What do you think?
Rate this book
Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands
“Anyone who studies nationalism, genocide, mass violence, or war in these regions, from the Enlightenment through the mid-20th century, needs to read [this].”—Central European History Shatterzone of Empires is a comprehensive analysis of interethnic relations, coexistence, and violence in Europe’s eastern borderlands over the past two centuries. In this vast territory, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethnically and religiously diverse populations encountered each other along often changing and contested borders. Examining this geographically widespread, multicultural region at several levels—local, national, transnational, and empire—and through multiple approaches—social, cultural, political, and economic—this volume offers informed and dispassionate analyses of how the many populations of these borderlands managed to coexist in a previous era and how and why the areas eventually descended into violence. An understanding of this specific region will help readers grasp the preconditions of interethnic coexistence and the causes of ethnic violence and war in many of the world's other borderlands, both past and present.
543 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
253 people are currently reading
343 people want to read
About the author
Omer Bartov
34 books64 followersOmer Bartov is an Israeli-born historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a noted historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of genocide.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 22, 2018
The Worlds Between
An absolutely brilliant collection of 26 essays that will alter and intensify one's understanding of the interplay between, and eventual collapse of, empires in the 19th and 20th centuries. Each of the 26 historians offer deep and compelling insights by focusing on regions of contention where the borders of identity are weakly defined and up for grabs. Each chapter runs about 20 pages and stands well on its own. Its well written and well worth taking the time to read.
Imagining the Other
Larry Wolfe and Gregor Thum (Ch 1,2) discuss the impressions of travelers as they passed through the seams, observing how prototypically Russian, Polish, German, Czeck, Jewish, Slav (etc) the natives are. In "Megalomania and Angst" Thum talks about the famous Teutonic castle at Marienburg, which , when ownership was resolved as Prussian, which was was restored in 1804 into a popular tourist site and nationalist symbol. Ironically, it's is now on the Polish side. Similarly in the Carpathian mountains on the borders shared by at various times by Czechoslovakia , Germany, Hungary , Poland and Romania and Slovakia, the locals Czechs responded to the question of nationalism by organizing field trips to Prague whereas local Germans responding by bringing tourists to the mountains - both groups offered hiking packages and including rests at ethnically tinged hotels and beer gardens. The Ukranian/Polish village of Kryvorivnia (Ch 7) became a Mecca to many writers and artists. As an example the local Hutsul people were idealized, in particular by Ukranian impresario and writer Hnat Khotkevych who created a traveling theatre troop to promote Hutsul culture.
Language, literature, culture and schooling were applied politically as markers of identity. The Austria-Hungarian empire was itself was progressive and accommodating, legislating that if there were 40 students for a particular group, schooling would be provided in the language of choice. (Similar legislation exists in Canada.) Along the divide parents responded (Ch 6: Our Laws, Our Taxes by Gary Cohen ; Ch 11 - Marking National Space by Pieter Judson) by sending their children to different schools in alternate years, in part due to incentives such as offers of free school clothing or better Christmas presents, but also out of a desire to see that their children were fluently bilingual. When offered choice of one national identity or another preferred both. Of all the borderlands covered, the Carpathian highlands were perhaps unique as being the most diverse but the least prone to internal violence, possibly because no group had a clear advantage either in numerical, political or economic weight, which did not preclude violence from outside. (Ch 24: Carpathian Rus by Paul Mogosci)
Minority Rights
Several essays consider the special case of Jews in Europe or Christians such as Armenians , Assyrians or Copts in the Ottoman Empire. As empires devolved into nation states, these, like the Roma were dispersed groups that depended on the legal largess of the empire for their rights, causing them to show up at peace conferences such as the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), Berlin (1878), Versailles (Paris 1919), or in the case of the Armenians, lobbying for Tanzimat reform and implementation within the Ottoman empire . Emancipation, though slow, created a power shift where majorities felt threatened. However in early 20th century Kiev along the old border between Russia and Austria Hungary there was a cultural renaisance and sharing between Ukranians and Jews. (CH 23: Myroslav Shkandru -National Modernism in Post-Revolutionary Society - 1917-1930) . Ottoman Salonika thrived (for a while), becoming the most prosperous Jewish city in the early 20th century. Combined with the Greeks and the Armenians they dominated Ottoman trade, and emancipation allowed educated Greeks and Armenians to fill the ranks of at least lower end clerical service.
