The early nineteenth-century rebellions in the Balkans are regularly depicted by historians and international relations scholars as “the national revolutions.” These major historical events, including the two Serbian uprisings (1804–13 and 1815–17), the 1821 Wallachian revolt, and the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), are often interpreted as nationalist insurgencies against the Ottoman Empire. In the conventional view, the Christian populations of the Balkans have rebelled against “the Ottoman yoke,” aiming to establish their own sovereign and independent nation-states. Nevertheless, as Lynn Tesser shows convincingly in her new book, such descriptions are mostly incorrect. Rather than being driven by nationalist aspirations, these rebellions were largely a by-product of imperial geopolitics and the changing socioeconomic conditions in the region.

One of the key arguments of this book is that the new nation-states do not necessarily emerge due to the strength of popular nationalist sentiments or the vigor of nationalist movements. Rather, the creation of such polities has much more to do with the larger structural transformations of empires. Tesser is critical of the dominant accounts that overemphasize the explanatory power of nationalism or project the contemporary concept of “nationhood” into the premo