‘An Oriental Holiday’: constructing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a destination in British tourist literature, c. 1890–1914

ABSTRACT

This article challenges imagological historiography that contends Bosnia-Herzegovina represented a no-go zone for British tourists before the First World War because of its reputation for cultural backwardness and political instability. Through an analysis of published travelogues, travel guides, and travel journalism, as well as their reception in Britain, it places the evolution of images of Bosnia-Herzegovina in dialogue with British anxieties about the detrimental effects of industrial society. This article argues that the country (administered by Austria-Hungary from 1878 and annexed in 1908) became a popular destination for upper-class British tourists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as it was constructed as unspoiled by mechanical civilisation and free from lower-class tourists. Travel writers, most notably Henri Moser whose travel guide An Oriental Holiday (1895) will be closely examined, were imbricated with Austro-Hungarian authorities and regularly employed by the regime to promote this romantic image of Bosnia-Herzegovina to British audiences. This article concludes by demonstrating that the upsurge in touristic interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina was short-lived because of growing political tensions between Britain and Germany but provides a forceful counterpoint to imagological historiography that suggests the imagined geography of the region was defined in entirely negative terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Bosnia-Herzegovina
• travel writing
• tourism
• Balkanism
• Balkans

Introduction

Harry de Windt, one of the most popular travel writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, visited the Balkans as the ‘special correspondent’ for the Westminster Gazette in 1905. De Windt had previously travelled in what he considered to be some of the most remote and physically challenging areas of the world. As a young man, he served in Borneo as the aide-de-camp to his brother-in-law, Charles Brooke, the second ‘white Rajah of Sarawak’, an experience that left him feeling ‘disgust’ towards ‘staid suburbanites’ and admiring ‘the languid air of superiority assumed by … gentlemen east of Suez’. After this formative experience, de Windt chose a peripatetic career as a travel writer to avoid ‘a prosaic life in London’.¹ He gained fame in 1887 for travelling overland from Beijing to the English Channel, recounted in the bestselling From Pekin to Calais by Land (1889).² This adventure was followed by journeys to penal colonies in Siberia, the mountains of Baluchistan, and the gold fields of Alaska.³ De Windt’s celebrity was confirmed in 1902 when he travelled overland from Paris to New York via the Bering Straits becoming, he claimed, ‘the first person to travel by land from the Old to the New World’.⁴ His travels in the Balkans were conceived as the next episode in this series of adventures; the title of his travelogue, Through Savage Europe (1907), suggested he was visiting a region less known to his British readers than ‘Darkest Africa’.⁵

De Windt’s Balkan narrative, however, was characterised by a deep sense of belatedness and mourned ideas of adventure and heroism that were losing relevance as organised tourism spread across the region.⁶ His ultimate disappointment came in the Bosnian town of Jablanica where he discovered that a pair of English tourists had previously stayed. Finding out that the tourists were women, he imagined them as ‘elderly English spinsters’ and ridiculed the romantic reaction to the Bosnian landscape that they inscribed in the hotel guest book to undermine the fact that two female tourists had ‘discovered’ the town before him.⁷ De Windt’s demeaning view of women tourists reflected the bruised ego of a masculine explorer, but it also pointed towards his frustration that even the remoter reaches of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had been administered by Austria-Hungary since the 1878 Treaty of Berlin and were formally annexed in 1908, were no longer the uncharted territories that he had hoped they would be.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, as de Windt’s narrative suggested, was increasingly on the map for British tourists in the first decade of the twentieth century. This article considers representations of Bosnia-Herzegovina in English language tourist literature, comprised of handbooks, travelogues, and travel journalism written by and for British tourists between the early 1890s and 1914, and asks how this literature constructed the country as a desirable destination for what Thorstein Veblen defined in 1899 as the ‘leisure class’, social elites that demonstrated status through leisure pursuits.⁸ In this strand of writing, Bosnia-Herzegovina was represented as a romantic country whose Ottoman heritage and peasant culture was unspoiled by modern civilisation and free from what Miss Lavish from E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View describes as ‘the narrowness and superficiality’ of lower-class tourists.⁹ As John Urry explains, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries witnessed the emergence of a socially stratified European geography of leisure in which social distinctions were drawn less between those who did and did not travel and more between different classes of tourist and their destinations of choice.¹⁰ In this context, Bosnia-Herzegovina was promoted as an attractive destination for upper-class travellers looking for an ‘exotic’ and ‘off the beaten track’ holiday to distinguish themselves from mass tourism that had transformed the established destinations of Western Europe, such as Switzerland or the Franco-Italian Riviera, into what John Pemble calls ‘the playground of the multitude’.¹¹