Another interesting example was Upper Silesia (Ch 26 by Philipp Ther: Caught In Between). Ther reports the following sentence collected from a teenager by sociologist Danuta Berlinska reflecting the cultural borrowing of the region: "Jechoech na kole, trzaszech sie ze stromem i sie skrzywia linksztanga". It translates as "The Silesian boy rode a Czech bicycle with an old Polish verb and archaic Polish grammar into a Czech tree and then the German handlebars broke". (pp487). This kind of continuous creole appears in other border areas too.and points tot he importance of local identities over national. This serves as a gloss on the Silesian experience of being caught between multiple cultures and being a member of neither.
Where and How We Define the Border
The common theme is the problem of mapping ethnography to geography. In establishing the borders of the nation state the allegiances of the periphery become central. Whereas empires are multicultural though not egalitarian, the resolution of emerging national identities demanded homogenous linguistic and cultural markers. Yet by and large the people of the borderlands were ambivalent. Improved technology such as rail and roads (no-one seems to have mentioned telecommunications) changed the relationship to the center, an earlier form of globalization. It was a mixed blessing. Even though rail extended the power of empire it turns out then,as now, that globalization works in both direction. The same channels that carry commercial and military power from the centre can carry anarchy, rebellion and new ideas back to the core.
Frithjof Schenk (Ch 7: Identity Formation in the Russian Empire) writes about the Tsar's attempt to redirect trade to Russia away from Prussia through connecting St. Petersberg to Warsaw and Vienna. He notes that the stories of Sholom Aleichem often reflect the presence of trains, either bringing trouble from outside or offering escape from the Pale. In the 1880s Polish nationalists attacked rail and telegraph, finding support amongst the workers. The Russian Governor-General Gurko attempted to replace the Polish Catholics with qualified Russian Orthodox technicians but could not find enough.
Nor were borders necessarily precise, at least not until modernity where they can be measured. A border can simply be an vaguely defined hinterland, often of little value, where one territory fades into another. An interesting take on this was Pamela Balinger's "Liquid Borderland: Mapping the Eastern Adriatic". (Ch 22) Here she contrasts the mental imagery of national space by fishermen familiar with shoals, currents and the habits of fish, vs inland administrators more used to thinking in terms of straight lines and ecologists concerned with ecosystems rather than politics or shore based geography.
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
At worst the outcome is ethnic cleansing up to genocide. Peter Holquist in "Forms of Violence" (Ch 18) argues that WW Russian military policy in Anatolia and Persia was driven from above by logistics informed by statistics but the implementation from below resulted in civil disaster. This structural approach to violence differs Alexander Prussians assessment of Russian involvement in Galicia during WW I and II (Ch 19) which where both rulers and peasantry were suspicious of ethnic groups, in particular Jews, and incitement and permission to massacre and loot was used as a political instrument to acquire loyalty to the State. In 1941 the effect was repeated - the German invasion of the Soviet Union coupled with Nazi "anti-Jewish-Bolshevik" propaganda resulted in a wave of pogroms throughout the borderlands against Jews by multiple ethnic groups.
John-Paul Himka (Ch 20: Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder) looks at the NKVD massacres that took place in Russian managed jails when the Soviets retreated. Blame was disproportionaly leveled against long gone members of the NKVD who were presumed to be Jewish, and it was the local Jews who remained who paid the price. Chapter 4 (Theodore Weeks: Jews and Other in Vilna-Wilno-Vilnius) considers the flourishing of Jewish culture prior to WW I in the northerly region between Russia and Poland, and the subsequent destruction during WW I and II.
