Sarajevo 1914 : Sparking the First World War
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 28 - History
- Output identifier
- 48908371
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.5040/9781350093171
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic Press
- ISBN
- 9781350093218
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 116,000 word volume supplies fresh research questions and contexts for understanding the Sarajevo assassination as the spark of the First World War. I was entirely responsible for conceptualizing the project and its thematic framework. It began with an international conference which I organized on the Sarajevo centenary in June 2014, assembling 21 senior and junior historians from Britain and East-Central Europe.
From this I selected 12 essays and commissioned one extra contribution (chapter 12). I also decided that the book, besides its division into the assassination’s origins and impact, should be contextualized around the complicated ‘Southern Slav Question’ – reasserting that question as an unresearched yet in fact major cause of the Great War. This resulted in my introductory chapter (5,600 words), which seeks to explain the significance of the ‘Question’ for a new readership. Chapter 11 is then my own research chapter (10,800 words), which analyses for the first time the Croatian political culture of 1914 via its Hungarian and Serb security problems. Through governmental and intelligence documents from the Croatian State Archives, as well as press and memoir sources in Serbo-Croatian, I highlight Croatia as an overlooked centre of political instability in the Habsburg empire and the Balkans.
Besides this original research, I translated and edited chapter 4 from the original Croatian, radically rewrote some of the chapters by non-British historians (chapters 5, 7, 13), and substantially edited others in order to provide a better synthesis with the book’s key themes (2, 3, 12, 14). Lastly, I compiled the index and researched half the volume’s pictures, including the cover image. On this basis I estimate that, in a book which refocuses our attention on how the ripples of Balkan instability destabilized the Europe of 1914, I contributed 45% of the contents and 100% of the editorial work.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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