began. On this, see Malcolm, Bosnia cit., pp. 13-27. On conversion throughout the 16th and 15th centuries see, for example, C. Heywood, Bosnia under Ottoman Rule, 1463-1800, in M. Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia, Cambridge 1996, pp. 22-54; M. Hadžijahić, M. Traljić, N. Šukrić, Islam i muslimani u Bosni i Hercegovini, Sarajevo 1977.
180
J.V.A. Fine, The Bosnian Church. A New Interpretation: A Study of the Bosnian Church and its Place in State and Society from the 13th to the 15th Centuries, Boulder 1975, pp. 14-15.
181
A. Lopašić, Islamisation of the Balkans: Some General Considerations, in J.M. Scarce (ed.), Islam and the Balkans; Persian Art and Culture of the 18th and 19th Centuries, Edinburgh 1979, p. 58.
182
Ibid., p. 50.
183
J. McCarthy, Ottoman Bosnia, 1800 to 1878, in Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina cit., pp. 58-60. It is also important to recall that in the aftermath of the events of 1875-1878 Bosnia underwent significant ethno-demographic changes (see the graph in Ibid., p. 81).
184
Anon., Servia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria, in “Geographical Magazine”, October 1876, 3, pp. 257-261.
185
Daniel, Islam and the West cit.
186
Said, Orientalism cit., p. 59.
187
Anon., A short Trip into Bosnia, in “Household Words”, 1851, 3, p. 182.
188
Anon., A Ride through Bosnia cit., p. 551.
189
144
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Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 705.
190
Forsyth, The Slavonic Provinces south of the Danube cit., p. 159. E. de Laveleye, The Balkan Peninsula, London 1887, pp. 132-133. 193 H.A. Munro-Butler-Johnston, The Turks: their Character, Manners, and Institutions, as bearing on the Eastern Question, Oxford - London 1876. We know little about H.A. Munro-Butler-Johnston, except that he was a wealthy Turkophile member of parliament and Disraeli’s agent in several intrigues against Russia. He ‘posed’ as a secret emissary of Disraeli at Constantinople and in 1877 was used by the Prime minister as an emissary, with Lord Denbigh, to Andrássy. See Sumner, Russia and the Balkans cit., pp. 236-237, 320. See also Seton-Watson, Russo-British Relations During the Eastern Crisis, in “Slavonic Review”, 1924-1925, 4, p. 454. 194 Munro-Butler-Johnston, The Turks cit., pp. 22-23. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid. 197 Ibid., p. 22. 198 Ibid. 199 Ibid., p. 5. 200 Ibid., p. 45. 201 Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection cit., p. 179. 202 Ibid., p. 180. 203 Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe (1877) cit., p. 9. 204 Ibid., p. 32. 205 Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection cit., p. 87. 206 For a summary of the various features that the Medieval Western commentators ascribed to Islam, see N. Daniel, The Survival of Mediaeval Concepts, in Id., Islam and the West cit., pp. 271-308. 207 Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe (1877) cit., p. 1. 208 Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection cit., p. 198. 209 Mosse, Il razzismo in Europa cit., p. 81. 210 Banton, The Idiom of Race, in Back, Solomos (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism cit., p. 57. 211 Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection cit., pp. 150-151. 212 Arbuthnot, Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha cit., p. 45. 213 Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia cit., p. 671. 214 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe cit.; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit. 215 See previous chapter. 216 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., p. 20. It was also stressed that, continuing into the 20th century, European ‘mental maps’ continued to be constructed along religious lines. A summary of this topic can be found in Dupcsik, Postcolonial Studies and the Inventing of Eastern Europe cit. 217 D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge 1994, p. 265. See also H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford 1991. 191 192
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
145
D. Massey, Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place, in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson, L. Tickner (eds.), Mapping the Futures, London 1993; R. Shields, Images of Spaces and Places, Sussex 1991.
218
Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe cit.
219
Ibid., p. 9.
220
This term was coined by John Ledyard, an American who visited Russia in 1787-1788, and coined the phrase “freely constructed geographical sentiment”, Confino, Re-Inventing the Enlightenment cit., p. 8.
221
Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe cit., p. 7.
222
Ibid., p. 13.
223
Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., p. 16.
224
More on the topic of the difference between Orientalism and Balkanism can be found in Fleming, Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography cit.; and in D.I. Bjelić, Uvod, in Bjelić, Savić (eds.), Balkan kao metafora cit., pp. 17-39.
225
Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., p. 16. On the use of the figurative language in the age of British Imperialism, see E. Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from Tempest to Tarzan, Philadelphia 1997.
226
See Predgovor, in Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit., pp. 11-24.
227
In this paragraph we cannot consider the travellers prior to 1870s as they did not enter BosniaHerzegovina by crossing any of the mentioned rivers, but arrived by land via Dalmatia.
228
A.J. Patterson, From Agram to Zara, in “The Fortnightly Review”, April 1872, pp. 366, 509-532.
229
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., pp. 498-499.
230
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 46.
231
Ibid.
232
Ibid.
233
Ibid., p. 58.
234
Ibid.
235
The river Rubicon, in the Roman Republic, marked the boundary between the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul to the north and Italy proper to the south. In 49 BC Julius Caesar crossed the river as an act of war.
236
The konak was the vizier’s palace where the provincial government resided; the term was also occasionally used to refer more generally to a residence of a Turkish functionary.
237
All quotations from Evans’s travelogue are from Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., pp. 88-89.
238
Legh, A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 470.
239
Ibid., p. 474.
240
Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 16.
241
Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe cit., p. 6.
242
146
Neval Berber
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 59.
243
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces (1877) cit., p. 1.
244
Ibid.
245
Ibid.
246
Ibid., p. 704.
247
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 698.
248
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 89.
249
Ibid.
250
Anon., Independence and Integrity of the Ottoman Empire cit., p. 90. The same idea is repeated in Sandwith: “The more we penetrated into the country, the more was I reminded of Kurdistan. The outward features of all mountainous countries are more or less alike, provided they are in the same latitude. Were it not for the costumes Bosnia would remind one of Switzerland; as it is, the big turbans, small wiry horses, and gay costumes, carry the travellers’ mind to the mountains of Asia”, Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 701.
251
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, pp. 100-101.
252
Ibid., p. 58.
253
In this year Abdül Mecid I issued his Hatt-i Serif, a regulatory act that represented the starting point of a vast programme of reforms that would culminate in 1876 with the establishment of the first Ottoman constitution.
254
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., pp. 89-90.
255
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 702.
256
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 58.
257
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., pp. 89-90.
258
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2.
259
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces (1877) cit., p. 25.
260
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 118.
261
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces (1877) cit., pp. 8-9 (my italics).
262
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 709.
263
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces (1877) cit., pp. 74-75.
264
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 46.
265
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 702.
266
Said, Orientalism cit. See also R. Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient, London 1986; M.A. Stevens, The Orientalists: from Delacroix to Matisse, London 1984.
267
J. de Asboth, An official Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina, London 1890, p. vii (my italics).
268
P. Barry, At the Gates of the East: a Book of Travel among Historic Wonderlands, London - New York - Bombay 1906, p. 240.
269
Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East cit., pp. 134-135.
270
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
147
de Asboth, An official Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., pp. 14-15.
271
Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovin cit., pp. 89-90.
272
Ibid.
273
de Asboth, An official Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 11.
274
E.F.B. Thompson, A Ride through Bosnia and Herzegovina, in “Nineteenth Century”, 1907, 61, p. 685.
275
Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia cit., p. 657.
276
M. Cruger Coffin, Where East meets West, in “National Geographic Magazine”, 1908, 19, 5, p. 339.
277
V. Goedorp, With a Camera in Bosnia, in “Wide World Magazine”, February 1902, p. 499.
278
Legh, A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 657.
279
Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia cit., p. 657.
280
Goedorp, With a Camera in Bosnia cit., p. 498.
281
de Asboth, An official Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 11.
282
Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East cit., p. 499.
283
Goedorp, With a Camera in Bosnia cit., p. 499. Almost thirty years before Goedorp, George Bradshaw found an analogous image in Bihać: “Two rusty old cannon protect the gateway, and two sentinels stand guard over them, with their garments as dilapidated as the walls. When we have once entered, we pass a wide space, and the barracks on the R., to the second wall and gate leading to the wooden bridge across the Unna. It is perfectly marvellous how this rickety structure still stands, and resists the rapid Unna. […] Both sides are occupied by booths, where the solemn Osmans smoke the pipes of contemplation, and calmly wait till Allah sends them a customer for their wares to the extent of a few piastres, when they lie down and sleep the sleep of peace, or adjourn for a ‘kef ’ to the neighbouring cafés”, G. Bradshaw, Bradshaw’s Hand-Book to the Turkish Empire, vol. 2, Turkey in Europe, London - Manchester 1870, p. 327.
284
Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., pp. 62-63. On the topic of ‘cultural syncretism’, see also the analysis of Evans and Irby in chapter 1.
285
See, for example, A. McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London - New York 1995; S. Mills, Discourses of Difference, New York 1991; S. Morgan, An Introduction to Victorian Women’s Travel Writing About Southeast Asia, in “Genre”, summer 1987, 20, pp. 189-208. Within the South-Eastern context, Wendy Bracewell has shown the same process from the standpoint of the representations of the idea of ‘masculinity’, which she analysed in the texts of English travellers in the Balkans, and in those of Yugoslav travellers in Western Europe. By applying this heuristic approach to the study of the Balkan history overall, previously only employed in the field of postcolonial studies, Bracewell challenged certain analyses of the Balkanist discourse which tended to recognize only the Westerners’ desire to exercise their power over the Balkan populations, totally neglecting the same practice on the part of Balkan voices. W. Bracewell, New Men, Old Europe: Being a Man in Balkan Travel Writing Journeys: the International, in “Journal of Travel and Travel Writing”, 2005, 6.
286
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 116.
287
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 708.
288
148
Neval Berber
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 197.
289
Patterson, From Agram to Zara cit., p. 511.
290
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces (1877) cit., p. 257.
291
Strictly speaking, Todorova’s Balkanism crystallizes in the age of the Balkan wars (1912-1913).
292
E. de Laveleye, The Balkan Peninsula, London 1887, p. 72.
293
On this topic see chapter 6.
294
Benjamin Kállay was Common Minister of Finance in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1882 to 1902.
295
W.E. Curtis, The Great Turk and His Lost Province, in “National Geographic Magazine”, 1903, 19.5, p. 46.
296
H.G.S.A.O. Blowitz, A Trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina, in “Nineteenth Century”, 1894, 36, pp. 625626.
297
L. Lowe, Critical Terrains (French and British Orientalisms), Ithaca - London 1991, p. 6. On this see also Mani, Frankenberg, The Challange of Orientalism cit.; Clifford, On Orientalism cit.; Porter, Orientals and its Problems, in F. Barker (ed.), The Politics of Theory, Colchester 1983, pp. 179-193; J. Frow, Discourse and Power, in “Economy and Society”, May 1985, 14.2, pp. 193-213; P. O’Brien, Michel Foucault’s History of Culture, in L. Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley 1989, pp. 25-46.
298
The last two quotations are both from Lowe, Critical Terrains cit., p. 6.
299
Ibid.
300
Ibid.
301
Both quotations are from Ibid., p. 10.
302
Ibid., p. 5.
303
This emphasis on stereotypes is largely due to Homi Bhabha’s emphasis on the necessity of the analysis of colonial discourse, and of the process of subjectification of the Other in general, from the perspective of stereotypical discourse: “My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the process of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse”. See H.K. Bhabha, The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism, in Id. (ed.), The Location of Culture, London - New York 2004 (1994), p. 95.
304
Although in this chapter some travel accounts written by women are referred to, it is possible to call the principal British discourse on Bosnia a ‘male-centred discourse’. The female discourse seems, in fact, to derive from the hegemonic male discourse, including the fact that it is constructed rigorously on the metaphor of woman. With regard to this, G.C. Spivak observes that every discourse of man is necessarily constructed on the metaphor of woman: “Given the accepted charge of the notions of production and constitution, one might reformulate this: the discourse of man is in the metaphor of woman”, G.C. Spivak, Displacement and the Discourse of Woman, in M. Krupnick (ed.), Displacement: Derrida and After, Bloomington 1988, p. 169.
305
McClintock, Imperial Leather cit., p. 24.
306
Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., p. 15.
307
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
149
Bracewell, New Men, Old Europe: Being a Man in Balkan Travel Writing cit.; Id., The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing, in W. Bracewell, A. Drace-Francis (eds.), Under Eastern Eyes, Budapest - New York 2008, pp. 61-121.
308
Said, Orientalism cit.
309
Ibid., p. 206 (my italics).
310
Two excellent studies on the Western image of Islam confirm this viewpoint, see R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Cambridge 1962; Daniel, Islam and the West cit.
311
M. Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman. From Termagant to Odalisque, Austin 1997, p. 8.
312
Ibid.
313
Ibid., p. 6.
314
Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient cit., p. 26.
315
Daniel, Islam and the West cit., p. 275. These shifts depended on what Maxime Rodinson called “trends”, or the changing of the European cultural scene in the course of the centuries, M. Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, London 2002. The topic of the perception of Islam and of the Muslim communities in the West is well investigated; besides the two canonical studies already mentioned, see also A. Hourani, Islam in European thought, New York 1992; S. Rabah, L’Islam dans l’Imaginaire Occidental, Beyrouth 1998.