Editor Omer Bartov takes a different tact. In Communal Genocide - The Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (Ch 21) he examines eyewitness testimony of victims, bystanders, perpetrators, collaborators and rescuers. He advocates their use on equal footing with public documentation on the grounds that they bring to light both attitudes events that might otherwise go unnoticed, and deals effectively with possible objections.
Chapters 16 and 17 (Eyal Ginio and Keith Brown) do coverage similar to each other of Greek/Macedonian violence and ethnic cleansing against Balkan Ottomans, important to note, certainly not excusable, though Greeks would no doubt object to the lack of coverage of the ethnic cleansing of their populations from what is now Turkey.
Eric Weitz, Elke Hartman, Taner Akçam cover the Armenian Genocide. Weitz considers German imperial ambitions at the turn of the century, their relationship with the Ottomans both before and after the CUP coup, how they balanced this apropos the Balkan wars and their alignment with Austria-Hungary. Unlike the Western powers they were indifferent to the plight Ottoman Christians, disparaging them as destabilizing insurrectionists and "the Jews of the Orient", a phrase that occurs often in the German archives.
Hartman's topic (Ch 9) is the delegation of state power in the east by arming Kurdish, Yezidi and Arab tribes, largely refugees and nomads, with a view towards policing the region against Russian imperialism and counterbalancing the unlikely possibility of Armenian secession - a gross overreaction. The tribes were also given land to farm in an attempt to settle them, however many took the easier path of preying on and looting their more prosperous Armenian and Assyrian neighbours, culminating in the Hamidye massacres of 1895-96. The state thus played rival factions against each other yet absolved itself of responsibility, thus staving off European complaints, by blaming local actors.
Akçam describes the Young Turk regime as driven by poorly conceived precepts of statistics and social engineering in order to "manage" populations. The official idea was to keep the number of ethnic non-Muslims down to a controllable level of 5% or 10% of the population in each region. Whereas the Aegean Greeks were "managed" through a campaign of "threats, intimidation, looting and a limited number of killings" (pp272) resulting in forced deportation to Greece, the Armenians were subject to redistribution from their homes and were marched to unsustainable locations. As Akçam points out - 1.2 million Armenians were to be "resettled" in provinces with a total Muslim population of 1.7 million. Do the math - it can't be done.
David Gaunt (Ch 17) covers the collateral Assyrian genocide. In his view the Assyrians suffered in part because they were confused with Armenians, in part due to disunity between factions an in part due to the influx of nomadic Kurds and Arab tribes who found agrarian and village Christians easy targets for land theft and looting. Unlike the Armenians the Assyrian perspective was purely local and Gaunt suggests that they were unaware of the wider issues of Turkification - not that this awareness helped the Armenians in the long run. The Assyrian case is not widely known and Gaunt only devotes a single line to the final set of 1933 massacres. (See: The Forgotten Genocide: Eastern Christians, The Last Arameans, Genocide in the Islamic World: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudanand Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory).)
In Summary
It's a terrific book that deserves to be in any university or public library and read by history teachers especially, not to mention history buffs or political pundits of international relations. The information is not introductory, rather it best complements prior familiarity either with one or more histories of the regions in question, yet the techniques and insights are IMV wide ranging wrt global notions of national identity movements (Quebec, Belgium, Scotland, Africa, India, South America) , multiculturalism as well as understanding the initial frictions and reactions that can lead to exacerbated conflict.
An absolutely brilliant collection of 26 essays that will alter and intensify one's understanding of the interplay between, and eventual collapse of, empires in the 19th and 20th centuries. Each of the 26 historians offer deep and compelling insights by focusing on regions of contention where the borders of identity are weakly defined and up for grabs. Each chapter runs about 20 pages and stands well on its own. Its well written and well worth taking the time to read.
