Abstract

It is difficult to speak about Europe today without reference to its constitutive regions—supra-national geographical designations such as “Scandinavia,” “Eastern Europe,” and “the Balkans.” Such formulations are so ubiquitous that they are frequently treated as empirical realities rather than a series of shifting, overlapping, and historically constructed concepts. This volume is the first to provide a synthetic account of these concepts and the historical and intellectual contexts in which they emerged. Bringing together prominent international scholars from across multiple disciplines, it systematically and comprehensively explores how such “meso-regions” have been conceptualized throughout modern European history.

“After reading the individual contributions, the attempt of a Trans-European historiography through the inclusion specifically of the meso-regions proves to be truly successful….But it is not only because of an updated regional history that the volume is very informative and readable; it also offers many fruitful ideas for the various historiographical academic disciplines and an overarching transnational discourse. Hopefully, these concepts will be developed further.” • Historische Zeitschrift

“…acquiring this book will undoubtedly help you to get a very good understanding of the spatial turn, its advantages and its shortcomings, not to mention that it will provide you with all the necessary bibliography on matters of conceptual regions.” • EuropeanReview ofHistory:Revue européenne d'histoire

“All in all, this volume is a successful and highly recommendable book. It conveys many important insights into European history, as well as into the possibilities of doing a conceptual history which goes beyond basic political-philosophical concepts. And it will provide the reader with a good knowledge-base for answering the question about where Central Europe actually is located.” • Global Intellectual History

“Many of the individual chapters are highly readable and insightful…Many [readers] will indulge in the rich intricacies of conceptual history and historical concepts that abound in this book as a whole.” • European History Quarterly

“With a roster of authoritative scholars, the chapters of this book chart the construction and use of the key concepts of European space. By focusing on conceptual ‘clusters’, an extraordinary number of subjects are covered, and the complex processes at work are further highlighted by the frequent cross-referencing between chapters and topics, making this compelling book much more than the sum of its individual studies.” • Wendy Bracewell, University College London

Diana Mishkova has been the Director, since 2000, of the Center for Advanced Study Sofia. She has published extensively on comparative Balkan history, intellectual history, and historiography. She is the author of Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making (2018), Domestication of Freedom: Modernity and Legitimacy in Serbia and Romania in the Nineteenth Century (2001), and the editor of seven scholarly collections.

Balázs Trencsényi is Professor in the History Department of Central European University, Budapest. His main field of interest is the history of political thought in East Central Europe. He is the author of The Politics of ‘National Character’: A Study in Interwar East European Thought (2012), and co-author of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Vol. I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century' (2016).