316
This viewpoint was reconfirmed by Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient cit.; H. Džait, Evropa i Islam, trans. S. Berberović, Sarajevo 1985, pp. 22-23.
317
Daniel, Islam and the West cit., p. 274.
318
Ibid., p. 102.
319
Ibid., p. 270.
320
Ibid., p. 109.
321
M. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. M. Godzich, W. Godzich, Minneapolis - London 1986.
322
It is evident that Alloula refers to the thesis of Frantz Fanon who, speaking about the Algerian colonial context, thought of the veil as “the bone of contention in a grandious battle” between the occupation forces and the colonized Algerian population. Perceived as a symbol of the social status of the Algerian woman, the veil, according to Fanon, was targeted by the French official whose intention was mainly the destruction of Algerian originality: “The officials of the French administration in Algeria, committed to destroying the people’s originality, and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the Algerian woman”, F. Fanon, Algeria Unveiled, in Id. (ed.), A Dying Colonialism, trans. Chevalier H., London 1989, p. 23.
323
The eroticization of colonialism from the viewpoint of the sexualized image of the Muslim woman was also studied by S. Graham-Browne, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950, New York - London 1988 and by I.C. Schick, The Women of Turkey as Sexual personae: Images from Western Literature, in Z.F. Arat (ed.), Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman”, London 1998, pp. 83-101. By Sarah Graham-Brown on the same topic, see
324
150
Neval Berber
also The Seen, the Unseen and the Imagined: Private and Public Lives, in R. Lewis, S. Mills (eds.), Feminist Postcolonial Theory, Edinburgh 2003, pp. 502-520. See also Alloula’s The Colonial Harem cit.; Kabbani’s Europe’s Myths of Orient cit.; I.C. Schick, Representing Middle Eastern Women: Feminism and Colonial Discourse, in “Feminist Studies”, 1990, 16.2, pp. 344-380. On the same topic, see A. Balvannanadhan, L’Orient des femmes: le dépassement des divers ‘purdahs’, in M.E. PalmierChatelain, P. Lavagne d’Ortigue (eds.), L’Orient des femmes, Lyon 2002, pp. 285-295; A. Rivera, La guerra dei simboli. Veli postcoloniali e retoriche sull’alterità, Bari 2005; A. Vanzan, La storia velata. Le donne dell’islam nell’immaginario italiano, Rome 2006. I would also like to highlight a study by K. Perlin Başci on the American-Turkish relationship in the 19th century, based on the study of the image of the Ottoman women in the texts of American missionary women. See K. Perlin Başci, Shadows in the Missionary Garden of Roses: Women of Turkey in American Missionary Texts, in Arat (ed.), Deconstructing Images cit., pp. 101-127.
325
Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman cit.
326
M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, New York 1978.
327
N. Armstrong, The Rise of the Domestic Woman, in N. Armstrong, L. Tennenhouse (eds.), The Ideology of Conduct, New York - London 1987, p. 3.
328
Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman cit., p. 116.
329
On the condition of the Muslim woman in the Islamic world see W. Wiebke, Women in Islam, Princeton - New York 1993 (1981). An excellent historical account of female life conditions in the Ottoman harem can be found in L. Pierce, The Imperial harem: Women and sovereignity in the Ottoman Empire, Oxford 1993. On the harem as a site of slavery in the Middle East see E.R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, Seattle - London 1998. On the condition of women in the Middle East in general, see N. Keddie (ed.), Women and Gender in Middle Eastern History, New Haven - London 1993. For an earlier period on this same topic see M. Zilfi, Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern women in the early modern era, Leiden 1997. For the bibliography dealing with the use of the veil in the Islamic world in general, and in the Middle East and the Balkans in particular, see the next paragraph of this chapter.
330
A. Galland, Les Milles at une nuits: contes arabes, Paris 1745. The English version of the French text, Mille et une Nuits, ed. A. Galland was available in England between 1706 and 1708, Arabian Nights Entertainment, London 1718. Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman cit., p. 112.
331
This aspect was masterfully analysed by Billie Melman. See B. Melman, Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East 1718-1918. Sexuality, Religion and Work, Basingstoke 1992, p. 65. The image of the woman in The Thousand and One Nights has also been studied by Jean-François Gournay. See J.F. Gournay, L’image de la femme dans les Mille et une nuits, in Palmier-Chatelain, Lavagne d’Ortigue (eds.), L’Orient des femmes cit., pp. 93-100.
332
The contemporary image of the harem in the Western world, with a special emphasis on the United States, was also studied by Leila Ahmed. See L. Ahmed, Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem, in “Feminist Studies”, 1982, 8, 3, pp. 521-534.
333
Armstrong, The Rise of the Domestic Woman cit.
334
Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman cit., p. 8.
335
Melman, Women’s Orient cit.
336
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
151
See, for example, Lowe, Critical Terrains cit.
337
According to Billi Melman, in the 18th century Orientalist authority was contested by “domestic ethnography” written by some English women. Due to the nature of Islamic laws and customs, which forbade Western men access to Muslim houses, the private and domestic lives of Muslim women became a topic of the female domain, first aristocratic and later also bourgeois. See B. Melman, The Middle East/Arabia: “the Cradle of Islam”, in Hulm, Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion cit., pp. 111-112; Melman, Women’s Orient cit.; Lewis, Gendering Orientalism cit.; Roberts, Contested Terrains cit.
338
E. Apter, Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem, in “Differences”, Spring 1992, 4, 1, p. 207.
339
Id., Acting Out Orientalism: Sapphic Theatricality Turn-of-the-Century Paris, in E. Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics, London 1996; Id., Female Trouble cit.
340
F. Mernissi, Scheherzade goes West, Different Cultures, Different Harems, New York - London 2001.
341
It is also obvious that the concrete historical conditions experienced by the women described in these texts are far from marginal; on the basis of the historical and anthropological literature, it is possible to affirm that the plurality of costumes reflects the heterogeneity of daily life in Bosnia, both between the city and the countryside and between the various social classes. Bosnian Muslim women, in certain cases, did wear the veil and similar attire, but in certain other cases they did not. Anyway, it is certainly clear that the focus of the present analysis is not on the representation of the historical reality; the latter is taken into account, but not investigated in itself. See, for example, some critical observations by Radmila Kajmaković in her introduction to the popular work of the Croat anthropologist A. Hangi, R. Kajmaković, Antun Hangi, Život i običaji Muslimana u Bosni i Hercegovini, in A. Hangi, Život i običaji Muslimana u Bosni i Hercegovini, Sarajevo 1990 (reprint of the second revisited edition of 1906), pp. 7-15, at p. 10.
342
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 194. Similar references to the veil can be found in Thomson, The Outgoing Turk cit., pp. 66-67; Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro cit., p. 89; Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 194; Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., p. 131; Anon., A Ride through Bosnia cit., p. 555; Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces (1877) cit., p. 8; Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., pp. 699, 702; Goedorp, With a Camera in Bosnia cit., p. 494; de Laveleye, The Balkan Peninsula cit., p. 130; Barry, At the Gates of the East cit., p. 249; Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., pp. 33, 87; Whitwell, Through Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 69.
343
Miller, Travels and Politics cit., p. 98. Something similar can be found in de Laveleye, The Balkan Peninsula cit., p. 130.
344
Legh, A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., pp. 470-478; de Asboth, An Official Tour cit., p. 10.
345
This has been examined by B. Lewis, Some English Travellers in the East, in “Middle Eastern Studies”, 1968, 4.3, pp. 296-315; Daniel, Islam and the West cit., pp. 13-14, 20-21; Rodinson, Europe and the Mystic cit., pp. 49-50; Lewis, Gendering Orientalism cit. On Lady Montagu’s life and activity see I. Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment, Oxford 1999. On her ethnographical interests see E. Fernea, An early Ethnographer of Middle Eastern Women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in “Journal of Eastern Studies”, 1981, 40, pp. 329-338.
346
L. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam. Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, Yale 1992, p. 149.
347
152
Neval Berber
However, Lady Montagu did not only demystify the practice of veiling, she also wrote with extraordinary precision about polygamy, issues of the Muslim woman’s soul and her right to own property. See R. Halsband (ed.), The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. 1, Oxford 1965, pp. 318, 328, 329, 363. See also Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam cit., p. 269; N. Berber, Svelarsi e rivelarsi nell’Oriente. Leggendo Turkish Embassy Letters di Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in “Quaderni della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere di Verona”, 2007, pp. 5-16.
348
Halsband (ed.), The Complete Letters cit., p. 71. On the reception of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s viewpoint among her fellow travellers of the opposite sex who also visited the Middle East, see, for example, Melman, Women’s Orient cit.; L. Anvar-Chenderoff, Une Anglais parmi les Turques: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Palmier-Chatelain, Lavagne d’Ortigue (eds.), L’Orient des femmes cit., pp. 161-184.
349
Flora Tristan (1803-1844) was a feminist and socialist activist. In her writings, she mainly deals with issues linked to woman’s emancipation. See, for instance, F. Tristan, Lettres de Flora Tristan, Paris 1980. The saya is a long, very tight skirt, made of tiny pleats; the manto is a black, hood-like garment that completely covered the head and upper body except for one eye.
350
M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes (Travel Writing and Transculturation), London - New York 1992, p. 167.
351
Ibid., pp. 164-171.
352
M. Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies. Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge 1998, p. 99.
353
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam cit.
354
On the effects of anthropology on colonial theory and its sexist vision of women, see S.C. Rogers, Women’s Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory, in “Comparative Studies in Society and History”, 1978, 37, pp. 123-162; E. Fee, The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology, in M. Hartman, L. Banner (eds.), Clio’s Consciousness Raised, New York 1974, pp. 86-102.
355
It is important to remember that ‘colonial feminism’ was widely spread not only among the European men who travelled to the East, but also among women, especially if they were supportive of the new-born feminist ideology. See Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies cit.; Id., Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism, in R. Lewis, S. Mills (eds.), Feminist Postcolonial Theory, Edinburgh 2003, pp. 520-542.
356
As some recent work has shown, current representations of Muslim women in Iraq and Afghanistan do not differ significantly from these 19th centuries images of Muslim women, Ribera, La guerra dei simboli cit.
357
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 669; see also Legh, A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 471.
358
Miller, Travels and Politics cit., p. 100.
359
de Laveleye, The Balkan Peninsula cit., pp. 134-135.
360
Thomson, The Outgoing Turk cit., p. 64.
361
Ibid., pp. 66-67.
362
de Laveleye, The Balkan Peninsula cit., p. 133.
363
My sources offer this specific case only in the example of the Irish traveller James Creagh: “I sat on a cushion in […] verandah, inhaling the soothing fumes of a long hookah, two women got out of
364
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the cart [...]. The mistress was beautifully dressed. Her long light hair extended below her waist [...] her sky-blue jacket was worked all over with the richest gold embroidery; and her loose trousers and yellow slippers completed a costume of Eastern magnificence”, Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 61. Austria-Hungary, on the contrary, had strong colonial intents towards Bosnia, see R. Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism. The Habsburg ‘Civilizing Mission’ in Bosnia, 1878-1914, Oxford 2007.
365
It is likely that something similar happened when the British wrote of other Balkan regions where Islam was a dominant religion, such as Albania, Macedonia, southern Bulgaria, Kossovo and western Thrace; but we need further investigations in order to verify the entity and nature of these possible analogies.
366
Fanon, Algeria Unveiled cit., p. 48.
367
Miller, Travels and Politics cit., pp. 135, 143. Similar examples of the unveiled Muslim woman can be found in other post-1870s travel accounts, Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 316; Thomson, The Outgoing Turk cit., p. 70.
368
Anon., A Ride through Bosnia cit., p. 555; see also de Asboth, An official Tour cit., pp. 195-197. Anon., Independence and Integrity of the Ottoman Empire cit., p. 90; A.G. Hulme-Beaman, Notes of a Fortnight in Bosnia, in “Fortnightly Review”, 1889, p. 408. This specific representation is also found in an earlier text Arbuthnot, Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha cit., p. 63.
369
Miller, Travels and Politics cit., p. 135; also Arbuthnot, Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha cit., p. 63; Thomson, The Outgoing Turk cit., p. 66.
370
In the 19th century, the question of Ireland represented a complex set of political, economic and social issues which culminated in the foundation of the Home Rule movement. This movement was founded thanks to the initiatives of Daniel O’Connell – a Catholic lawyer and land-owner – and was oriented towards the politics of ‘emancipation’ of Catholics from religious discrimination. The movement mainly expressed the political and social aspirations of Catholic Ireland: “for some, it was an extension of the Irish land question; for others, town-dwellers, it promised liberation from the economic restraints imposed by the old regime”, in A. Jackson, Home Rule (An Irish History), London 2003, p. 2.
371
There are numerous studies on this topic in relation to Ireland. See, for example, J. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the 19th Century, Cork 1996; N. McCaw (ed.), Writing Irishness in 19th-Century British Culture, Aldershot 2004; D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London 1996. Less has been written on the topic in relation to Bosnia-Herzegovina, see, for example, O. Hadžiselimović, At the Gates of the East, New York 2001.
372
Sir H.G. Elliot, Some Relations and other Diplomatic Experiences, London 1922, p. 214, quoted in Anderson, The Eastern Question cit.
373
Miller, Travels and Politics cit., p. 105.
374
Barry, At the Gates of the East cit., pp. 236-237.
375
See above, note 50.