Imagining the Other
Larry Wolfe and Gregor Thum (Ch 1,2) discuss the impressions of travelers as they passed through the seams, observing how prototypically Russian, Polish, German, Czeck, Jewish, Slav (etc) the natives are. In "Megalomania and Angst" Thum talks about the famous Teutonic castle at Marienburg, which , when ownership was resolved as Prussian, which was was restored in 1804 into a popular tourist site and nationalist symbol. Ironically, it's is now on the Polish side. Similarly in the Carpathian mountains on the borders shared by at various times by Czechoslovakia , Germany, Hungary , Poland and Romania and Slovakia, the locals Czechs responded to the question of nationalism by organizing field trips to Prague whereas local Germans responding by bringing tourists to the mountains - both groups offered hiking packages and including rests at ethnically tinged hotels and beer gardens. The Ukranian/Polish village of Kryvorivnia (Ch 7) became a Mecca to many writers and artists. As an example the local Hutsul people were idealized, in particular by Ukranian impresario and writer Hnat Khotkevych who created a traveling theatre troop to promote Hutsul culture.
Language, literature, culture and schooling were applied politically as markers of identity. The Austria-Hungarian empire was itself was progressive and accommodating, legislating that if there were 40 students for a particular group, schooling would be provided in the language of choice. (Similar legislation exists in Canada.) Along the divide parents responded (Ch 6: Our Laws, Our Taxes by Gary Cohen ; Ch 11 - Marking National Space by Pieter Judson) by sending their children to different schools in alternate years, in part due to incentives such as offers of free school clothing or better Christmas presents, but also out of a desire to see that their children were fluently bilingual. When offered choice of one national identity or another preferred both. Of all the borderlands covered, the Carpathian highlands were perhaps unique as being the most diverse but the least prone to internal violence, possibly because no group had a clear advantage either in numerical, political or economic weight, which did not preclude violence from outside. (Ch 24: Carpathian Rus by Paul Mogosci)
Minority Rights
Several essays consider the special case of Jews in Europe or Christians such as Armenians , Assyrians or Copts in the Ottoman Empire. As empires devolved into nation states, these, like the Roma were dispersed groups that depended on the legal largess of the empire for their rights, causing them to show up at peace conferences such as the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), Berlin (1878), Versailles (Paris 1919), or in the case of the Armenians, lobbying for Tanzimat reform and implementation within the Ottoman empire . Emancipation, though slow, created a power shift where majorities felt threatened. However in early 20th century Kiev along the old border between Russia and Austria Hungary there was a cultural renaisance and sharing between Ukranians and Jews. (CH 23: Myroslav Shkandru -National Modernism in Post-Revolutionary Society - 1917-1930) . Ottoman Salonika thrived (for a while), becoming the most prosperous Jewish city in the early 20th century. Combined with the Greeks and the Armenians they dominated Ottoman trade, and emancipation allowed educated Greeks and Armenians to fill the ranks of at least lower end clerical service.
Another interesting example was Upper Silesia (Ch 26 by Philipp Ther: Caught In Between). Ther reports the following sentence collected from a teenager by sociologist Danuta Berlinska reflecting the cultural borrowing of the region: "Jechoech na kole, trzaszech sie ze stromem i sie skrzywia linksztanga". It translates as "The Silesian boy rode a Czech bicycle with an old Polish verb and archaic Polish grammar into a Czech tree and then the German handlebars broke". (pp487). This kind of continuous creole appears in other border areas too.and points tot he importance of local identities over national. This serves as a gloss on the Silesian experience of being caught between multiple cultures and being a member of neither.
Where and How We Define the Border
The common theme is the problem of mapping ethnography to geography. In establishing the borders of the nation state the allegiances of the periphery become central. Whereas empires are multicultural though not egalitarian, the resolution of emerging national identities demanded homogenous linguistic and cultural markers. Yet by and large the people of the borderlands were ambivalent. Improved technology such as rail and roads (no-one seems to have mentioned telecommunications) changed the relationship to the center, an earlier form of globalization. It was a mixed blessing. Even though rail extended the power of empire it turns out then,as now, that globalization works in both direction. The same channels that carry commercial and military power from the centre can carry anarchy, rebellion and new ideas back to the core.
