Yugoslavia in the British Imagination : Peace, War and Peasants before Tito

Despite Britain entering the 20th century as the dominant world power, public discourses were imbued with a cultural pessimism and rising social anxiety. Through this study, Samuel Foster explores how this changing domestic climate shaped perceptions of other cultures, and Britain's relationship to them, focusing on those Balkan territories that formed the first Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1941.

Yugoslavia in the British Imagination examines these connections and demonstrates how the popular image of the region's peasantry evolved from that of foreign 'Other' to historical victim - suffering at the hand of modernity's worst excesses and symbolizing Britain's perceived decline. This coincided with an emerging moralistic sense of British identity that manifested during the First World War. Consequently, Yugoslavia was legitimized as the solution to peasant victimization and, as Foster's nuanced analysis reveals, enabling Britain's imagined (and self-promoted) revival as civilization's moral arbiter.

Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival sources, this compelling transnational analysis is an important contribution to the study of British social history and the nature of statehood in the modern Balkans.

“The images we have of others speak volumes about ourselves. In this book the history of the British images of the South Slav peasant become a handy tool for the telling of a wider and more intimate story: how modern Britain's ever shifting perceptions of the outside world were always, more than anything else, close reflections of Britain's own shifting self. The result is a rich, meshed history of the social and cultural lives of Britain and the Yugoslav lands from the late 19th century until the eve of the Second World War. This work is also a serious contribution to the field of imagology. Making good and critical use of the scholarship produced over the last thirty years on the modern Western images of the Balkans Samuel Foster renews and expands a field of knowledge that has still so much to give.” —Eugene Michail, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, University of Brighton, UK

“Detailed and compelling. I'm impressed by Foster's deft analysis of British imaginative geography and the emergence of Anglo-British identity against ethnographic and cultural rhetoric about the moral virtue of South Slavic peasants prior to and during the First World War. This is an effective way of tracking British anxieties about its place in “civilization's moral hierarchy” as Britain became an urban and industrialized nation. This transnational study expands our understanding of how depictions of foreign places and peoples in popular culture contribute to wider discursive formulations of twentieth century national identities, in this case Anglo-British identity.” —Melissa Bokovoy, Professor and Chair of History, University of New Mexico, USA