376
Aga is a landowning lord, belonging to the lower of the two categories of landowners. The original meaning, however, is lord or senior janissary officer.
377
154
Neval Berber
For a general account of the religious, ethnic and social composition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ireland in the 19th century, see respectively Malcolm, Bosnia (A Short History) cit.; S.J. Connolly (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Irish History, Oxford 2004 (1998).
378
On the process of the ‘islamicization’ of Bosnia-Herzegovina see chapter 5 in Malcolm, Bosnia cit., pp. 51-70; M. Hadžijahić, Porijeklo bosanskih muslimana, Sarajevo 1990; S. Džaja, Konfessionalität und Nationalität Bosniens und der Herzegowina: voremanzipatorische Phase 1463-1804, Munich 1984. In writing this paragraph the following works were useful Malcolm, Bosnia cit.; R. Mantran (ed.), Histoire de l’empire ottoman, Paris 1989; M. Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambridge 1996; P.F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1351-1804, Seattle - London 1973.
379
B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans (18th and 19th Centuries), Cambridge 1983, p. 89.
380
As Noel Malcolm has shown, the action of Siliktar Ali-pasha is highly paradigmatic in this sense. Appointed governor of Bosnia by the Porte, in 1813 he decided to curb Bosnian independence immediately; it was then that he also announced, upon his arrival in Sarajevo, that he was not going to spend just three days there, as allowed by custom, but would alternate between Sarajevo and Travnik at sixmonth intervals. This provoked a violent reaction by the local noblemen, against which Ali-pasha was forced to engage his troops. Eventually, he managed to establish his will. Malcolm, Bosnia cit., p. 120.
381
Originally, a kapetan was a military administrator in a frontier zone. In Bosnian history it signified an administrator of a territorial division, whose office was hereditary with wide-ranging powers.
382
See Jackson, Home Rule cit.; Connolly (ed.), The Oxford Companion cit.; A. O’Day, Irish Home Rule, Manchester - New York 1998.
383
According to Justin McCarthy’s studies, Bosnia and Herzegovina had, in 1870, a population of 694,000 Muslims, 534,000 Orthodox Christians and 208,000 Catholics. See J. McCarthy, Ottoman Bosnia, in M. Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambridge 1993, p. 81.
384
M. Ekmečić, Ustanak u Bosni 1875-1878, Sarajevo 1873.
385
Jackson, Home Rule cit.
386
Connolly (ed.), The Oxford Companion cit., p. 309.
387
The critical bibliography relative to Home Rule issues is vast, for an introduction see Jackson, Home Rule cit.
388
Ibid., p. 3.
389
This passage is quoted in R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question, London 1935, p. 22.
390
J. Creagh, Sparks from Camp Fires, London 1901, p. 25.
391
Id., Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah, vol. 2, London 1876, p. 136.
392
As far as Benjamin Disraeli’s policy of non-intervention after his re-election as prime minister in 1874 is concerned, see J. Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain, New York 1972; J. Snyder, Myths of Empire. Domestic Politics and International Ambition, Ithaca - New York - London 1991.
393
T. Wemyss Reid, The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Miles, First Lord Houghton (1890), vol. 2, London 1890, p. 341.
394
Ibid., p. 496.
395
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
155
See A.J. Ward, The Irish Constitutional Tradition: Responsible Government and Modern Ireland, 1782-1992, Washington 1994.
396
See also O. MacDonagh, Ireland, New Jersey 1968, p. 31.
397
D. Fitzpatrick, Ireland and the Empire, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. The 19th Century, Oxford 1999, pp. 496, 501.
398
C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830, London - New York 1989; K. Jeffery (ed.), An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, Cambridge 1996.
399
O. MacDonagh, Introduction, in W.E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, vols. 5, 6, Oxford 1989, 1996, pp. liii-liv. See T. Garvin, The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics, Dublin 1981; P. O’Farrell, England and Ireland since 1800, Oxford 1975.
400
E.W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, London 1993, pp. 266, 275.
401
Fitzpatrick, Ireland and the Empire cit., p. 504.
402
See A. Porter, Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism, in Id. (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire cit., pp. 198-222; J. Cell, The Imperial Conscience, in P. Marsh (ed.), The Conscience of the Victorian State, Syracuse 1979, pp. 173-213.
403
The Speeches of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, vol. 5, India: Madras and Bengal, 1774-1785, P.J. Marshall (ed.), Oxford 1981, p. 385.
404
See, for example, D. Mandić, Povijest okupacije Bosne i Hercegovine (1878), Zagreb 1910.
405
J. Beddoe, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe, Bristol 1885.
406
This word derives from the 19th-century English belif that the Irish belonged to the Celtic race. See L.P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England, Bridgeport 1968, pp. 17-36.
407
P. Luckombe, A Tour Through Ireland: Wherein the Present State of That Kingdom is Considered, London 1783, p. 19.
408
See R. Kearney (ed.), The Irish Mind, Dublin 1985; Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts cit.; Id., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Newton Abbot 1971; R.N. Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy, Philadelphia 1976; T.W. Hodgson Crosland, The Wild Irishman, London 1905.
409
It is interesting to observe that James Creagh interprets many aspects of the Bosnian reality using the paradigms typical for Anglo-Irish relations. For example, Creagh notices in the peasants’ tensions of 1875 a great danger for Bosnia and foresees, in the case of possible revolt, consequences worse than those in Belfast: “A feast, a procession, a word, or a song may at any moment set the province in a blaze which would throw even the riots of Belfast into the shade”, Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 125. Similarly, when tackling the question of Christian rights in Bosnia, Creagh recalls the Irish political background when he states that “the Turks and the Christians are on footing of equality [...] the remembrance of ancient persecutions still inspires those deadly hatreds, like the passions of Ribbon-men and Orangemen in the north of Ireland, are ever ready to break out with a violence all the more astonishing because the causes that might justify it have long been removed”. Ibid., pp. 124-125.
410
156
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Quoted in the opening chapter entitled The Travelers’ Tales: Bosnia and Herzegovina in British Eyes, in Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit.
411
In his autobiography, Creagh describes the Irish outside the Bosnian context by using the language that was commonly used by the English. He observes, for instance, the Irish custom of not wearing shoes: “After the Great Revolution, English recruiting sergeants took the place of French, and formerly, though not of late years, fine, handsome, and good humoured lads [i.e. Irish], who had never worn shoes or stockings, nor eaten other food than potatoes and milk, were always ready to accept the shilling, and follow the drum”, Creagh, Sparks from Camp Fires cit., p. 4.
412
Ibid., p. 125.
413
Ibid.
414
Ibid., p. 136.
415
Quoted in R.W. Seton-Watson, The Role of Bosnia in International Politics, in “The Raleigh Lecture on History”, 29 October, 1931, pp. 16-17.
416
Ibid.
417
Anderson, The Eastern Question cit., pp. 178-188.
418
Ibid.
419
See chapter 3.
420
Anderson, The Eastern Question cit.; Jelavich, History of the Balkans cit., pp. 186-192; Mantran (ed.), Storia dell’impero ottomano cit., pp. 455-492.
421
“During the 19th century Russia not only absorbed the Caucasus area, but extended control over the Central Asian steppe lands and the three khanates of Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokand. The Russian border by 1885 thus reached that of British protected Afghanistan. Russian advances in the Far East at the expense of China were also seen with apprehension in London. With points of conflict running from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, it can be understood why British diplomats watched the Russian moves with such care. Moreover, the key to the entire situation appeared to lie in Constantinople and the Turkish Straits”, Jelavich, History of the Balkans cit., p. 188. See also Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia cit.; Snyder, Mythes of Empire cit.
422
By doing so, British government found itself in a contradictory situation: on the one hand, at home and in the continent, the government supported national and liberal movements; on the other, in colonised countries and in relation to the Eastern Question, British politicians pursued a completely different political line, discouraging the emancipatory national movements. Jelavich, History of the Balkans cit., p. 188.
423
Benjamin Disraeli was known for his Turkophile positions since 1845. After his Grand Tour in the Near East, he decided indeed to join the Turkish troups in the Albanian War. See B. Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, London 1926; Id., Letters, J.A.W. Gunn (ed.), Toronto 1982; R. Blake, Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land 1830-31, London 1982; W.F. Monypenny, G.F. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli. Earl of Beaconsfield, 6 vols., New York 1968.
424
Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., p. 95.
425
The pro-Ottoman positions of the first English travellers in Bosnia were also pointed out by Hadžiselimović, Na vratima istoka cit., pp. 20-21.
426
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
157
Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro cit., vol. 2, p. 85.
427
Arbuthnot, Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha cit., p. 34.
428
Creagh, Sparks from Camp Fires cit.
429
Arbuthnot, Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha cit.
430
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, pp. 168-169.
431
Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro cit., vol. 2, p. 67.
432
Paton, Highlands and Islands cit., p. 169.
433
Cezzar Ahmet Pasha (1708-1804), identified according to some transliterations as Djezzar Pasha, was an Ottoman governor who defended the fortifications of Acre when Napoleon Bonaparte besieged it during his Syrian campaign, after the capture of Egypt (then an Ottoman territory) in 1798. Djezzar, which can be translated as ‘butcher’, was known for his brutal techniques when handling enemies.
434
Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 64.
435
See chapter 10, Resistence and reform, in Malcolm, Bosnia cit., pp. 119-135. See also K.E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece, Princeton 1999.
436
See, for example, Arbuthnot, Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha cit.; Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah cit., vol. 2, p. 122; Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot cit., p. 180; Patterson, From Agram to Zara cit., p. 376; Anon., Independence and Integrity of the Ottoman Empire cit., p. 89; see Introduction, in Stillman, Herzegovina and the Late Uprising cit.
437
Gladstone’s campaigning in favour of the South Slavs went through different stages; for a detailed account see R. Shannon, Gladstone and British Balkan Policy, in R. Melville, R.J. Schröder (eds.), Der Berliner Kongress von 1878, Wiesbaden 1982, pp. 164-165. See also R. Shannon, Midlothian: 100 years later, in P.J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion, London 1985, pp. 88-101.
438
W.E. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, London 1876; see also Gladstone’s article on Montenegro and the national question, W.E. Gladstone, Montenegro: A Sketch, in “The Nineteenth Century”, 1877, 101, pp. 130-150.
439
On the issues regarding specifically the ‘Bulgarian question’ in the British foreign policy, see K. Šarova, The Bulgarian Question in the Foreign Policy of Great Britain and Russia, 1856-1876, in Melville, Schröder (eds.), Der Berliner Kongress cit., pp. 115-124.
440
Gladstone’s speech, quoted in J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, London 1899, vol. 2, pp. 175-176.
441
Shannon, Gladstone and British Balkan Policy cit., p. 172.
442
Ibid.
443
Anon., The Turks in Europe cit., p. 469.
444
Ibid., p. 471.
445
Alfred Tennyson, for example, was directly inspired by Gladstone’s campaign in favour of Montenegro. On May 1877, on the front page of “The Nineteenth Century”, Tennyson’s poem Montenegro was published, introducing Gladstone’s article on Montenegro published in the same issue of review, Gladstone, Montenegro: A Sketch cit.
446
158
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Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection cit.
447
S.L. Horwitz defined him as “an ardent liberal”. S.L. Horwitz, The Find of a Lifetime. Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos, New York 1981, p. 37.
448
Both these interpretations of Evans’s work can be found in M. Ekmečić’s Preface to the second, Serbo-Croat, edition of Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on foot during the Insurrection (Pješke kroz Bosnu i Hercegovinu tokom ustanka avgusta i septembra 1875, Sarajevo 1973 [1st ed. 1965]). It is important to remember that Ekmečić was at the time of writing one of the most important historiographical voices on Bosnia, the author of a volume on the history of the revolt of 18751878 seen by many as foundational (Ustanak u Bosni 1875-1878, Sarajevo 1973), as well as of one of the rare studies on the image of Bosnia-Herzegovina in European travel writing between 1850 and 1878 (Slika o Bosni i Hercegovini cit.). His historiographical statements of that period and with this Yugoslav socialist flavour are therefore precedent to his well known later acceptance of explicit Serbian nationalism in Bosnian terms.
449
This reading of the facts can be found in the Editor’s note to the recent Croat reprint of Evans’s account, A.J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on foot during the Insurrection, Hannover - Čakovec 2003. Even though the author of this “note” is identified only as “L.K.”, it is understood that the author in question is Ljudevit Krmpotić, editor of a recent Croat edition of A.J. Evans, Illyrian Letters (Ilirska pisma), Hannover - Čakovec 2001.
450
See, for example, Ekmečić, Slika o Bosni i Hercegovini cit., pp. 312-315.
451
A. Evans, The Slavs and European Civilisation (A lecture delivered at Sion College, Feb., 23 1878), London 1878, p. 6.
452
Russia entered in war against Turkey in April 1877.
453
Evans, Illyrian Letters cit., p. xii.
454
Id., Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on foot during the Insurrection cit., p. lviii (from the context unequivocally emerges that the independent state to which Evans refers is understood as being exclusively Bosnian).
455
Ibid.
456
See Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East cit.; Id., Montenegro: A Sketch cit. Vesna Goldsworthy talks about the other influential British voices that supported the Bulgarian national cause, such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Robert Browning and William Morris, see Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania cit., p. 37.
457
Evans, The Slavs and European Civilisation cit.; Id., The Austrians in Bosnia, in “Macmillan’s Magazine”, 1878, pp. 495-504.