Frithjof Schenk (Ch 7: Identity Formation in the Russian Empire) writes about the Tsar's attempt to redirect trade to Russia away from Prussia through connecting St. Petersberg to Warsaw and Vienna. He notes that the stories of Sholom Aleichem often reflect the presence of trains, either bringing trouble from outside or offering escape from the Pale. In the 1880s Polish nationalists attacked rail and telegraph, finding support amongst the workers. The Russian Governor-General Gurko attempted to replace the Polish Catholics with qualified Russian Orthodox technicians but could not find enough.
Nor were borders necessarily precise, at least not until modernity where they can be measured. A border can simply be an vaguely defined hinterland, often of little value, where one territory fades into another. An interesting take on this was Pamela Balinger's "Liquid Borderland: Mapping the Eastern Adriatic". (Ch 22) Here she contrasts the mental imagery of national space by fishermen familiar with shoals, currents and the habits of fish, vs inland administrators more used to thinking in terms of straight lines and ecologists concerned with ecosystems rather than politics or shore based geography.
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
At worst the outcome is ethnic cleansing up to genocide. Peter Holquist in "Forms of Violence" (Ch 18) argues that WW Russian military policy in Anatolia and Persia was driven from above by logistics informed by statistics but the implementation from below resulted in civil disaster. This structural approach to violence differs Alexander Prussians assessment of Russian involvement in Galicia during WW I and II (Ch 19) which where both rulers and peasantry were suspicious of ethnic groups, in particular Jews, and incitement and permission to massacre and loot was used as a political instrument to acquire loyalty to the State. In 1941 the effect was repeated - the German invasion of the Soviet Union coupled with Nazi "anti-Jewish-Bolshevik" propaganda resulted in a wave of pogroms throughout the borderlands against Jews by multiple ethnic groups.
John-Paul Himka (Ch 20: Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder) looks at the NKVD massacres that took place in Russian managed jails when the Soviets retreated. Blame was disproportionaly leveled against long gone members of the NKVD who were presumed to be Jewish, and it was the local Jews who remained who paid the price. Chapter 4 (Theodore Weeks: Jews and Other in Vilna-Wilno-Vilnius) considers the flourishing of Jewish culture prior to WW I in the northerly region between Russia and Poland, and the subsequent destruction during WW I and II.
Editor Omer Bartov takes a different tact. In Communal Genocide - The Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (Ch 21) he examines eyewitness testimony of victims, bystanders, perpetrators, collaborators and rescuers. He advocates their use on equal footing with public documentation on the grounds that they bring to light both attitudes events that might otherwise go unnoticed, and deals effectively with possible objections.
Chapters 16 and 17 (Eyal Ginio and Keith Brown) do coverage similar to each other of Greek/Macedonian violence and ethnic cleansing against Balkan Ottomans, important to note, certainly not excusable, though Greeks would no doubt object to the lack of coverage of the ethnic cleansing of their populations from what is now Turkey.
Eric Weitz, Elke Hartman, Taner Akçam cover the Armenian Genocide. Weitz considers German imperial ambitions at the turn of the century, their relationship with the Ottomans both before and after the CUP coup, how they balanced this apropos the Balkan wars and their alignment with Austria-Hungary. Unlike the Western powers they were indifferent to the plight Ottoman Christians, disparaging them as destabilizing insurrectionists and "the Jews of the Orient", a phrase that occurs often in the German archives.
Hartman's topic (Ch 9) is the delegation of state power in the east by arming Kurdish, Yezidi and Arab tribes, largely refugees and nomads, with a view towards policing the region against Russian imperialism and counterbalancing the unlikely possibility of Armenian secession - a gross overreaction. The tribes were also given land to farm in an attempt to settle them, however many took the easier path of preying on and looting their more prosperous Armenian and Assyrian neighbours, culminating in the Hamidye massacres of 1895-96. The state thus played rival factions against each other yet absolved itself of responsibility, thus staving off European complaints, by blaming local actors.
Akçam describes the Young Turk regime as driven by poorly conceived precepts of statistics and social engineering in order to "manage" populations. The official idea was to keep the number of ethnic non-Muslims down to a controllable level of 5% or 10% of the population in each region. Whereas the Aegean Greeks were "managed" through a campaign of "threats, intimidation, looting and a limited number of killings" (pp272) resulting in forced deportation to Greece, the Armenians were subject to redistribution from their homes and were marched to unsustainable locations. As Akçam points out - 1.2 million Armenians were to be "resettled" in provinces with a total Muslim population of 1.7 million. Do the math - it can't be done.
