A Balkan Mission

by James Thomson Shotwell

Funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Shotwell travels through the Balkans in the autumn of 1925, traipsing about Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. Partially to record his observations of the peoples and their cultures, partially a business trip to complete the "Economic and Social History of the World War," his observations roam wide.

180 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

James Thomson Shotwell was a Canadian-born American history professor. He played an instrumental role in the creation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1919, as well as for his influence in promoting inclusion of a declaration of human rights in the UN Charter.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting portrayal of what inter-war Yugoslavia was like, but as any book written by a Western author should be taken with a grain of salt. As most other Western authors, Shotwell picked his favorite Balkan people, in this case the Serbs, and goes out of his way to portray them as more advanced than their neighbors. His frequent dismissals of Tito's regime are overblown and I actually laughed at loud when he portrayed Tito as a Croatian dictator who dominated the Serbs - the capital of communist Yugoslavia was Belgrade and Serbs made up a disproportionate amount of the government and especially the army.