458
For the German context, see Die serbische Revolution and the other works on Serbia by Leopold von Ranke, as well as the Romantic translation of some Serb popular songs by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Both German authors were assisted in this operation by Vuk Karadžić. There were also several English editions of Ranke’s work; see, for example, L. von Ranke, A History of Servia, and the Servian Revolution, trans. Mrs. A. Kerr, London 1853.
459
Sandwith, A Trip into Bosnia cit., p. 713.
460
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces (1877) cit., p. 7.
461
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
159
Ibid., p. 5. See also chapter 1.
462
J.G.C. Minchin, The Growth of Freedom in the Balkan Peninsula, London 1886.
463
Ibid., p. 33.
464
For this information on Humphry Sandwith see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24647, accessed on 25 October 2004.
465
With Russian troops almost at the gates of Istanbul, the Treaty of San Stefano of early 1878 brought an end to the Russo-Turkish war.
466
For years the Austrians, concerned by the growing influence of Russia in the Balkans, tried to establish a barrier against the Tsar, in particular in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism cit., pp. 16-18.
467
After a series of misunderstandings between Sultan Abdul Hamid and William Gladstone, the occupation of Egypt by British forces in 1882 gave an entirely new twist to Anglo-Turkish relations and increased the Sultan’s hostility toward, and distrust of, Britain. Anderson, The Eastern Question cit., p. 224.
468
Evans, The Austrians in Bosnia cit.
469
Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia, cit., p. 663.
470
Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East cit., p. 128.
471
Thompson, A Ride through Bosnia and Herzegovina, cit., p. 700.
472
Bracewell, Opinion-makers cit., p. 92.
473
As Barbara Jelavich has noted, the political implication of the travellers’ texts in the 19th century was that what they described was generally accepted as true. Jelavich, The British Travellers in the Balkans cit., p. 412.
474
Until that time, British travel accounts did not in any real way compete with French and German travelogues, considered rich in particulars and with detailed descriptions.
475
Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., p. 97.
476
P. Magnus, Gladstone. A Biography, London 1968, pp. 240-241; Shannon, Midlothian: 100 years later cit., pp. 88-101.
477
Bracewell, Opinion-makers cit., pp. 115-117.
478
Muir Mackenzie, Irby, Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe (1877) cit.
479
Evans, Times and Chance cit., p. 183.
480
See chapters 3 and 4.
481
See chapter 2.
482
There were many other travellers to the Balkans, especially those who entered into direct contact with the colonial societies, who confronted these two different geo-political contexts. See, for example, A. Upward, The East End of Europe, London 1908; P. Henderson, A British Officer in the Balkans, London 1909.
483
Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia cit., p. 671.
484
Barry, At the Gates of the East cit., p. 247.
485
160
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All quotations referring to Thomson are from Thomson, The Outgoing Turks cit., p. 68.
486
Benjamin Kállay was concurrently minister of finance and chief secretary for Bosnia from 1882 to 1902.
487
All quotations are taken from Blowitz, A Trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina cit., pp. 621, 626.
488
The role of Lord Salisbury during the Berlin Congress would certainly merit more attention, Miller, Travels and Politics cit., pp. 87, 90.
489
Lang, The Austrians in Bosnia cit., p. 667.
490
Ibid.
491
Legh, A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina cit., p. 471.
492
Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East cit., p. 107.
493
T.W. Legh, Retrospection, London 1941, p. 56.
494
‘Snaffle’, In the Land of the Bora, or Camp Life and Sport in Dalmatia and the Herzegovina, 18945-6, London 1897.
495
Emil Taaffer came from an Austrian family of Irish ancestary, the Taaffe family having originally emigrated from Galway, Ireland.
496
Hulme-Beaman, Notes of a Fortnight in Bosnia cit., p. 403. The prison in Zenica and the “perfect functioning” of its prison is also recalled by Hulme-Beaman few years later in a book that represents an account of his travels in the “Near East”: “Like everything else the Austrians have done to Bosnia, the Zenitza establishment is a perfect model”, A.G. Hulme-Beaman, Twenty Years in the Near East, London 1898, p. 156.
497
Thomson, The Outgoing Turk cit., p. 63.
498
See also Todorova’s comments on William Miller’s “Balkanism”. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., pp. 18-19.
499
Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East cit., p. xiii.
500
Ibid., pp. xv-xvi (my italics).
501
As Todorova claimed, between the two wars it was the hybrid character of the Balkans which definitively established the Balkanist discourse. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans cit., p. 123.
502
‘Snaffle’, In the Land of the Bora cit., pp. 159-160.
503
R. Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia, Edinburgh - London 1895, p. 14.
504
Ibid.
505
Ibid., pp. 14-15.
506
Hulme-Beaman, Notes of a Fortnight in Bosnia cit., p. 397.
507
Blowitz, A Trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina cit., p. 633.
508
For the Bosnian history of this period see Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism cit.; P. Sugar, Industrialization of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1878-1918, Seattle 1963.
509
Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism cit.
510
Bibliography
Primary Sources Memoirs and Travellers’ Accounts Arbuthnot G., Herzegovina; or Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels, London 1862. Asboth J. de, An Official Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina, London 1890. Barry J., At the Gates of the East: a Book of Travel among Historic Wonderlands, London - New York - Bombay 1906. Boué A., La Turquie d’Europe, т. 2, Paris 1840. Creagh J., Armenians, Koords, and Turks, Strand 1880. Id., Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah (A Journey through Hungary, Slavonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Montenegro, to the North of Albania – in the summer of 1875), 2 vols., London 1876. Id., Sparks from Camp Fires, London 1901. Evans A., Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875. With an Historical Review of Bosnia and a Glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the Ancient Republic of Ragusa, London 1876. Id., Illyrian Letters, London 1878. Forsyth W., The Slavonic Provinces south of the Danube, London 1876. Henderson P., A British Officer in the Balkans, London 1909. Holbach M., Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings, London 1910. Hulme-Beaman A., Twenty Years in the Near East, London 1898. Laveleye E. de, The Balkan Peninsula, London 1887. Legh T., Retrospection, London 1941. Mill J., The Ottomans in Europe; or, Turkey in the Present Crisis, London 1876. Miller W., Travels and Politics in the Near East, London 1898. Id., The Ottoman Empire and its successors, 1801-1922, Cambridge 1923. Muir Mackenzie G., Irby A., Across the Carpathians, London 1862. Id., Notes on the South Slavonic Countries in Austria and Turkey in Europe, Edinburgh - London 1865. Id., Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, 2 vols., London - New York 1866. Id., Travels in the Slavonic provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, 2 vols., London 1877 [2nd enlarged ed.]. Munro R., Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia, Edinburgh - London 1895. Paton A., The Youngest member of the European Family, London 1845.
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Id., Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic, including Dalmatia, Croatia, and the Southern provinces of the Austrian Empire, 2 vols., London 1849. Id., The Bulgarian, the Turk and the German, London 1855. Id., Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic, Leipzig 1861. Sandwith H., A Narrative of the Siege of Kars, London 1856. Id., The Hekim Bashi, 2 vols., London 1864. Id., (ed.), Notes on the South Slavonic Countries in Austria and Turkey in Europe, Edinburgh - London 1865. “Snaffle” [aka Robert Dunkin], In the Land of the Bora, or Camp Life and Sport in Dalmatia and the Herzegovina, 1894-5-6, London 1897. Spencer E., Sketches of Germany and the Germans, with a glance at Poland, Hungary and Switzerland, in 1834, 1835, and 1836, 2 vols., London 1836. Id., Travels in European Turkey, 2 vols., London 1851. Id., Travels in France and Germany in 1865 and 1866, including a Steam Voyage down the Danube, and a Ride across the Mountains of European Turkey from Belgrade to Montenegro, 2 vols., 1866. Stillman W., Herzegovina and the Late Uprising: The Causes of the Latter and the Remedies, from the Notes and the Letters of a Special Correspondent, London 1877. Thomson H., The Outgoing Turk. Impressions of a Journey Through the Western Balkans, London 1897. Upward A., The East End of Europe, London 1908. Whitwell E. [aka Janet Mauriel Whitwell], Through Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Paint Brash, Darlington - London 1909. Wilkinson Sir J., Dalmatia and Montenegro (with a journey to Mostar in Herzegovina and remarks on the Slavonic nations), 2 vols., London 1848.
Articles in periodicals Anon., A Short Trip into Bosnia, in “Household Words”, 1851, 3, pp. 182-187. Anon., Montenegro, the Herzegovina, and the Slavonic Populations of Turkey, in “Macmillan Magazine”, 1862, 6, pp. 345-352. Anon., Exodus of Mussulmans from Servia, in “Macmillan Magazine”, 1863, 8, pp. 87-96. Anon., A Lady’s Visit to the Herzegovinian Insurgents, in “Cornhill Magazine”, 1876, pp. 60-73. Anon., A Ride through Bosnia, in “Fraser’s Magazine”, November 1875, pp. 549-565. Anon., Independence and Integrity of the Ottoman Empire, in “The British Quarterly Review”, 1876, 64.128, pp. 78-98. Anon., The Turks in Europe, in “The British Quarterly Review”, 1876, 64.128, pp. 441-472. Anon., Bosnia and Bulgaria, in “Edinburgh Review”, 1876, 8, pp. 535-572. Anon., Servia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria, in “Geographical Magazine”, 1876, 3, pp. 257-261.
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‘Austrian Medical Officer’, A Peep at Bosnia, in “Sharpe’s London Magazine”, 1893, 3, pp. 334-340. Blowitz H., A Trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina, in “Nineteenth Century”, 1894, 36, pp. 621-644. ‘Captain Spencer’ [aka Edmund Spencer], The Slavonians in Eastern Europe, in “United Service Magazine”, 1875, 3, pp. 226-235. Cruger Coffin M., Where East Meets West, in “National Geographic Magazine”, 1908, 19, pp. 309-344. Curtis W., The Great Turk and His Lost Province, in “National Geographic Magazine”, 1903, 19, pp. 46-61. Evans A., Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum, I-II, in “Archeologia”, 1885, 48, pp. 1-105, and III-IV, in Ibid., 1886, 49, pp. 1-167. Id., Over the Marches of Civilised Europe, in “Fraser’s Magazine”, May 1873, 78.41. Id., The Austrian War against Publicity, in “The Contemporary Review”, 1882, 62, pp. 383-399. Id., The Austrians in Bosnia, in “Macmillan’s Magazine”, 1878, pp. 495-504. Id., The Austrian Counter-Revolution in the Balkans, in “Fortnightly Review”, 1880, 27, pp. 491-524. Gladstone W., Montenegro: A Sketch, in “The Nineteenth Century”, 1877, 113, pp. 130-150. Goedorp V., With a Camera in Bosnia, in “Wide World Magazine”, February 1902, pp. 494-500. Hulme-Beaman A., Notes of a Fortnight in Bosnia, in “Fortnightly Review”, September 1889, pp. 395409. Irby P., Work among the Bosnian Fugitives, in “Good Words”, 1876, 4, pp. 638-642. Lang R., The Austrians in Bosnia, in “The Fortnightly Review”, November 1879, pp. 650-671. Lanin E., Bosnia and Herzegovina, in “The Contemporary Review”, May 1894, pp. 735-760. Legh T., A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in “The New Review”, November 1891, pp. 470-480. Patterson A., From Agram to Zara, in “The Fortnightly Review”, April 1872, pp. 509-532. “Punch”, 17 June 1876; 7 April 1877; 31 August 1878; 18 February 1882. Sandwith H., A Trip into Bosnia, in “Fraser’s Magazine”, December 1873, pp. 698-713. Tennyson A., Montenegro, in “The Nineteenth Century”, 1877, 13. Thompson E., A Ride through Bosnia and Herzegovina, in “Nineteenth Century”, 1907, 61, pp. 685700.
Other printed primary sources Beddoe J., The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe, Bristol 1885. Bradshaw G., Bradshaw’s Hand-Book to the Turkish Empire, vol. 1, Turkey in Europe, London - Manchester 1870. Coleti J., Accessiones et corrections all’Illyricum Sacrum del P. Daniel Farlati, in Bulić F. (ed.), Bollettino di Archeologia e Storia Dalmata, Spalato 1910. Evans A., The Slavs and European Civilisation (A lecture delivered at Sion College, Feb., 23 1878), London 1878.
