Syllabus
Annotation
This course offers a unique comparative historical perspective on three small nation(states) within and without empires from the late 1870s to late 1920s. In so doing, it provides a fresh reading on the concepts of economic nationalism, nation, empire and nation-state.
It focuses exclusively on three different historical, political and socio-economic developments, namely, the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Bohemia, Ottoman Albania and Tsarist Georgia to their early years/decades as nation-states, respectively, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Georgia. With these three entities sharing an attempt to renegotiate their political position within the respective empires as well as their belated declaration of independence – in the contexts of the Balkan wars and the First World War – the course explores their political and economic alternatives in the two settings (imperial and national).
It does so by underscoring the economic dimension in the forging these modern small nation(states), in addition suggesting that rather than exclusionary the concepts of empire and nation-state were complementary to each other.