David Gaunt (Ch 17) covers the collateral Assyrian genocide. In his view the Assyrians suffered in part because they were confused with Armenians, in part due to disunity between factions an in part due to the influx of nomadic Kurds and Arab tribes who found agrarian and village Christians easy targets for land theft and looting. Unlike the Armenians the Assyrian perspective was purely local and Gaunt suggests that they were unaware of the wider issues of Turkification - not that this awareness helped the Armenians in the long run. The Assyrian case is not widely known and Gaunt only devotes a single line to the final set of 1933 massacres. (See: The Forgotten Genocide: Eastern Christians, The Last Arameans, Genocide in the Islamic World: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudanand Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory).)
In Summary
It's a terrific book that deserves to be in any university or public library and read by history teachers especially, not to mention history buffs or political pundits of international relations. The information is not introductory, rather it best complements prior familiarity either with one or more histories of the regions in question, yet the techniques and insights are IMV wide ranging wrt global notions of national identity movements (Quebec, Belgium, Scotland, Africa, India, South America) , multiculturalism as well as understanding the initial frictions and reactions that can lead to exacerbated conflict.
November 14, 2021
Overall, an excellent discussion of the dynamics of nationalism, regionalism, and the historical contingencies of the process of creating present-day Europe.
Not every chapter is for everyone, I think; I certainly didn’t read all of the essays. Some are clearly geared for a more specialist audience, and even in some of the more general-interest essays, I found myself with Wikipedia close at hand (“what exactly were the border of interwar Silesia again?”).
But if you have an interest in nationalism and the process of nation-state building, what this means for minority populations and cultural practices, and how this might help you understand some of the similar dynamics at play today, I encourage you to check it out.
Not every chapter is for everyone, I think; I certainly didn’t read all of the essays. Some are clearly geared for a more specialist audience, and even in some of the more general-interest essays, I found myself with Wikipedia close at hand (“what exactly were the border of interwar Silesia again?”).
But if you have an interest in nationalism and the process of nation-state building, what this means for minority populations and cultural practices, and how this might help you understand some of the similar dynamics at play today, I encourage you to check it out.
July 28, 2025
This is an academic book for readers with a knowledge of Eastern European history post 1770s and especially of European nationalism. The reader also needs a grasp of history/geography of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, the Middle East and Caucuses. But, while not an easy read, I highly recommend.
January 1, 2026
A fantastic, scholarly work. This collection of essays covers many of the dynamics of ethnic relations and conflicts of Central and Eastern European empires in the 19th and 20th centuries. I strongly recommend for anyone interested in studying nationalism, Eastern Europe or the Holocaust.
November 7, 2021
Some of the writing is amazing and some is pretty bad. I learned a ton on how multi ethnic areas were destroyed by hate. This is a book I recommend skipped articles that don’t draw you in.
September 10, 2022
Good Bedtime Reading
If you are into European history, then read this. It provides a better understanding of the regions that are within a nation of country.
If you are into European history, then read this. It provides a better understanding of the regions that are within a nation of country.
May 15, 2022
Shatterzone of Empires is a collection of scholarly essays that analyze the causes of ethnic conflict and violence among the peoples of eastern Europe's historic borderlands during the 19th and 20th centuries. The work received highly favorable reviews from scholars when it was published in 2013, and it is hardly my intention to critique it as I am not qualified to do so. However, I bought the book to gain a deeper understanding of the current war in Ukraine, and it was very helpful in that regard. Within the collection, there are several studies dealing with the terrible genocides that occurred in western Ukraine during the Second World War and earlier. Although difficult to read, these studies provide context for the equally terrible images we are seeing on television and social media every day now. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand the underpinnings of the current conflict.
May 13, 2016
An extremely valuable collection of narratives discussing national identity, borderlands, and transnational exchange.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews