History of Serbia (1919)

This little book is the fruit of some years of travel and study in the Near East. Its publication was interrupted by the War, but was finished during a period of convalescence.The original intention was to relate the story of Serbia from the revival of her independence in the nineteenth century until the period just before the Balkan War of 1 912, at which past history evidently melts into present politics. The aim was to show how the diplomacy of the Great Powers affected the destinies of Serbia in the nineteenth century, as a companion study to a similar one of Bavaria in the eighteenth century published previously under the title of Kaiser Joseph and Frederic the Great. In both the object was to draw attention to the unpublished sources of British diplomacy at the Record Office, which furnish material as rich and important as it is neglected. But, as the study progressed, it became evident that it could not be confined to the nineteenth century. The principles of strategy are eternal, and geography has affected diplomacy in Serbia in all ages in a strikingly similar way. It was well to show that the aims of Byzantium or Turkey or Hungary in the Middle Ages
affected Serbia like the aims of similar Powers to-day. Nor is modern Serbian history intelligible without reference to its splendid and tragic past. A study of the Serbian past, though almost unknown to English readers,is complicated by the abundance of historians and the amazing variety of their views.