Society, the City and Industry in the Balkans, 15th-19th Centuries

Nikolai Todorov. Society, the City and Industry in the Balkans, 15th-19th Centuries. Studies in East-Central Europe 1500-1900, Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1998. x. 340 pp. Index. $103.95, cloth. This collection brings together fourteen of Nikolai Todorov's works published between 1964 and 1992. Seven were written in English, and the other half in French; most derived originally from conference papers that were subsequently published. In general, all articles reflect his long-standing devotion to researching the socioeconomic histories of the Balkan region during periods of Ottoman rule. The availability of these articles in one volume is a convenient resource for the researcher examining Ottoman-era societies in the Balkans, and especially in Bulgaria. A major flaw of the book, one that cannot be attributed to the author, is the lack of any sort of introduction that would explicate to the reader Todorov's place in Balkan scholarship or even in twentieth-century Bulgaria. In 1964, Todorov founded and became the first director of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Balkan Studies. Editor-in-chief of Etudes balkaniques, he was among a very limited number of Bulgarian academics whose works were published in English prior to the 1990s. He also held senior positions in Bulgaria's Academy of Sciences, was appointed as Bulgaria's ambassador both to Greece and to UNESCO, served as the Chairman of the Grand National Assembly of Bulgaria, and is noteworthy for other distinctions in and out of academia. The failure to include an introduction, a bibliography, and so forth-as is often found in other Variorum publications-was a serious omission on the part of the editors of this text and the series. After reading these articles published over a period spanning four decades, it is apparent that a major objective in Todorov's scholarly career was to challenge the standard Bulgarian, East European, and Soviet historical narratives concerning the Balkans. These narratives tended to depict the Ottoman period as one of negative absolutes: absolute domination, backwardness, destruction, religious intolerance, and so forth. Though very superficially conformist (i.e., his writing was quite empirical in content and sprinkled with occasional citations of Lenin, Marx, or established socialist/Soviet scholars), Todorov's scholarship was in most instances both credible and original in an environment that did not necessarily foster either virtue. Many of the articles are quite specific in topic and/or with respect to their intended audience. …

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