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Petkov K., Infidels, Turks and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind, ca. 1400-1600, New York 1997. Petrungaro S., L’Est europeo, o a est dell’Europa, in “900. Per una storia del tempo presente”, 2004, 10, pp. 77-86. Id., Terra e acqua: i Balcani, spazio dell’(in)ospitalità, in Panattoni R., Solla G. (eds.), L’ospitalità, l’infrangersi, Genoa - Milan 2006, pp. 119-128. Pierce L., The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignity in the Ottoman Empire, Oxford 1993. Porter A., Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism, in Id. (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. The 19th Century, Oxford 1999, pp. 198-222. Porter D., Orientalism and its Problems, in Barker F. (ed.), The Politics of Theory, Colchester 1983, pp. 179-193. Pratt M., Imperial Eyes (Travel Writing and Transculturation), London - New York 1992. Pyenson L., Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940, London - Baltimore 1993. Rabah S., L’Islam dans l’Imaginaire Occidental, Beyrouth - Liban 1998. Ramet P., Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslavia, in Id. (ed.), Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and east European Politics, Durham 1989, pp. 299-328. Rivera A., La guerra dei simboli, Bari 2005. Roberts M., Contested Terrains: Women Orientalists and the Colonial Harem, in Beaulieu J., Roberts M. (eds.), Orientalism’s Interlocutors. Painting, Architecture, Photography, Durham - London 2002. Rodinson M., Europe and the Mystique of Islam, London 2002. Rogers S., Women’s Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory, in “Comparative Studies in Society and History”, 1978, 37, pp. 123-162. Rothenberg G., The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522-1747, Urbana 1960. Id., The Military Border in Croatia 1740-1881. A Study of an Imperial Institution, Chicago - London 1966. Said E., Culture and Imperialism, London 1993. Id., Orientalism. Western Representations of the Orient, London 1978. Šamić M., Francuski putnici u Bosni i u Hercegovini u XIX stoljeću, Sarajevo 1981. Šarova K., The Bulgarian Question in the Foreign Policy of Great Britain and Russia, 1856-1876, in Melville R., Schröder R. (eds.), Der Berliner Kongress von 1878, Wiesbaden 1982, pp. 115-124. Schenk F., Mental Maps. Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung, in “Geschichte und Gesellschaft”, 2002, 28, pp. 493-514. Schick Irvin C., Representing Middle Eastern Women: Feminism and Colonial Discourse, in “Feminist Studies”, Summer 1990, 16.2, pp. 344-380. Id., The Women of Turkey as Sexual personae: Images from Western Literatur’, in Arat Z. (ed.), Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman”, London 1998, pp. 83-101.
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Seton R., Open Doors for Female Labourers: Women Candidates of the London Missionary Society, 1875-1914, in Bickers R., Seton R. (eds.), Missionary Encounters, Richmond 1996, pp. 50-70. Seton-Watson R., The Role of Bosnia in International Politics, The Raleigh Lecture on History, 29 October, Humphrey Milford Amen House 1931, pp. 3-35. Id., Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question. A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics, London 1935. Id., Britain in Europe, 1789-1914, Cambridge 1945. Id., Russo-British Relations During the Eastern Crisis, in “Slavonic Review”, 1924-1925, 4. Shannon R., Gladstone and British Balkan Policy, in Melville R., Schröder R. (eds.), Der Berliner Kongress von 1878, Wiesbaden 1982. Id., Midlothian: 100 years later, in Jagger P. (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion, London 1985, pp. 88-101. Id., Gladstone and Bulgarian Agitation 1876, Hamden 1975. Shaw Ezel K., Heywood C., English and Continental Views of the Ottoman Empire, Los Angeles 1972. Shields R., Images of spaces and places, Sussex 1991. Šidak J., Gross M., Karaman I., Šepić D. (eds.), Povijest hrvatskog naroda 1860.-1914., Zagreb 1968. Sillitoe A., Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel 1815-1914, London 1995. Silvestre M., Valerio A. (eds.), Donne in viaggio. Viaggio religioso, politico, metaforico, Rome - Bari 1999. Šljivo G., Omer-Paša Latas u Bosni i Hercegovini 1850.-1852., Sarajevo 1977. Snyder J., Myths of Empire. Domestic Politics and International Ambition, Ithaca - New York - London 1991. Solomos J., Back L., Introduction: theorising race and racism, in Id. (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism, London - New York 2000. Southern R., Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Cambridge 1962. Spivak G., Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Nelson C., Grossberg L. (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke 1988. Id., Displacement and the Discourse of Woman, in Krupnick M. (ed.), Displacement: Derrida and After, Bloomington 1988. Sprinkler M. (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Oxford 1992. Stevens M., The Orientalists: from Delacroix to Matisse, London 1984. Sugar Peter F., Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354-1804, Seattle - London 1973. Talal A., Two European Images of Non-European Rule, in Id. (ed.), Anthropology and Colonial Encounter, London 1970. Thiesse A., La creazione delle identità nazionali in Europa, Bologna 2001 (ed. or. 1999). Todorova M., Imagining the Balkans, Oxford 1997. Toledano E., Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, Seattle - London 1998.
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Svelando la Bosnia-Erzegovina. La letteratura di viaggio britannica (1844-1912) Negli ultimi anni le rappresentazioni pubbliche delle regioni del sud-est europeo sono state spesso oggetto di indagini scientifiche. Raramente, però, sono state investigate le forme che questi processi di generalizzazione hanno assunto all’interno di un contesto nazionale particolare, studiando le loro specifiche modalità di costruzione e trasmissione. Questo libro, partendo dal presupposto secondo il quale gli immaginari collettivi sulla Bosnia-Erzegovina venivano costruiti in relazione alle condizioni geografiche, politiche e sociali sia del paese occidentale di origine che del paese sud-est europeo di arrivo, ha dimostrato che i viaggiatori britannici, quando scrivevano della Bosnia-Erzegovina tra la seconda metà dell’Ottocento e i primi anni del Novecento, si servivano di un repertorio di immagini e di un ‘discorso’ peculiari e distinti rispetto a quelli tipici per i Balcani e detti ‘balcanisti’. Gli stereotipi e i pregiudizi che venivano coniati per l’area bosniaca infatti erano molto spesso ‘orientalisti’, e solo occasionalmente assumevano tratti più marcatamente ‘balcanisti’. Ciò significa che il discorso britannico sulla Bosnia-Erzegovina non era solo una semplice sottospecie del ‘balcanismo’, bensì un discorso molto peculiare, che io ho denominato ‘orientalismo di matrice balcanica’. La decostruzione degli stereotipi relativi alla Bosnia-Erzegovina e la conseguente ricostruzione del discorso che la riguarda sono i binari lungo i quali si è mosso il presente studio dell’immagine della Bosnia e dei bosniaci nel discorso pubblico britannico che, tra il 1844 e il 1912, si era sviluppato con forza sulle pagine anzitutto dei testi di viaggio, secondariamente anche sui fogli d’informazione, in memorie, in discorsi pubblici e in corrispondenze private, che pure sono state prese in considerazione. I primi quattro capitoli di questo libro hanno mostrato che si è trattato di un processo cognitivo complesso, che ha visto i viaggiatori britannici prima ‘scoprire’ la Bosnia-Erzegovina geograficamente e, poi, descrivere e in qualche modo ‘inventare’ il paese dal punto di vista culturale. Il forte carattere islamico del paese ha certamente giocato un ruolo importante nella costruzione della Bosnia in termini orientalisti. Inoltre, sia il linguaggio razziale che quello razzista hanno avuto una parte di primaria importanza ed erano comunemente utilizzati dai viaggiatori nelle loro identificazioni dei bosniaci. Nel primo capitolo si è visto che i viaggiatori che si recavano in Bosnia tra il 1844 e i primi anni Settanta possono essere considerati responsabili del primo moderno
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posizionamento geografico della Bosnia nelle mappe mentali europeo-occidentali in relazione ai territori europeo-ottomani. In questo modo la regione emerse da un contesto indistintamente ottomano, assumendo una sua identità geografica e culturale. Non solo la Bosnia-Erzegovina acquisì dei tratti peculiari rispetto alle altre regioni balcaniche ottomane, ma anche i bosniaci musulmani vennero riconosciuti come di origine e di lingua slava e pertanto differenziati dai turchi. Con il gruppo di viaggiatori del periodo successivo agli anni Settanta, quando la Bosnia e la Bulgaria divennero per i britannici le due regioni balcaniche di maggior interesse, i libri di viaggio divennero molto più informati sotto il profilo storico e sociologico. Le loro narrazioni si focalizzarono sempre di più sulla composizione etnica e religiosa del paese, cercando soprattutto di trovare l’elemento o gli elementi di ‘coesione’ all’interno della società bosniaca. Il tratto unificante era stato identificato nella presunta comune ‘razza slava’ della popolazione, indipendentemente dalla diversità delle appartenenze religiose. Persino con i viaggiatori in Bosnia dopo il 1878 – quando la Bosnia, secondo molti commentatori britannici, era entrata in una nuova era con il suo passaggio all’amministrazione austro-ungarica – l’identificazione in termini ‘slavi’ continuava ad avere un ruolo centrale. Abbiamo infatti osservato che i britannici in questi anni, benché piuttosto inclini a osservare i cambiamenti che la Bosnia stava attraversando con la nuovo amministrazione asburgica, continuavano ad essere interessati anzitutto alla composizione razziale e religiosa del paese, puntualizzando regolarmente la ‘slavicità’ dei bosniaci. Nel secondo capitolo è stato analizzato questo ‘paradigma razziale’ che si diffuse nel corso dell’Ottocento e venne applicato agli slavi del sud, quindi anche ai bosniaci. Si è osservato, soprattutto, come certi aspetti delle culture europee, quella britannica inclusa, caratterizzate dall’uso delle teorie razziali, abbiano avuto un ruolo importante nella costruzione del discorso razziale sul sud-est europeo. Anzitutto, i viaggiatori avevano l’abitudine di interpretare il concetto di razza da molteplici punti di vista, tutti legati alla polemica relativa alla Questione d’Oriente. C’erano, comunque, alcune differenze significative tra gli autori e, in base al periodo o all’orientamento politico, essi adottavano un approccio più ‘slavofilo’ o più ‘turcofilo’. Secondo l’approccio tipico dei liberali, la ‘natura’ slava dei bosniaci avrebbe dato loro la possibilità di progredire e di organizzarsi in stati autonomi e indipendenti, quando si fossero trovati a vivere in condizioni ambientali favorevoli. Diversamente la pensavano i conservatori, che secondo un pensiero tipicamente razzista consideravano i bosniaci, come altri gruppi umani, sostanzialmente inferiori e quindi incapaci di autogovernarsi.
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Al di là della comune tendenza a identificare gli slavi in termini di razza, gli osservatori britannici spesso percepivano i mussulmani bosniaci come essenzialmente differenti dagli altri gruppi etno-confessionali della regione. Detto in estrema sintesi, essi assumevano la maggior parte degli aspetti negativi derivanti sia dalle proiezioni ‘balcaniste’ che da quelle ‘orientaliste’, con particolare riguardo al loro carattere fanatico e violento. Benché vi fosse una certa uniformità nello stereotipo dei mussulmani della Bosnia visti come straordinariamente violenti, le rappresentazioni dei conservatori, da un lato, e dei liberali, dall’altro, si distinguevano per i differenti modi in cui era spiegata l’origine di quella violenza. Coerentemente con i loro punti di riferimento teorici, i conservatori concepivano la violenza come un tratto ereditario, strettamente legato alla genetica umana; i liberali, dall’altro lato, spiegavano la violenza dei mussulmani bosniaci a partire dai fattori ambientali, in accordo con teorie che percepivano la razza come qualcosa di variabile e in grado di modificarsi nei diversi contesti politici o socio-culturali. Gli autori che difendevano l’origine ambientale della violenza scrivevano specialmente negli anni Settanta, durante gli anni della rivolta contadina. Erano apertamente slavofili e di frequente si dichiaravano ostili nei confronti della cultura turco-ottomana, spesso identificata con l’Islam. Anche se la teoria ambientalista a volte veniva adottata anche per spiegare i comportamenti degli altri gruppi etno-confessionali, si era diffusa la convinzione secondo la quale il ‘fanatismo’ religioso e culturale dei mussulmani li rendeva particolarmente feroci. Nel terzo capitolo si è visto come la società bosniaca islamizzata, incarnata nella figura del ‘violento’ mussulmano bosniaco di origine slava, fungesse da lente attraverso la quale veniva osservato ogni aspetto della vita di questa società. Una delle prime conseguenze di questa rappresentazione collettiva era che la Bosnia non veniva rappresentata come una ‘terra di mezzo’, come spesso veniva fatto in relazione agli altri spazi all’interno o ai margini dell’Europa, e in particolare in relazione all’‘Est europeo’ e ai ‘Balcani’, bensì come un’area essenzialmente incompatibile con tutto ciò che veniva percepito come Europa occidentale. Secondo questi viaggiatori la Bosnia era icasticamente separata dall’Europa da un ‘fiume’, che divideva l’Est dall’Ovest. I viaggiatori britannici descrivevano la Bosnia non come una regione est-europea o balcanica, bensì come un Oriente, e questo nonostante la sua posizione sud-est europea, che in effetti faceva sì che questo Oriente acquisisse alcune caratteristiche peculiari. Questo ‘Oriente bosniaco’ non fu né costante né definitivo: esso venne sottoposto a un processo di parziale occidentalizzazione che iniziò con i viaggiatori negli anni Settanta e si affermò definitivamente dopo il 1880. La Bosnia-Erzegovina descritta
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dai britannici tra il 1844 e il 1912, pur continuando ad essere fortemente orientalizzata, aveva anche acquisito alcuni tratti che venivano considerati tipicamente occidentali. Questi ultimi, quando non erano impregnati dalla retorica della ‘missione civilizzatrice’, quasi sempre contenevano tutto ciò che i viaggiatori consideravano come essenzialmente corrotto e decadente dell’Occidente. In questo modo, l’‘Oriente bosniaco’ acquisì dei tratti che, in questi stessi anni, venivano assegnati anche ad altri contesti balcanici, nei quali, demograficamente e culturalmente, a prevalere erano gli elementi cristiani. Nonostante l’introduzione in questo periodo di alcune caratteristiche occidentali all’interno di questo equilibrio complesso, il discorso britannico dominante sulla Bosnia-Erzegovina non era il balcanismo, bensì una sottospecie del discorso orientalista, un orientalismo declinato in termini balcanici, che ho voluto definire ‘orientalismo di matrice balcanica’. Di ciò si ha ulteriore conferma attraverso l’analisi dell’immagine della Bosnia-Erzegovina in una prospettiva di genere, come emerge dal quarto capitolo. Anzitutto è stato mostrato che tra la seconda metà dell’Ottocento e i primi anni del Novecento molti viaggiatori osservavano la Bosnia focalizzandosi sulla donna bosniaca mussulmana, percepita come una vittima della tirannia religiosa maschilista di matrice islamica. Influenzati dalle prime correnti di pensiero femministe, i viaggiatori britannici in Bosnia producevano rappresentazioni che enfatizzavano certi aspetti culturali e sociali, i quali iniziavano ad essere considerati discriminatori nei confronti delle donne, mostrando, per esempio, la donna mussulmana della Bosnia-Erzegovina a partire dal suo corpo velato, o addirittura come una prigioniera dell’harem. Un ulteriore aspetto che emerse era che né la sensualità né l’erotismo, in genere particolarmente pronunciate nelle rappresentazioni delle donne mussulmane nei contesti coloniali, erano presenti nell’immagine della donna mussulmana della Bosnia. Per spiegare tale diversità, si è mostrata particolarmente utile l’enfasi posta da alcuni studiosi sulla stretta relazione esistente tra gli aspetti erotico-sensuali del corpo femminile nelle rappresentazioni orientaliste e colonialiste e l’esperienza colonizzatrice, quest’ultima assente in maniera diretta in Bosnia-Erzegovina, perlomeno da parte britannica. La mancanza, infatti, di un progetto coloniale britannico per la Bosnia, molto probabilmente influenzò l’immagine della donna mussulmana della Bosnia, legata alla violenza e slegata quasi completamente dalla sfera dell’erotismo. A partire dall’immagine della donna mussulmana della Bosnia letta come ‘vittima’, si è potuto mostrare che i viaggiatori britannici in Bosnia tra il 1844 e il 1912 stigmatizzavano culturalmente i ‘Balcani mussulmani’ rispetto ai Balcani tout court.
