What Stojanović attempted, and largely succeeded in doing with this book, is not merely to realize the old Annales project of a holistic history, but to relate its subject, the Balkans, to that part of the world which seemed to reject them yet paradoxically was born together with them: Europe.

We must see the Balkan Worlds as a first attempt to integrate the Balkans into the historiographical field of world history. And this constitutes a historiographical paradox: world history as a historiographical genre emerged precisely through the critique of Eurocentrism. However, what the Yugoslav historian does as both a political demand and historiographical endeavor is to show that if Old Europe is identified with the Balkans, then there can be no New Europe without them. As he describes it in coded terms: "The failure of the first Europe (of the Balkans) to align with the new Europe may mean that there will be no Europe at all, only capitalism."

Is this argument subservient to the logic of Eurocentrism, or does it represent its exact opposite, reminding us that Europe is not just Western and Central Europe, but also Eastern and Southeastern? One could be critical of the political dimension of this demand. But no one can fail to accept the following: that this dramatic moment in the recent history of the Balkans led Stojanović to write the only holistic-"global" history of the peninsula so far, the only one that does not follow the beaten path of linear narrative. For this reason alone, it is worth reading.

Dimitris Stamatopoulos