In the summer of 1850, Ömer Lütfi Paşa led a punitive expedition into the Ottoman eyalet (vilayet from 1867) of Bosnia to subdue provincial notables who had risen against the Tanzimat – the imperial bureaucracy’s sweeping centralizing reforms. Ivo Andrić, the Yugoslav novelist and Nobel laureate, fictionalized Ömer’s encounter with Bosnia’s obstinate aristocracy. In Andrić’s telling, the native beys defied the Paşa – an upstart who had been born an Austrian subject of Orthodox Christian faith and converted to Islam in his mid-twenties. “This is Bosnia, you fool,” they thought while measuring up Ömer’s resolve, “a land that bends but does not change.”1 Yet, within a year, the imperial troops painstakingly crushed the anti-reform movement. Despite Ömer Lütfi’s triumphs, the trope of historical stagnation had not only framed Andrić’s fiction. It has routinely served historians, who, regardless of divergent ideological and scholarly sensibilities, interpreted the last decades of Ottoman rule in Bosnia as inevitably pointing to a systemic breakdown of sovereignty and the eventual Austro-Hungarian occupation (1878) and annexation (1908).

Hannes Grandits’ deeply researched study counters these teleologies, be they of Habsburg imperialist, Balkan nationalist, or Yugoslav socialist persuasions. Grandits details the multifaceted socioeconomic and political changes that defined Bosnia in the 1860s and 1870s. The book repositions the westernmost vilayet of Ottoman Europe as a hub in a broad matrix of bureaucratic expansion, interstate rivalry, and attendant violence. This is a work of synthetic interpretation whose originality lies in a skillful weaving together of multiple historical approaches: biographies of non-elite actors, studies of communal violence, social and economic analysis of state-making, and transimperial geopolitics. The author employs a creative methodology to comprehend the denouement of centuries-long Ottoman rule in Bosnia, tracking how local events shaped and were in turn shaped by regional and continental developments. The result is a dynamic narrative that entwines the microfabrics of social strife, the state-building efforts of provincial elites, and the far-reaching twists of imperial competition.

The book’s extraordinary thematic breadth emanates from its blending of diverse types of sources. Grandits mobilizes understudied memoirs, prompting contemporaries of various social and ethnoreligious backgrounds into a multidirectional dialogue about the crises through which they lived. The voices of a Swiss director of the Sarajevo vilayet hospital, a Dalmatian telegraphic officer in Ottoman service, and a Catholic parish priest who sat on the vilayet’s supreme administrative council come together to underscore manifold contingencies channeling Bosnia’s historical currents. To supplement firsthand accounts, Grandits uses Austrian and Montenegrin archival documents, translations of official Ottoman correspondence, and published collections of Great Power diplomatic reports.

Chapters 1 and 2 trace the extensive administrative and social transformations that the imperial and vilayet bureaucracies spurred during the 1860s. Mirroring the empire-wide reform drives, the Bosnian statesmen were confident that the perceived weaknesses of governance could be overcome with a sustained standardization of legal systems.2 As Grandits stresses, this optimism galvanized agrarian and tax reforms, trade liberalization, investments in public infrastructure and security, and an attempt at incorporating leaderships of separate confessional communities more firmly into vilayet administration. Yet, rapid change and political turbulence on all sides of provincial borders exacerbated old and opened up new social fissures. Nascent discourses of national liberation and class antagonism, expansionism of neighboring Serb and Montenegrin autonomous principalities, the unpredictable posture of imperial rivals, and contractions of global financial markets compromised the reform endeavor. Nonetheless, Grandits notes that the Ottoman hold over Bosnia remained firm. Into the mid-1870s, as the empire experimented with institutional tools that would anchor the central state’s authority and involve larger sections of the populace in the business of government, there was no sign of credible threats to the legitimacy of the existing order.

