Blood Ties - by İ & pek Yosmaoğ & lu (Paperback)

About the Book

Blood Ties explains the origins of the shift from sporadic to systemic and pervasive violence through a social history of the "Macedonian Question."

Book Synopsis

The region that is today Macedonia was long the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It was home to a complex mix of peoples and faiths who had for hundreds of years lived together in relative peace. To be sure, these people were no strangers to coercive violence and various forms of depredations visited upon them by bandits and state agents. In the final decades of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, however, the region was periodically racked by a bitter conflict that was qualitatively different from previous outbreaks of violence. In Blood Ties, Ipek K. Yosmaoglu explains the origins of this shift from sporadic to systemic and pervasive violence through a social history of the "Macedonian Question."Yosmaoglu's account begins in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin (1878), when a potent combination of zero-sum imperialism, nascent nationalism, and modernizing states set in motion the events that directly contributed to the outbreak of World War I and had consequences that reverberate to this day. Focusing on the experience of the inhabitants of Ottoman Macedonia during this period, she shows how communal solidarities broke down, time and space were rationalized, and the immutable form of the nation and national identity replaced polyglot, fluid associations that had formerly defined people's sense of collective belonging. The region was remapped; populations were counted and relocated. An escalation in symbolic and physical violence followed, and it was through this process that nationalism became an ideology of mass mobilization among the common folk. Yosmaoglu argues that national differentiation was a consequence, and not the cause, of violent conflict in Ottoman Macedonia.

Review Quotes

"Yosmaoglu relies on theoretical literature in sociology and political science about the use of violence to frame her arguments and to comprehend the patterns of mayhem that marked late Ottoman Macedonia. Hence, her study is an important contribution to a range of literatures in history and the social sciences. It sheds much light on the antecedents of violence in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s." Chip Cagnon, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Yosmaoğlu's riveting and multifaceted study of Ottoman Macedonia adds to the extensive literature on the Macedonian Question at two levels: first, it constitutes the first systematic study of Ottoman sources related to the area (triangulated with French, British, and, sporadically, Greek accounts), and second, it provides an unambiguously bottom-up depiction of events at the community level. Yosmaoğlu partakes in a new scholarly trend--led by Isa Blumi, Christine Phylliou, and Ryan Gingeras, among others--to integrate imperial (Ottoman) and national (Balkan) viewpoints in one coherent narrative....[H]er ability to analyze conflicting accounts, empathize with the plight of Ottoman subjects, and reject stereotypes about the Balkans is admirable.

About the Author

İpek K. Yosmaoğlu is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University.