Tourist literature, Austria-Hungary, and imagological historiography

The tourist literature considered in this article occupies an ambiguous position between what Paul Fussell distinguishes as the ‘travel book’ and the ‘guidebook’, the former autobiographical and sustained by a narrative exploiting literary devices and the latter impersonal and programmatic in scope, comprised of ‘raw data’ to be followed by prospective visitors.¹² As James Buzard expands, guidebooks were designed to rationalise the travelled environment by connecting tourist infrastructures and advising tourists of where to go, what to see, and what to feel.¹³ By contrast to these binary categorisations, tourist literature about Bosnia-Herzegovina included both conventional handbooks, notably An Oriental Holiday (1895) by Henri Moser, a Swiss polymath employed by the Austro-Hungarian administration to boost tourism to the country, and literary narratives that recounted the journeys of individual travellers and which promoted the provinces as a destination by drawing the reader’s attention to attractions and improved tourist infrastructure, such as comfortable hotels and reliable road and railway networks built by the Austro-Hungarians.¹⁴

Rudy Koshar defended tourist literature as historical source material against the orthodoxy set by scholars such as Urry who asserted that the ‘tourist gaze’ was simply an extension of consumer behaviour in capitalist societies.¹⁵ Kosher argued that tourist literature had ‘meaning beyond the marketplace’ as designations of what to see elucidated nineteenth and twentieth century concerns of nation building.¹⁶ Not all sights included in tourist literature were given equal weight: as William Stowe suggests, they were comprised of all kinds of ‘mays’, ‘wills’, ‘shoulds’, and ‘musts’.¹⁷ Tourist literature was predicated on hierarchies that displayed ‘a political and ideological dimension’ that directed ‘audiences towards certain moral judgements and attitudes’.¹⁸ This reflects Roland Barthes assertion that tourist guides are an extension of the bourgeois ‘disease of thinking in essences’ in which ‘the real spectacle of conditions, classes, and professions’ is reduced to a ‘nice, neat commedia dell’arte’,¹⁹ thus privileging certain histories and identities over others by ‘establishing channels of power by defining what is to be seen and what is to be ignored’.²⁰ Tourist literature has therefore been important in the ‘ideological representation of the nation’ and has been exploited by regimes ‘to present a desired narrative of the country’, as Kalyan Bhandari notes.²¹ In particular, tourism has been mobilised by developmental regimes because, as Peter M. Sánchez and Kathleen M. Adams argue, it allows them to exploit ‘scenic and heritage resources potentially instilling civic pride, while simultaneously generating new revenue, principally for the achievement of more important goals’.²²

This confluence between tourist literature and political power finds a particularly clear example in the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina before 1914. Tourist literature about the country functioned as promotional material for the modernising Austro-Hungarian administration, which was headed from 1882 until his death in 1903 by Benjamin von Kállay, the Joint Minister of Finance for Austria-Hungary. As Edin Hajdarpašić explains, Kállay’s regime sought to combat social discontent, which was often framed in nationalist terms, by stimulating economic development through tourism and inculcating a Bosnian identity shared across Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic communities.²³ To encourage tourism, the administration articulated a positive international image of Bosnia-Herzegovina through literature that attested to Austria-Hungary’s successes in transforming the formerly ‘savage’ country into a picturesque, pastoral, and, above all else, safe destination for tourists. This strategy involved directly employing boosters like Moser, whose travel writing and promotional activities will be discussed in detail below. Following the success of Moser’s work, Austria-Hungary’s strategy increasingly included subtler methods to reach a wider audience that Jill Steward and Nataša Urošević have demonstrated were used elsewhere in the Dual Monarchy, such as assisting travel writers not directly associated with the Bosnian administration in the expectation that they would disseminate a favourable image of the country in Britain that would appeal to prospective tourists.²⁴ Although a distinction can be made between tourists directly sponsored by the Austro-Hungarian administration and those who indirectly benefited from the regime’s programme of modernisation, the net effect of writings produced by both categories of tourist was to legitimise the empire’s self-proclaimed ‘civilising mission’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a tendency that only cooled in the years immediately before 1914 as the Dual Monarchy’s growing alignment with Germany alarmed British commentators.²⁵

