European History Quarterly

This article focuses on the gendered aspects of the institutional framework surrounding the protection, control over, and transfer of property before 1914 in the area that became Romania in the twentieth century, from inheritance to marriage divorce, dowry, and widowhood. During the period covered here, these territories were part of several distinctive administrative regimes—the Habsburg Empire, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire—that also treated property ownership and transfer in various ways. Therefore, my analysis is comparative and offers insights into broader major historical questions, such as the relationship between religious dogma and secular law; the impact of ecclesiastical courts in relation to lay institutions in administering law and preserving property rights; and the impact of such institutions in enforcing specific gender norms.

This paper discusses the legal debates of nineteenth-century Greece and the attempts to produce a legal framework following the establishment of the modern Greek state. These debates had both a practical significance since such a framework was essential for the creation of a modern state, and an ideological one since the chosen framework would be a statement about how the new state perceived itself, its history, and its place in Europe. These questions were particularly relevant in the case of civil law as Greek legal scholars contemplated whether to accept the use of customary law, or to reject it, and if so what laws should replace it. In this paper, I examine this debate within the context of European legal developments and the process of codification undertaken throughout Europe from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as the ideological and practical implications of the debate.

I argue that, despite the belief that the efforts of Greek legal scholars led to the elimination of the use of customary law from the Greek judicial system, my research in the archival material of the Appeals Court of Athens indicates that customary law was still dominant a generation after the establishment of the modern Greek state. I conclude that a re-examination of the role and practices of the Greek courts in the nineteenth century is much needed as their flexibility thirty years after the creation of the Greek state is closer to the legal pluralism of the courts of the Ottoman period than to the model advocated by the contemporary legal scholars who demanded a ‘modern’ judicial system to assist the renaissance of the Greek nation.

This article tracks how political and intellectual leaders from south-eastern Europe used the concept of civilization, or a particular type of ‘civilization-speak’, from the end of the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. It compares and contrasts how they employed civilization-speak in different linguistic milieus – French, Modern Greek, and Romanian – and how they deployed it to further changing political aims during a period of political upheaval in the Balkans. It traces how civilization-speak served initially as a tool for extracting support from west European, especially French, patrons, and was later refashioned into a rhetorical instrument of nationalism. This study places the intellectual and political history of south-eastern Europe during the era in a pan-European context and adds nuance to discussions about the development of nationalism in the region.

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.