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Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- 1 The Fathers, 1780s–1820s -- 2 The Sons, 1820s–1860s -- 3 The Grandsons, 1860s–1890s -- 4 Gendered Business: Merchant Ladies as Entrepreneurs -- 5 Parallel Networks: Trade as Appropriation of Space and Multiple Uses of Time -- 6 Tropes of Nationalisms: Visible Markets, Invisible Ideologies -- 7 Everyday Practices, Sociability, and Public Imagery -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.

Drawing upon previously unpublished commercial ledgers and correspondence, this study offers a collective social biography of three generations of Balkan merchants. Personal accounts humanize multiethnic networks that navigated multiple social systems - supporting and opposing various aspects of nationalist ideologies.

AbstractHow were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens' interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the "naturalization" of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such "soft power" they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the "curing" and "caring" dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens' honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring "by nature," and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women's effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.

How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens' interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the "naturalization" of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such "soft power" they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the "curing" and "caring" dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens' honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring "by nature," and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women's effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.

Heike Karge, Friederike Kind-Kovacs, and Sara Bernasconi, eds., From the Midwife's Bag to the Patient's File: Public Health in Eastern Europe, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017, vii–xix, 349 pp., $70.00/€62.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-963-386-208-7.Constantin Barbulescu, Physicians, Peasants, and Modern Medicine: Imagining Rurality in Romania, 1860–1910, translated by Angela Jianu, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018, xi–xii, 292 pp., $60.00/€50.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-963-386-267-4.

This article discusses a specific type of religious travel—not pious pilgrimage to the Holy Lands—but more mundane trips performed by Eastern Orthodox sisters to beg for donations within and between three multi-confessional empires. More specifically, it focuses on how nuns' spatial movements put them on the bigger imperial and transnational maps of church, state, and society and contributed to negotiating space for gender. By combining mobility and gender as categories of analysis, I position the sisters' acts within three broad themes: travel, women's education, and social networks. I suggest that nuns' involvement in local communities and the establishment of schools for girls provides evidence for worldly as well as pious concerns. By encompassing rich social interactions, the sisters' story presents gender imbalances in more palpable form and embodies larger experiences of nineteenth-century women who strove to achieve self-development and to assert social visibility.

This article compares the geographic and social mobility of two "lesser known" groups of workers: merchants' assistants and maidservants. By combining labor mobility, class, and gender as categories of analysis, it suggests that such examples of temporary and return migration opened up new economic possibilities while at the same time reinforcing patriarchal order and increasing social inequality. Such transformative social practice is placed within the broader socio-economic and political fabric of the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans during the "long 19th century." ; This article compares the geographic and social mobility of two "lesser known" groups of workers: merchants' assistants and maidservants. By combining labor mobility, class, and gender as categories of analysis, it suggests that such examples of temporary and return migration opened up new economic possibilities while at the same time reinforcing patriarchal order and increasing social inequality. Such transformative social practice is placed within the broader socio-economic and political fabric of the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans during the "long 19th century."

This article focuses on Bulgaria and looks at the interconnected processes of building public health services and military institutions in the late Ottoman Empire and its other Balkan successor states: Greece, Serbia, and Romania. An elite class emerged from this development that moved between the army and civil service and vice versa. The paper draws on four case studies to follow the career paths of physicians who straddled two worlds – empire and nation-state – and tried to merge Ottoman notions of modernization with a compressed version of state-led modernization, de-Ottomanization, and militarization of Bulgaria. Both the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan nation-states borrowed models from European military, medical, and sanitary institutions. Thus, these states embraced the army as the epitome of modernization with concomitant attention given to medicine as a sign of scientific advancement. Such pairing under the umbrella of progress eased the subsequent expansion of state, militarization, and nationalism. The initial public health structures were thereby influenced by visions that privileged the state's military needs and compelled the new elites to champion nationalism. The article is grounded in archival materials, diaries, and memoirs and adds a neglected dimension to the understanding of the transition from empire to nation-state.