Despite the increased frequency with which tourist literature about Bosnia-Herzegovina was published for British audiences, this strand of writing has been consistently neglected as an example of meaningful cross-cultural representation between Britain and the Balkans. Studies of travel writing about southeast Europe have generally overlooked tourist literature with John Allcock and Antonia Young explicitly restricting their focus to travel writing about ‘serious business’ – political and humanitarian campaigns, anthropological studies, journalistic investigations, and so on – at the expense of writing by and for leisure travellers.²⁶ Although few imagological historians are as openly dismissive towards tourists, it is clear that the stereotype of the superficial tourist ‘following blindly where authentic travellers have gone with open eyes and free spirits’ has shaped the parameters of study as travel to the Balkans has been theorised through the colonial frameworks of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ by Maria Todorova and Andrew Hammond.²⁷ As these categories of ‘intellectual reconnaissance’ suggest,²⁸ imagological scholarship about the Balkans has been largely unanimous with the aforementioned scholars, alongside Milica Bakić-Hayden, Vesna Goldsworthy, David Norris and others, asserting that the Western concept of the region was composed of violence, discord, and backwardness.²⁹

This overgeneralised concept of denigrating representation, however, does not correspond to Bosnian tourist literature’s ‘imagined geography’: that is, the spatial ordering of the world in which images of foreign lands are created through imagery, texts and discourses that reflect the desires and anxieties of external observers rather than the realities of those being observed.³⁰ Tourist literature represented Bosnia-Herzegovina as an ‘exotic’ and ‘romantic’ country unspoiled by industrial civilisation that was defined principally through the cultural legacy of Ottoman rule that had preserved the region’s peasant culture. As the concept of imagined geography indicates, representations of foreign lands responded to the changing cultural mores of external observers. The promotion of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a peasant society can therefore be situated within the growing British suspicion of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and anxieties about the degenerative effects of urban culture.³¹

Reflecting the contradiction at the heart of the tourism industry which ‘sells promises of the “extraordinary” whilst, at the same time, promising to deliver an extension of the “everyday” in terms of standard and familiar services and facilities’, tourist literature conceived Bosnia-Herzegovina as a country in which visitors could experience an ‘oriental’ and agrarian culture unspoiled by modernisation while enjoying the benefits associated with Austro-Hungarian imperialism that was said to have brought culture, civilisation, and security to what had until recently been considered a religiously fanatical, politically immature, and economically backwards country.³² This article therefore aims to correct the misconception that Bosnia-Herzegovina constituted what Eugene Michail calls ‘a no-go area’ for tourists because of the lack of infrastructure and dominant image of political and ethnic violence that was associated with the Balkans before the First World War.³³

The British image of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1850s–1890s

British travellers began to visit Bosnia-Herzegovina with regularity in the mid-nineteenth century because of the growing political interest in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire as a buffer to Russian expansion.³⁴ These travellers did not visit the country for leisure and their travels were typically tied to political or professional interests in the context of the Eastern Question.³⁵ Perceptions of Bosnia-Herzegovina in this period were imbricated with ‘the nationalist investment in the boundary of “same-different”’ on the part of travellers who represented foreign cultures in ethnocentric terms to affirm the dynamism of their own nation.³⁶ As Hammond explains, by the mid-nineteenth century the British devotion to industry and commerce and investment in Enlightenment ideals of order and progress were entrenched in the minds of most travellers as the hallmarks of civilised society so that ‘if not achieved by a host culture, became a standard by which the inadequacies of that culture could be properly determined’.³⁷ Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late Ottoman period was economically underdeveloped by comparison to Western Europe and travellers consequently represented the country as disorderly and violent with little in the way of cultural or commercial merit.³⁸ Indeed, even at the turn of the twentieth century the country remained overwhelmingly agrarian with 88 per cent of the population being classified by Austro-Hungarian authorities as peasants belonging to Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic communities.³⁹