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Questa non è l’unica implicazione dell’immagine della donna mussulmana bosniaca emersa dalle fonti che sono state indagate in questo libro. Lo stesso stereotipo venne sottoposto ad alcune significative evoluzioni, specialmente alla fine degli anni Settanta, dopo il passaggio della Bosnia all’amministrazione austro-ungarica. In questo periodo, infatti, i viaggiatori britannici rappresentavano la donna mussulmana non soltanto nel segno del velo o dell’harem, ma anche priva di tutte quelle imposizioni limitanti che gli europei occidentali nel Settecento e nell’Ottocento legavano strettamente all’Islam e, in modo particolare, alla donna mussulmana. In questo senso, dagli anni Settanta in poi, è possibile parlare di una parziale occidentalizzazione della donna mussulmana, e di una riconciliazione della Bosnia coi Balcani e con il resto dell’Europa. Anche nella prospettiva dell’immagine della donna mussulmana, quindi, è stato possibile rintracciare il discorso principale sulla Bosnia presente nella letteratura di viaggio britannica, che era appunto caratterizzato da un ‘orientalismo di matrice balcanica’. Il discorso britannico sulla Bosnia-Erzegovina negli anni Settanta non era costruito solo sul paradigma orientalista bensì anche su quello irlandese, e il quinto capitolo è dedicato a questo tema. Si è mostrato che nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento circolavano numerosi libri di viaggio britannici dove i viaggiatori, mentre scrivevano della Bosnia, nello stesso tempo tracciavano dei paragoni tra lo stato irlandese (britannico) e la provincia bosniaca (ottomana, poi asburgica). Questa comparazione tra la Bosnia e l’Irlanda era sicuramente determinata dall’esistenza di alcune effettive somiglianze strutturali tra i due paesi, di tipo politico, economico, sociale e culturale. Inoltre, nel momento in cui operavano questo confronto, i britannici mostravano la convinzione di una loro superiorità culturale nei confronti sia dell’Irlanda che della Bosnia e questo, di conseguenza, posizionava i due paesi in una condizione culturalmente periferica nei confronti della Gran Bretagna. Quindi, rispetto al ‘centro’ caratterizzato da aspetti di ‘civiltà’, i due paesi, posizionati ai cosiddetti confini dell’Europa, venivano descritti come essenzialmente barbari. Ciò nonostante, i viaggiatori britannici e i diplomatici, mentre comparavano le due realtà periferiche, di frequente instauravano una sorta di scala gerarchica. Secondo quest’ottica, ad esempio, i bosniaci, se paragonati agli irlandesi, erano visti come meno capaci di istituire e governare uno stato autonomo. Sempre secondo questo rapporto gerarchico, ravvisabile sia nelle rappresentazioni letterarie sia in quelle iconografiche, i bosniaci e gli erzegovesi – sia mussulmani, che cristiani – rispetto agli irlandesi erano collocati in una posizione di inferiorità culturale e razziale. Una simile prospettiva era fortemente influenzata dalla situazione geopolitica dei due paesi: mentre l’Irlanda
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rientrava nell’amministrazione britannica ed era geograficamente vicina a Londra, la Bosnia-Erzegovina non solo era più distante dall’Inghilterra, ma si trovava anche nella zona di influenza della ‘dispotica’ e ‘corrotta’ Porta di Istanbul. Il fatto che i bosniaci venissero paragonati agli irlandesi, e la Bosnia all’Irlanda, ci informa inoltre, nel quadro di una discussione relativa alle mappe mentali collettive, dell’esistenza di alcune strategie peculiari che nell’Ottocento venivano adottate dai britannici per definire l’‘Oriente bosniaco’ come un paese europeo, sia in termini culturali che politici. Mentre i britannici percepivano la Bosnia come Oriente, il paradigma irlandese da essi utilizzato confermava che si trattava di un Oriente che in qualche modo orbitava all’interno dello spazio culturale europeo. Infine, questo capitolo ha dimostrato che, per meglio comprendere la complessa rete di relazioni culturali all’interno dell’Europa, è necessario che l’opposizione ‘EstOvest’, applicata da alcuni studiosi nell’investigazione delle relazioni culturali e di potere tra le varie società europee ed extraeuropee, venga integrata in una scala di relazioni ‘centro-periferia’. L’approccio comparato di questo capitolo ha infatti mostrato che non c’è una rigida opposizione tra un’‘Europa’ e una ‘non-Europa’, e che le relazioni culturali all’interno dell’Europa seguono piuttosto una scala graduale che discende dal ‘centro’ verso la ‘periferia’. Anche se il focus principale in questo libro ha riguardato prevalentemente gli immaginari collettivi e si è quindi concentrato soprattutto sul livello delle rappresentazioni, nell’ultimo capitolo si è mostrato come queste rappresentazioni talvolta entrino in contatto diretto con la politica britannica interna ed estera, influenzandola o facendosi influenzare da essa. Il tema centrale del sesto capitolo, quindi, è rappresentato dalla politicizzazione dei libri di viaggio britannici, nonché dal loro utilizzo ad opera di politici britannici di quel tempo. Si è potuto pertanto vedere come la letteratura di viaggio britannica sulla Bosnia tra gli anni Quaranta e gli anni Settanta fosse influenzata dalle posizioni filo-turche dei viaggiatori e come questo atteggiamento fosse decisivo nella rappresentazione di alcune figure e di certi eventi interni al contesto politico e militare bosniaco. Le posizioni dei viaggiatori erano, comunque, condizionate da decisioni di più ampia portata legate alla pax britannica, perseguita attraverso la preservazione del sistema del ‘balance of power’, e promossa a partire dal 1856 da Palmerstone, dopo la decisione di promuovere una politica che mirasse all’integrità e all’inviolabilità dell’Impero ottomano. La turcofilia dei primi viaggiatori fu progressivamente marginalizzata negli anni Settanta attraverso la campagna elettorale di Gladstone, che si focalizzò sulla ne-
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cessità morale dei britannici di intervenire nei Balcani per soccorrere gli ‘oppressi’ slavo-cristiani dal ‘giogo’ turco, pensando soprattutto ai bulgari e ai montenegrini, ma anche ai bosniaci. Molti bosniaci, tra il 1875 e il 1878, si erano ribellati contro l’Impero ottomano e avevano sofferto una repressione piuttosto violenta da parte delle autorità turche e delle truppe irregolari, i bashi bazouk. I viaggiatori in Bosnia di questo periodo riflettevano una simile posizione slavofila anche nei loro resoconti. Non è sempre facile mostrare con precisione la relazione che i viaggiatori instauravano con l’arena pubblica e politica negli anni Settanta: talvolta le loro posizioni erano direttamente influenzate dalla campagna gladstoniana, talaltra erano loro a influenzarla – e sostenerla. L’intreccio e la reciproca influenza tra letteratura di viaggio e politica emerse con maggiore evidenza nei viaggiatori dopo il 1880. La nuova amministrazione austriaca, in Bosnia dal 1878, era unanimamente appoggiata in Gran Bretagna sia dai liberali sia dai conservatori. Persino Gladstone, che poco prima aveva promosso la causa bulgara e slavo-meridionale in Gran Bretagna, dopo essere stata rieletto nel 1880 appoggiò una politica filo-ottomana e filo-austriaca, avanzata dal precedente governo durante l’era di Disraeli. Questa stessa politica filo-austriaca si ritrova in quasi tutti i libri di viaggio dopo il 1880. Inoltre, una retorica basata sulla ‘missione civilizzatrice’, affermatasi in questi anni, aveva significativamente contribuito a quella stessa politica filo-austriaca. Quello che è emerso da quest’analisi, il cui punto di partenza era lo scenario politico al quale poi si è fatto ritorno passando per il corpus della letteratura di viaggio britannica, è che il ruolo giocato dai viaggiatori nell’arena pubblica era molto complesso e vario, con i viaggiatori che avevano ruoli talvolta più attivi, talaltra più passivi. Questi scrittori, che cambiavano il loro orientamento politico riguardo la Bosnia in base agli scenari politici britannici, influenzavano quella stessa politica con le loro narrazioni dai forti contenuti politici. A conclusione di questo capitolo, e proprio sulla base delle ragioni or ora esposte, lanciamo anche un’ipotesi di ricerca, la cui risposta si colloca però nettamente al di fuori del presente lavoro e alla quale abbiamo pertanto dovuto rinunciare. Non abbiamo potuto tuttavia esimerci dal porla, per il fatto che è parte integrante del sintagma scelto per denominare il ‘travel-discourse’ in esame: se quello analizzato è un ‘orientalismo di matrice balcanica’, perché si riferisce ad una regione che è percepita dal punto di vista geografico e culturale come parzialmente europea, ma soprattutto orientale perché islamica, allora è giocoforza chiedersi che caratteristiche abbiano le rappresentazioni legate alle altre regioni balcaniche a forte caratterizzazione islamica. Quale sarà, se c’è, il discorso egemone ad esempio per l’Albania, o la Macedo-
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nia? Se le nostre riflessioni sono esatte, verrebbe da pensare che anche in quei casi a prevalere negli immaginari collettivi occidentali in relazione a queste regioni sia un approccio più orientalista che balcanista. Eppure, al di là di approfondite verifiche che necessariamente bisognerebbe fare, una differenza radicale passa tra la Bosnia-Erzegovina e le altre regioni balcaniche, poiché nella prima l’islamizzazione fu più profonda e diffusa che altrove. Pur limitandosi sempre ad una parte della sua popolazione complessiva, essa diede un forte imprinting alla cultura locale, secondo circostanze storico-sociali diverse, ad esempio, dalla Bulgaria, anch’essa a lungo ottomana, ma con modalità chiaramente molto diverse. La nostra ipotesi andrebbe allora forse raffinata, riferendola non a ‘regioni’ intere, ma a singole aree, se non a singoli gruppi (i pomachi in Bulgaria, ad esempio, o gli albanesi mussulmani e le aree da questi più compattamente abitate). Più di questo, però, in questa sede non abbiamo potuto fare. Chiudiamo quindi il lavoro con l’augurio che queste tematiche vengano in futuro sviluppate e precisate, nella speranza che sia stato di stimolo e d’aiuto quanto esposto in questo libro.