Chapters 3 and 4 present a new reading of the origins of the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–1878). Explanations prevalent in Yugoslav and ex-Yugoslav historiographies have posited that the Ottoman rule in Bosnia and much of the Balkans crumbled under the pressures of nationalism and/or revolutionary class struggle (pp. 82–83). Contrasting previous historical narratives, Grandits contends that the maelstrom of violence that soon consumed Ottoman Europe stemmed from local disturbances in the Bosnian vilayet’s southeastern borderlands in the summer of 1875. At this point, the author offers two novel insights. First, rather than imploding under the weight of fiscal collapse and societal strains, the Ottoman state doggedly pursued pacification. When an escalation of conflicts over taxation in eastern Herzegovina and armed Montenegrin incursions set in motion a massive refugee crisis, the Ottoman administration not only succeeded in gradually pacifying the region but also put in place robust interimperial repatriation mechanisms. Second, Grandits reframes the Herzegovina uprising as a failure of nationalist activists who poured into the region from Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Serbia, and further afield. Rather than inciting widespread revolts, these “professional revolutionaries” had to come to terms with the locals’ indifference or outright aversion to anti-imperial ideologies of Pan-Slavism, nationalism, and socialism (pp. 59–63). As a matter of fact, Grandits points out that by early 1876 contemporary observers would have agreed that the tumultuous episode in Herzegovina had completely subsided, being only the latest in a long line of violent but temporary outbursts in scarcely administered frontier districts.

The last three chapters outline the integration of Bosnia’s local crises into patterns of diplomatic exigency and the Ottomans’ devastating wars with Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia (1876–1878). Challenging pervasive nineteenth-century discourses and later historiographical tropes of Ottoman stasis, disorder, and imminent decline, Grandits shows how the Bosnian provincial bureaucracy went about its business amid systemic turmoil, withstanding insurgency and successfully managing socioeconomic discontent. As the imperial armies faced a series of defeats in the winter of 1877–1878, hundreds of thousands of Balkan Muslims left ancestral homes across the peninsula – from Podgorica to Filibe/Plovdiv. However, the state apparatus in Bosnia prevailed as an integral and functioning part of the Ottoman body politic. It pushed on with administrative reforms and counterinsurgency campaigns, sought to strengthen imperial loyalties and cross-confessional cooperation, provided social security payments to returning soldiers, and sent delegates to the newly-constituted Ottoman Parliament.

Grandits concludes that there was nothing inevitable about the end of Ottoman rule in Bosnia. Even after Austria-Hungary had secured the mandate to occupy the vilayet at the Congress of Berlin (June–July 1878), no cracks appeared in the imperial edifice. Claiming guardianship over the Sultan’s authority, provincial notables wrestled power away from demoralized state officials, mounting stern yet forlorn resistance against an occupying force of more than 150,000. Thus, as Grandits forcefully demonstrates, the Ottoman political infrastructure did not disintegrate. Rather, it was destroyed by a predatory “civilized” empire in what deserves to be regarded as the truly last Habsburg-Ottoman war. By closely reexamining “the years in between” or the period from the summer of 1875 to the autumn of 1878, the book reveals the interconnectedness of various actors – bureaucrats, bandits, nationalists, diplomats, war correspondents, refugees, peasants, soldiers – and historical forces – global capitalist circuits, cycles of imperial cooperation and rivalry, humanitarian interventions, provincial reform and state-making – that underpinned the history of late Ottoman Bosnia (pp. 311–314).

Finally, Grandits could have expanded on the longer trajectory of Austro-Hungarian designs on Bosnia. He suggests that the emperor, the Foreign Ministry, and the army devised the occupation policy only in mid-1878. Even if there existed no exhaustive plan, the possibility of occupation had already been discussed with Russian counterparts in Reichstadt and Budapest in 1876–1877.3 The omission and an occasional factual error aside (Kragujevac was the capital of the Serb Principality until 1841, not 1867), The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia sets a standard in a field that has seen a thorough deconstruction of old research paradigms. Grandits’ ceaseless traversing of the local, the regional, and the transregional positions him as a trailblazer in the ongoing search for new interpretive frameworks in modern Balkan history. His careful analysis of situational loyalties and the unstable interplays between state and non-state actors charts an exciting historiographical path.

Notes:
1 Ivo Andrić, Omer-paša Latas, Belgrade 2019, p. 39.
2 Bosnia was by no means special in this regard. In the 1860s, provincial reform unfolded along similar lines in all corners of the Ottoman Empire. See, for instance, Nora Barakat, Bedouin Bureaucrats. Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, Stanford 2023, especially chapter 2; Chris Gratien, The Unsettled Plain. An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Stanford 2022, especially chapter 2; M. Safa Saraçoğlu, Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria. Politics in Provincial Councils, Edinburgh 2018.
3 See Mihailo D. Stojanović, The Great Powers and the Balkans, 1875–1878, Cambridge 1968, pp. 74–77; A. F. Pribram, The Secret Treaties of Austria-Hungary 1879–1914, volume II, Cambridge 1921, pp. 188–203.