Mark Cornwall, "Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians have examined in depth the regional context which allowed this assassination to happen or the murder's ripples which quickly spread out across the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Europe as a whole. In Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Professor Mark Cornwall, a Central European specialist at the University of Southampton, has gathered an impressive cast of contributors from a 2014 history conference to explore the causes of the Sarajevo assassination and its consequences for the Balkans in the context of the First World War.

With Professor Cornwall writing a highly informative introductory essay, this volume assesses from a variety of regional perspectives how the 'South Slav Question' destabilized the empire's southern provinces, provoking violent discontent in Croatia and Bosnia, and exacerbating the empire's relations with Serbia, regarded by Austria-Hungary as a dangerous state. It then explores the ripples of the Sarajevo event, from its evolution into a European crisis to the creation of a new independent state of Yugoslavia.

Bringing together fresh perspectives by historians from Austria, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia, as well as leading British historians of Austria-Hungary, this book published by Bloomsbury Academic is essential reading for anyone, either specialists or the educated lay reader, who wants to understand the Sarajevo violence and how it shaped modern Balkan history and indeed world history,

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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