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Razotkrivajuci Bosnu i Hercegovinu u Britanskoj Putopisnoj Literaturi (1844.-1912.) U posljednjih nekoliko desetljeća javna prikazivanja područja jugoistočne Evrope su često bila predmet znanstvenih istraživanja. Samo su ponekad, međutim, bili istraživani oblici koje su ti procesi generalizacije zadobivali u okviru jednog određenog nacionalnog konteksta, izučavanjem njihovih specifičnih modaliteta konstruisanja i prenošenja. Ova knjiga, polazeći od pretpostavke da su kolektivni imaginariji o Bosni i Hercegovini bili konstruisani pod uticajem geografskih, političkih i društvenih uslova ne samo ishodišne zapadne nego i jugoistočne države u koju su putnici stizali, je pokazala da su se britanski autori, kada su pisali o Bosni i Hercegovini u razdoblju između druge polovice 19. i prvih godina 20. vijeka, služili određenim repertoarom slika i jednim vrlo specifičnim ‘diskursom’, koji se bitno razlikovao od onog vezanog za Balkan i poznatog kao ‘balkanizam’. Stereotipi i predrasude koji su bili stvoreni za Bosnu i Hercegovinu, bili su najčesće ‘orijentalističke’ prirode, a samo ponekad su zadobijali i izrazito ‘balkanistički’ oblik. To znači da britanski diskurs o Bosni i Hercegovini nije bio samo jedna podvrsta ‘balkanizma’, nego jedan vrlo osobit diskurs, koji bi se mogao nazvati ‘orijentalizam balkanskog porijekla’. Dekonstrukcija stereotipa vezanih za Bosnu i Hercegovinu, i rekonstrukcija diskursa koja ju je paralelno slijedila, bila je moguća zahvaljujući izučavanju slike Bosne i bosanskog stanovništva u javnom britanskom diskursu koji se snažno razvijao između 1844. i 1912., i to prije svega na stranicama putopisa, ali i u dnevnicima, kulturnim časopisima, memoarima, javnim govorima i privatnim korispondencijama. U prva četiri poglavlja ove knjige sam pokazala da se radilo o jednom vrlo složenom kognitivnom procesu, prema kojemu su putnici prvo ‘otkrili’ Bosnu geografski a onda je i opisali i, u nekom smislu, kulturno ‘stvorili’. Snažan islamski karakter je svakako odigrao važnu ulogu u ovom procesu konstrukcije Bosne u orijentalističkim terminima. Osim toga, rasni i rasistički jezik su takođe imali primarnu važnost, i putnici su ga često koristili kada se radilo o identifikaciji bosanskog stanovništva. U prvom poglavlju sam pokazala kako su Britanci koji su putovali kroz Bosnu u razdoblju između 1844. i početka šezdesetih godina tog istog vijeka, po prvi put u moderno doba geografski locirali Bosnu na mentalnim kartama zapadne Evrope u odnosu na evropsko-osmanske teritorije. Na taj način je ova balkanska oblast izronila iz osmanskog konteksta, zadobivši pritom svoj specifični geografski i kulturni identitet. Bosna i Hercegovina nije samo na taj način zadobila svoj specifični oblik
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u odnosu na druga područja Balkana pod uticajem Osmanskog Carstva, nego su i bosanski muslimani bili priznati na temelju svoga zasebnog slavenskog porijekla i jezika, i kao takvi različiti od Turaka. U periodu koji je potom uslijedio, kada su Bosna i Bugarska jako zainteresirale britansku javnost zbog masovne pobune seljačkog stanovništva, britanski putopisi na Balkanu su naglo postali istorijski i sociološki bogatiji informacijama. Njihove naracije su se sve više fokusirale na etnički i vjerski profil Bosne, nastojeći prije svega da pronađu element ili elemente ‘kohezije’ unutar bosanskog društva. Ujedinjujuću tačku predstavljalo je vjerovanje da se radilo o stanovništvu koje je pripadalo zajedničkoj ‘slavenskoj rasi’, bez obzira na različitu vjersku pripadnost. Čak i u slučaju putnika u Bosni nakon 1878. godine, kada su mnogi britanski komentatori vjerovali da je sudbina ove zemlje već bila ušla u novo doba dolaskom pod austrougarsku upravu, identifikovanje stanovništva u ‘slavenskim’ terminima nastavilo je da bude od centralne važnosti. Nastojala sam pokazati da su Britanci u toku ovog perioda, iako često skloni pokazati i one promjene koje su zadesile Bosnu i Hercegovinu pod habsburškom upravom, nastavili da budu zainteresovani i za rasni i vjerski sadržaj, precizirajući redovno da se radilo o stanovništvu ‘slavenskog’ porijekla. U drugom poglavlju sam analizirala upravo tu ‘rasnu paradigmu’ koja se bitno rasprostranila u Velikoj Britaniji u toku 19. vijeka i koja se redovno primjenjivala kako na južne Slavene u cjelini, tako i na Bosance zasebno. Posebno sam obratila pažnju na činjenicu da je evropska kultura, uključujući i britansku, u mnogim pogledima bila obilježena sve većom primjenom rasnih teorija, i da je to odigralo vrlo važnu ulogu u konstrukciji rasnog diskursa spram jugoistočne Evrope. Prije svega, putnici su tumačili koncept ‘rase’ sa mnogobrojnih gledišta vezanih uz polemiku o Istočnom pitanju. Postojale su, međutim, značajne razlike između autorâ i, zavisno od perioda ili političkog opredjeljenja, svaki autor je usvajao ‘slavofilski’ ili ‘turkofilski’ pristup rasi. U skladu sa tipičnim liberalnim shvaćanjem, slavenska ‘priroda’ Bosanaca je od njih učinila narod sposoban da se organizuje u neovisnu i autonomnu državu, no samo ukoliko bi se našli u povoljnim izvanjskim okolnostima. Drugačije su razmišljali konzervativci, koji su u skladu sa tipično rasističkim poimanjem smatrali da su Bosanci, kao i puno drugih naroda, bili bitno inferiorniji od Evropljana i da zbog toga nisu nikako u stanju da upravljaju sami svojom državom. Pored veoma proširene sklonosti da identificiraju sve slavenske narode u rasnim terminima, britanski posmatrači bosanske stvarnosti su percepirali bosanske muslimane kao bitno različite u poređenju sa drugim etno-konfesionalnim grupama koje su živjele u istom području. Ukratko rečeno, muslimansko stanovništvo je poprimalo negativne karakteristike proizašle
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i iz ‘balkanističkih’ i iz ‘orijentalističkih’ diskursa, dok se sa posebnom pažnjom se podvlačila navodna fanatična i nasilna strana njihovog karaktera. Iako je postojala poprilična izjednačenost u građenju stereotipa koji su podvlačili sklonost ka nasilju kod muslimanskog stanovništva, prikazivanja konzervativaca, s jedne strane, i liberala, s druge, su se razlikovale po načinu na koji je bivao identifikovan izvor tog nasilja. U skladu sa svojim polaznim teorijama, konzervativci su percipirali nasilje kao nasljednu karakteristiku, usko vezanu za genetsko nasljeđe te ljudske rase; liberali su, s druge strane, objašnjavali nasilje bosanskih muslimana polazeći od izvanjskih faktora, suglasno sa teorijama koje su smatrale da je rasa nešto promjenjivo i u stanju da mijenja oblike u različitim političkim i socio-kulturnim kontekstima. Autori koji su smatrali da nasilje potiče iz okoline pisali su naročito u sedamdesetim godinama, za vrijeme seljačke bune u Bosni. Bili su slavofili i otvoreno su se deklarirali neprijateljski prema tursko-osmanskoj kulturi, koja je često bivala identifikovana sa islamom. Iako je ta teorija vezana za okolinu ponekad bivala usvajana da bi se objasnilo ponašanje i drugih etno-konfesionalnih grupa, bilo je prošireno mišljenje da je religijski i kulturni ‘fanatizam’ muslimanskog stanovništva učinio da ta skupina postane posebno okrutna. U trećem poglavlju sam pokazala kako je islamizirano bosansko društvo, oličeno u figuri ‘nasilnih’ bosanskih muslimana slavenskog porijekla, predstavljalo neku vrstu povećala kroz koje su se posmatrali različiti oblici života bosanskog društva. Jedna od prvih posljedica ovog kolektivnog prikazivanja je bila ta da Bosna i Hercegovina nije bila prikazivana kao ‘zemlja na razmeđu’, kao što je čest slučaj kada se govorilo o drugim geografskim područjima unutar ili na granicama Evrope, i posebno o ‘Istočnoj Evropi’ i ‘Balkanu’, nego kao područje prvenstveno inkompatibilno sa svim onim što se smatralo kao zapadna Evropa. Po mišljenju ovih putnika Bosna je bila jasno odvojena od Evrope ‘rijekom’ koja je djelila Istok od Zapada. Britanski putnici su opisivali Bosnu ne kao područje istočne Evrope ili Balkana, nego kao Istok, i to unatoč njezinoj jugoistočnoj poziciji, koja je uistinu i učinila da ovaj Istok zadobije neke svoje specifične karakteristike. Vrijedi naime naglasiti da ‘bosanski Istok’ nije bio niti konstantan niti definitivan: naprotiv, bio je izložen procesu djelimične okcidentalizacije, koja je započela sa putnicima u sedamdesetim godinama, a konačno se afirmisala nakon 1880. U razdoblju između 1844. i 1912. Bosna i Hercegovina je, iako je nastavila da bude izložena vrlo jakom procesu orijentalizacije, zadobila i neke karakteristike koje su bile shvaćane kao tipično zapadnjačke. Kada nisu bile izložene uticaju retorike i ideologije poznate pod imenom ‘civilizacijska misija’, te karakterisitke su skoro uvijek bile pod uticajem elemenata koje su putnici
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smatrali dekadentnim i korumpiranim na Zapadu. Na taj način je ovaj ‘bosanski Istok’ zadobio i neke od karakteristika koje su se u ovom istom periodu mogle naći u mnogim drugim balkanskim kontekstima, u kojima su, demografski i kulturno, bili dominantni hrišćanski elementi. Bez obzira na činjenicu da su u navedenom periodu unutar ove već vrlo složene ravnoteže bile uvedene i neke karakteristike tipične za Zapad, dominantni britanski diskurs za Bosnu i Hercegovinu nije ipak bio balkanizam, nego jedna podvrsta orijentalizma, ili orijentalizma definiran u balkanskim terminima koji sam nazvala ‘orijentalizam balkanskog porijekla’. To je dodatno potvrđeno putem analize slike Bosne i Hercegovine iz rodne perspektive, što je tema četvrtog poglavlja. Prije svega sam pokazala kako su mnogi putnici u vremenu između druge polovice devetnaestog i prvih godina dvadesetog vijeka posmatrali Bosnu fokusirajući se na bosansku muslimansku ženu, koja je bila percepirana kao žrtva islamske vjerske i šovinističke tiranije. Pišući pod uticajem prvog talasa feminizma, britanski putopisci u Bosni su naglašavali kulturne i socijalne aspekte koji su smatrani za diskriminirajuće spram žena, prikazujući na primjer muslimanske žene prvenstveno posredstvom pokrivenog tijela, ili čak kao zarobljenice muškog harema. Osim toga, drugi značajan aspekat koji vrijedi spomenuti se ticao senzualnosti i erotizma; poprilično izraženi u kolonijalnim kontekstima, ni jedan ni drugi se nisu pojavljivali u britanskim prikazivanjima muslimanskih žena Bosne i Hercegovine. Da bi se objasnila ta razlika, pokazalo se prilično korisnim prihvatiti naglasak nekih istraživača na uskoj povezanosti između senzualno-erotičnih aspekata ženskog tijela na orijentalističkim i kolonijalističkim prikazivanjima i kolonizatorskog iskustva, koje je bilo u potpunosti odsutno u Bosni, barem kada je riječ o britanskom carstvu. Nepostojanje britanskog kolonijalnog projekta za Bosnu je vjerovatno uticao na oblik slike bosanske žene muslimanskog porijekla, vezanog prvenstveno za šovinističko nasilje i skoro u potpunosti lišenog sfere erotizma. Polazeći od slike bosansko-muslimanske žene kao žrtve, pokazala sam kako su britanski putnici u Bosni između 1844. i 1912. kulturno stigmatizovali ‘muslimanski Balkan’ u poređenju sa Balkanom tout court. No, nije se radilo o jedinoj manipulaciji slikom bosansko-muslimanskih žena. Kao što su pokazala moja istraživanja, isti stereotip je bio prolazio i kroz neke druge značajne razvojne promjene, posebno od kraja sedamdesetih godina nakon što je Bosna prešla pod kontrolu austrougarske uprave. U tom periodu britanski putnici u