This derogatory portrait was summarised by Humphry Sandwith in his account of ‘A Trip into Bosnia’ (1873) for Fraser’s Magazine. As became common practice in travel narratives that represented the passage into Bosnia-Herzegovina as ‘a civilisational break’ between the progressive West and static East, Sandwith described the difference in conditions between Austrian Slavonia and Ottoman Bosnia as a ‘greater contrast in everything as if you were transported from an English village to Timbuktoo’.⁴⁰ Drawing on his experience serving as the Chief Military Officer for British and Turkish forces at Kars during the Crimean War, Sandwith continued that no place in the Ottoman Empire, whether ‘amongst the Nomads of Mesopotamia, or the Kurds on the Persian frontier’, did he feel himself in a country so ‘thoroughly Asiatic’ and ‘ruinous’.⁴¹

Excepting the perceived social and economic ‘backwardness’ of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the most striking element of the country’s society for British visitors was the large Muslim presence. According to the 1879 census, the first conducted by the Austro-Hungarians, 38 per cent of the population identified as Muslim, 43 per cent Orthodox, and 18 per cent Catholic, with the remainder made up of smaller minorities, notably Sephardic Jews. Bosnian Muslims held the preeminent position in local society, forming the majority of the population in towns and cities and the main property owners in the countryside.⁴² Although smaller numerically than the Orthodox community, travellers tended to come into greater contact with Bosnian Muslims as Muslim elites provided them with food, lodgings, and security, usually in the form of kawas (armed guardians).⁴³

British visitors to Bosnia-Herzegovina regularly commented upon the apparent ‘fanaticism’ of the country’s Muslims. This impression derived from their ‘principle distinctive feature’ as the descendants of Christian Slavs that had converted to Islam during the Ottoman conquest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.⁴⁴ It was for this reason that travellers often referred to them as ‘Mohammedan Slavs’ to distinguish them from Ottoman Turks.⁴⁵ Liberal travellers in the 1870s, influenced by campaigns for the national emancipation of the Christian Slavic populations of ‘Turkey in Europe’, believed that Bosnian Muslims were among the most ‘uncompromising’ in the Ottoman Empire because their conversion was ‘a forcible demonstration of the transforming power of Islam’, as Thomas Wodehouse Legh wrote.⁴⁶ The archaeologist Arthur J. Evans suggested that their status as apostates had transformed the country into ‘the chosen land of Mohammedan Conservatism’.⁴⁷ Adelina Paulina Irby, in the popular second edition of Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe (1877), which included a ‘masculine stamp of approval’ in the form of a preface by William Gladstone, described Bosnian Muslims as ‘licensed and fanatical marauders’ who committed ‘cruelties of the worst ages … on helpless [Christian] women and children’ during the 1875 rebellion by Orthodox peasants.⁴⁸ Recent imagological scholarship by James Perkins and Samuel Foster has shown that liberal advocacy for the Southern Slavs during the 1870s challenged denigrating discourses about the Balkans, but travel accounts from this decade demonstrate that Bosnia-Herzegovina remained ‘the shadowed lands of backwardness and barbarism’ in the minds of British travellers on account of the Slavic population’s conversion to Islam.⁴⁹

The Austro-Hungarian occupation of the country in 1878 was generally welcomed by British commentators as an opportunity to bring civilisation to ‘the rearguard of Mohammedanism in Europe’.⁵⁰ For instance, William James Stillman, an American journalist and lifelong friend of Arthur J. Evans, believed the best solution to the Bosnian question was the country’s occupation under ‘a system of patriarchal despotism’.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in the immediate term the occupation enhanced the country’s fanatical reputation as the Muslim population mounted a guerrilla war against the Austro-Hungarian army. Vienna initially dispatched 72 000 troops to Bosnia-Herzegovina in July 1878, but by the autumn of that year this number had swollen to 268 000 as the army met unexpectedly strong resistance from remaining Ottoman battalions that were reinforced by Muslim irregulars. By the end of 1878, the country was mostly pacified but at the cost of 5000 Austro-Hungarian troops.⁵²

