Dealing with smallness in Habsburg Bohemia, Ottoman Albania and Tsarist Georgia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Abstract
The borderlands of the Habsburg, Ottoman and Tsarist Empires, stretching from the Baltics to the Balkans, have long been understood by historians of the region as zones of conflict between imperial despotism on the one hand and emerging cultural and ethno-national societies on the other. These conflicts supposedly reached their zenith in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eventually resulting in the destruction of either the empires themselves or, in the case of the Soviet Union, the fall of the old regime and their replacement by an unprecedented socio-political experiment.
But, following Jürgen Osterhammel historians have more recently begun to study the remarkably peaceful co-existence of nations and empires up until the First World War. This chapter helps explain why, by focusing on and comparing the role played by smallness in political discourse amongst elites in three different imperial settings: in Habsburg Bohemia, Ottoman Albania and Tsarist..