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Bosni su prikazivali muslimanske žene ne samo prekrivene maramom ili zatvorene u harem, nego i bez svih tih nametnutih ograničenja, koje su zapadni Evropljani u osamnaestom i devetnaestom vijeku vezivali uz islam, i naročito za muslimanske žene. Tako je moguće, od sedamdesetih godina pa nadalje, govoriti o djelimičnoj okcidentalizaciji muslimanskih žena, kao i o pomirenju Bosne sa Balkanom i ostalom Evropom. I iz perspektive prikazivanja muslimanske žene, dakle, bilo je moguće identifikovati glavni diskurs o Bosni prisutan u britanskoj putopisnoj literaturi kao ‘orijentalizam bakanskog porjekla’. Britanski diskurs o Bosni i Hercegovini sedamdesetih godina nije bio konstruisan samo na osnovi orijentalističke paradigme nego i one irske, i toj sam temi posvetila peto poglavlje. Nastojala sam pokazati kako je u drugoj polovici devetnaestog vijeka postojao veliki broj britanskih putopisa u kojima su putnici, pišući o Bosni, u isto vrijeme povlačili i paralele između irske (britanske) države i bosanske (osmanske) provincije. Ovo poređenje između Bosne i Irske je sigurno nastalo pod uticajem nekih stvarnih strukturalnih sličnosti između te dvije istorijske situacije, koje su bile političkog, ekonomskog, socijalnog i kulturnog tipa. Osim toga, kada su poredili te dvije situacije, Britanci su u isto vrijeme i pokazivali koliko su bili uvjereni u svoju kulturnu superiornost kako prema Irskoj tako i prema Bosni, a ta činjenica je automatski stavljala ove dvije države u položaj kulturne periferije spram Velike Britanije. Dakle, spram ‘centra’ koji je bio označen ‘civiliziranim’ karakteristikama, Bosna i Irska, locirane na takozvanoj periferiji Evrope, su bile prikazivane prvenstveno kao ‘barbarske’ zemlje. Uza sve to, britanski putnici i diplomati, dok su uspoređivali te dvije periferne regije, često su uspostavljali neku vrsu hijerarhijske ljestvice. Na temelju takvog gledište, Bosanci su u usporedbi sa Ircima bili držani za manje sposobne da osnuju i vladaju svojom neovisnom državom. Još uvijek gledano iz perspektive ovog hijerarhijskog odnosa, koji se može primijetiti i u literarnim i u ikonografskim prikazivanjima, Bosanci i Hercegovci – i muslimanskog i hrišćanskog porijekla – spram Iraca su bili predstavljani kao kulturno i rasno inferiorniji. Ta perspektiva je bila pod snažnim geopolitičkim uticajem dviju država: dok je Irska bila pod britanskom upravom i geografski bliža Londonu, Bosna i Hercegovina nije samo bila udaljena od Engleske, nego se i nalazila u uticajnoj zoni ‘despotskog’ i ‘korumpiranog’ Istanbula. U okviru diskursa vezanog za kolektivne mentalne karte, činjenica da su Bosanci bili poređeni sa Ircima a Bosna sa Irskom, dodatno nas informiše o postojanju vrlo specifičnih strategija koje su Britanci u toku 19. vijeka usvojili da bi definisali
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‘bosanski Istok’ kao evropsko područje u kulturnim i političkim terminima. Iako su Britanci percepirali Bosnu kao Istok, irska paradigma koju su u isto vrijeme koristili je bila u stanju da pokaže da se radilo o nekom Istoku koji se u neku ruku kretao unutar evropskog kulturnog prostora. Konačno, u ovom poglavlju sam pokazala da je, kako bi se bolje shvatila složena mreža kulturnih odnosa unutar Evrope, potrebno da se opozicija ‘Istok-Zapad’, koju su često naučnici koristili da bi bolje razumjeli djelovanje kulturnih veza i ravnoteže moći između evropskih i van-evropskih društava, integriše sa ljestvicom zasnovanom na odnosima ‘centar-periferija’. Komparativni pristup u ovom poglavlju je pokazao da ne postoji oštra opozicija između ‘Evrope’ i ‘ne-Evrope’, i da kulturne veze unutar Evrope radije prate jednu vrstu stupnjevite ljestvice koja se kreće u silazećem smjeru od ‘centra’ prema ‘periferiji’. Iako su u ovoj knjizi jezgro istraživanja predstavljali kolektivni imaginariji, u zadnjem poglavlju sam pokazala na koji način su ta prikazivanja ulazila u direktan kontakt sa vanjskom i unutrašnjom britanskom politikom, utičući na nju ili nalazeći se pod njezinim uticajem. Tako sam u šestom poglavlju obratila pažnju na politiziranje britanskih putopisa, kao i na korištenje tih istih putopisa od strane britanskih političara u istom periodu. Na taj način sam pokazala kako su britanski putopisi o Bosni između četrdesetih i sedamdesetih godina bili pod uticajem turkofilskih stavova putnika i kako je takav politički pristup bio presudan u prikazivanjima nekih figura i određenih događaja u političkom i vojnom kontekstu Bosne i Hercegovine. Stavovi putnika su ipak bili uvjetovani odlukama šireg opsega, vezanih za pax britannicu, čiji je cilj bio održati ravnotežu moći, i koja je od 1865. godine bila promovisana od strane Palmerstona, nakon njegove odluke da se podrži politička linija koja bi podupirala integritet i nepovredivost Osmanskog Carstva. Turkofilski stavovi prvih putnika su postepeno gurnuti na marginu sedamdesetih godina u vrijeme Gladstonove izborne kampanje, koja je bila fokusirana na moralnu nužnost britanske intervencije na Balkanu za pomoć ‘potlačenim’ hrišćanima slavenskog porijekla, koji su živjeli pod turskom ‘opsadom’, imajući pritom na umu najprije Bugare i Crnogorce, ali također i stanovništvo Bosne i Hercegovine. Veliki broj Bosanaca se pobunio između 1875. i 1878. protiv Osmanskog Carstva, zbog čega su morali pretrpiti poprilično okrutno suzbijanje bune od turskih vlasti i neredovnih trupa, bashi bazouk. Britanski putnici u Bosni u ovom periodu su iskazivali slične slavofilske stavove i u svojim putopisima. Nije uvijek jednostavno sa preciznošću opisati vrstu odnosa koju su putnici uspostavljali sa političkom sferom i sferom javnosti uopšte u toku sedamdesetih
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godina: ponekad su njihovi stavovi bili direktno pod uticajem Gladstonove izborne kampanje, a ponekad su bili oni ti koji su na nju uticali – i u neku ruku je podržavali. Splet i uzajamni uticaj putopisa i politike je jasno izašao na vidjelo i kod putnika u Bosnu nakon 1880. Novo austrijsko rukovodstvo koje je bilo u Bosni od 1878. bilo je u Velikoj Britaniji jednoglasno podržavano sa obje strane, liberalne i konzervativne. Čak i Gladstone, koji je do malo prije toga promovisao bugarsku i južnoslavensku nacionalnu stvar u Velikoj Britaniji, nakon što je bio ponovo izabran u 1880. godine, je podržao filo-osmansku i austrofilsku politiku, koju je predložila prethodna vlada za vrijeme Disraelieve ere. Ta ista austrofilska politika se može naći u skoro svim putopisima nakon 1880. godine. Uz to, retorika koja se temeljila na ‘civilizacijskoj misiji’ i koja se afirmisala tih godina, značajno je uticala na tu istu austrofilsku politiku. Ova analiza, čija je polazna tačka bio politički scenarij kojem se kasnije i vratila prolazeći kroz korpus britanskih putopisa, je pokazala da je uloga koju su putnici odigrali unutar javne arene bila vrlo složena i različita: putnici su nekada imali aktivnu, a nekada pasivnu ulogu. Ti pisci, koji su mijenjali svoj politički stav prema Bosni ovisno o britanskom političkom scenariju, su i uticali na tu istu politiku preko naracija isprepletenih sa političkim sadržajima. U zaključku ovog poglavlja predlažem jednu vrstu istraživačke hipoteze, čiji odgovor ostaje u svakom slučaju van okvira ovog istraživanja, zbog čega sam morala i da odustanem od njegovog eventualnog traženja. Međutim, nije moguće izbjeći postavljanje tog pitanja jer ono predstavlja i dio sintagme odabrane radi denominiranja travel discourse kojem sam posvetila ovo istraživanje: ako je moguće analizirani diskurs nazvati ‘orijentalizam balkanskog porijekla’, budući da se odnosi na područje koje je iz kulturne i geografske perspektive precepirano kao djelimično evropsko, i iznad svega kao orijentalno zbog uticaja islama, onda je nužno i priupitati se kakve su karakteristike prikazivanja drugih balkanskih prostora, koji su na isti ili sličan način okarakterizovani islamskim kulturnim elementima. Kakav bi bio, ako uopšte postoji, hegemonijski diskurs na primjer za Albaniju ili za Makedoniju? Ako su moja razmišljanja tačna, onda bi se moglo reći da i u ovim slučajevima, kod kolektivnih zapadnih imaginarija koji se odnose na ta područja, dominira više orijentalistički nego balkanistički pristup. No, bez obzira na činjenicu da je potrebno dublje proučiti predmet, postoji jedna vrsta radikalne razlike između Bosne i Hercegovine i drugih područja Balkana, jer je islamizacija ove zemlje bila mnogo uticajnija i raširenija nego u drugim krajevima. Iako je bila ograničena samo na jedan
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dio stanovništva, ona je svakako ostavila jedan vrlo jak pečat na lokalnu kulturu, bitno se razlikujući od, po istorijsko-socijalnim prilikama, na primjer, Bugarske, koja je isto tako kao Bosna i Hercegovina bila dugo pod osmanskim uticajem, iako u različitim modalitetima. Naša hipoteza bi u tom slučaju trebala, dakle, da bude istančana, da se ne koristi samo u odnosu na ‘područja’ u cijelosti, nego i na pojedinačne teritorije, ako ne i na pojedinačne grupe (npr. Pomake u Bugarskoj ili muslimanske Albance i oblasti koje ovi kompaktno naseljuju). No, više od ovog što sam izložila u ovoj knjizi nije bilo moguće izvesti. Zaključiću dakle moj rad sa željom da ova tematska pitanja budu dalje razrađena i precizirana u budućnosti, u nadi da bi sve ono što sam iznijela u mojoj knjizi možda moglo na neki način i da bude i poticaj na tako nešto.
Publications of the CLIOHRES Network of Excellence Thematic Work Group 1, “States, Legislation, Institutions” 1. Public Power in Europe: Studies in Historical Transformation, James S. Amelang, Siegfried Beer eds., 2006; 2. Communities in European History: Representations, Jurisdictions, Conflicts, Juan Pan-Montojo, Frederik Pedersen eds., 2007; 3. Making, Using and Resisting the Law in European History, Günther Lottes, Eero Medijainen, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson eds., 2008; 4. Institutional Change and Stability: Conflicts, Transitions, Social Values, Andreas Gémes, Florencia Peyrou, Ioannis Xydopoulos eds., 2009. Thematic Work Group 2, “Power and Culture” 1. Power and Culture: Hegemony, Interaction and Dissent, Ausma Cimdiņa, Jonathan Osmond eds., 2006; 2. Power and Culture. Identity, Ideology, Representation, Jonathan Osmond, Ausma Cimdiņa eds., 2007; 3. Power and Culture: New Perspectives on Spatiality in European History, Pieter Franēois, Taina Syrjämaa, Henri Terho eds., 2008; 4. Rebellion and Resistance, Henrik Jensen ed., 2009. Thematic Work Group 3, “Religion and Philosophy” 1. Religion, Ritual and Mythology. Aspects of Identity Formation in Europe, Joaquim Carvalho ed., 2006; 2. Religion and Power in Europe: Conflict and Convergence, Joaquim Carvalho ed., 2007; 3. Bridging the Gaps: Sources, Methodology and Approaches to Religion in Europe, Joaquim Carvalho ed., 2008; 4. Routines of Existence: Time, Life and Afterlife in Society and Religion, Bojan Borstner, Joaquim Carvalho eds., 2009. Thematic Work Group 4, “Work, Gender and Society” 1. Professions and Social Identity. New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society, Berteke Waaldijk ed., 2006; 2. Reciprocity and Redistribution: Work and Welfare Reconsidered, Gro Hagemann ed., 2007; 3. Rhetorics of Work, Dimitra Lampropoulou, Carla Salvaterra, Yannis Yannitsiotis eds., 2008; 4. The Faces of Death. Visualising History, Andrea Pető, Klaartje Schrijvers eds., 2009. Thematic Work Group 5, “Frontiers and Identities” 1. Frontiers and Identities: Exploring the Research Area, Lud’a Klusáková, Steven G. Ellis eds., 2006; 2. Imagining Frontiers. Contesting Identities, Steven G. Ellis, Lud’a Klusáková eds., 2007; 3. Frontiers and Identities: Cities in Regions and Nations, Lud’a Klusáková, Laure Teulières eds., 2008; 4. Frontiers, Regions and Identities in Europe, Steven G. Ellis, Raingard Eßer, with Jean-Franēois Berdah, Miloš Řezník eds., 2009. Thematic Work Group 6, “Europe and the World” 1. Europe and the World in European Historiography, Csaba Lévai ed., 2006; 2. Sights and Insights: Interactive Images of Europe and the Wider World, Mary N. Harris ed., 2007; 3. Europe and its Empires, Mary N. Harris, Csaba Lévai eds., 2008; 4. European Migrants, Diasporas and Ethnic Minorities, Matjaž Klemenčič, Mary N. Harris eds., 2009. Transversal Themes 1. Citizenship in Historical Perspective, Steven G. Ellis, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, Ann Katherine Isaacs eds., 2006; 2. Immigration and Emigration in Historical Perspective, Ann Katherine Isaacs ed., 2007; 3. Discrimination and Tolerance in Historical Perspective, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson ed., 2008; 4. Paths to gender. European Historical perspectives on Women and Men, Carla Salvaterra, Berteke Waaldijk eds., 2009.
Doctoral Dissertations 1. Florencia Peyrou, La Comunidad de Ciudadanos. El Discurso Democrático-Republicano en España, 1840-1868 (2006); 2. Marta Smagacz, Revitalisation of Urban Space. Social changes in Kraków’s Kazimierz and the Ticinese District of Milan (2007); 3. Andreas Gémes, Austria and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Between Solidarity and Neutrality (2008); 4. Vitaly V. Tichonov, A Historian of the “Old School”. Boris Ivanovich Syromyatnikov’s Scientific Biography (2008); 5. Momir Samardžić, The Railway Issue in Serbian Politics (1878-1881) (2009); 6. Claudia Bertazzo, I Magnati e il Diritto nei Comuni Italiani del XIII Secolo (2009); 7. Michael Refalo, The Maltese Commercial Class 1870-1914: Business, Families, Networks (2010); 8. Neval Berber, Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912) (2010).
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