These developments were widely covered in the British press and in subsequent years reports circulated of the ‘anarchy’ that still prevailed in the country, including the assassination of Austrian officials, the summary execution of ‘bands of robbers’, and a significant uprising against the administration between 1881 and 1882 that was dramatically depicted in Illustrated London News.⁵³ The disturbed condition of the country continued to feature in travel narratives following the occupation. Robert Hamilton Lang, a Scottish financier, was one of the first British visitors to the country following the Austrian takeover, which he claimed had aroused ‘fanatical spirits’ and would lead to continued ‘bloody resistance’.⁵⁴ The anonymous author of ‘Adventures among the Austrians in Bosnia’ (1883) likewise described ‘a general feeling of insecurity’ throughout the country because of guerrilla attacks by ‘Mahommedan insurgents’.⁵⁵ Although the fighting had ceased by the time the diplomat Ardern Hulme-Beaman visited Bosnia-Herzegovina the late 1880s, he still wrote of the ‘fanaticism from one end of the country to another’ indicating the lingering association between the country and violence in Britain.⁵⁶ Returning to the primary focus of this article, this derogatory and dangerous image clearly did not avail the country to the development of leisure travel. Indeed, travel in Bosnia-Herzegovina was imagined to be ‘a pilgrimage towards the certainty of discomfort, and the chance of even worse’, as the Anglo-Irish writer James Creagh noted.⁵⁷

Henri Moser and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Crucial in challenging this derogatory image of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Britain was Henri Moser, arguably one of the most famed travel writers of the late-nineteenth century who has been largely overlooked by Anglophone travel writing scholarship.⁵⁸ The son of the Swiss watchmaker and industrialist Heinrich Moser, he was born in Saint Petersburg in 1844 and went on to represent his father’s business ventures in Russia. However, his scandalous lifestyle in the Russian capital led to his estrangement from his father and, amid the fallout from this familial split, he attempted to join General Mikhail Skobelev’s 1866 campaign in Central Asia, despite lacking a formal invitation to do so. Moser hoped to rendezvous with the Russian Army in Samarkand, but after arriving in the Central Asian city was informed that the key battles had already been fought. Nevertheless, this first taste of Central Asian culture kindled what was to become Moser’s lifelong interest in Islamic art that qualified him to work closely with the Austro-Hungarian administration in the promotion of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a tourist destination.

Moser returned to the newly acquired Central Asian territories of the Russian Empire in 1869, visiting Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand and securing a job managing the export of silkworms to Italy. This enterprise proved commercially unsuccessful and led to Moser’s bankruptcy. In the wake of this failure, his physical and mental health spiralled downwards, and he recuperated as a guest of his sister, Sophie, who was married to Benedek Mikes of Zabola, a Transylvanian count. Ágnes Sebestyén suggests that it was during this convalescence that Moser was introduced to the upper echelons of Austro-Hungarian society and perhaps met Benjamin von Kállay.⁵⁹

In the 1880s, Moser undertook two lengthy journeys in Central Asia, both of which were sponsored by the Russian government. In the company of Prince Wittgenstein, he travelled through the region in 1883 and followed the course of the Amu Darya. The success of this expedition resulted in an invitation being extended for Moser to join an 1888 survey examining the feasibility of the Transcaspian railway. Perhaps the most notable outcome of these expeditions were two books: À Travers l’Asie Centrale: Impressions de Voyage (1885) and L’irrigation en Asie Centrale: Étude Géographique et Économique (1894).⁶⁰ The first of these works was a lavishly illustrated travelogue – it contained 170 engravings from photographs taken during the journey – and established Moser’s reputation as a scholar of Central Asian culture.⁶¹ The engraving of Moser by the Swiss artist Evert van Muyden that prefaced À Travers l'Asie Centrale provided a portrait of a pre-eminent expert on the region: rifle in hand and dressed in Russian military uniform with oriental textiles and the skins of the big cats draped across his shoulders and lap, his eyes looked into the distance beyond the picture symbolising his desire for further adventure (Figure 1). Moser’s Central Asian travelogues were never translated into English, but because of the strategic importance of the region during the so-called Great Game between Britain and Russia his works were widely reviewed in the British press which declared him a ‘celebrated explorer’ and an ‘authority’ on the area.⁶²

Figure 1. Henri Moser by Evert van Muyden in À Travers l’Asie Centrale, c. 1885.

Moser used his travels in Central Asia to collect artefacts from the region. As Elika Palenzona Djalili contends, Moser’s motivation for collecting stemmed from his commitment to imperialism: he respected the aesthetic value of Islamic artworks, but believed they were the picturesque relics of a culture that had run its course and which Russia had a moral obligation to ‘civilise’, a sentiment that would motivate his engagement with Bosnia-Herzegovina.⁶³ The first major exhibition of his collection took place in 1886 and toured Swiss and German cities, including Schaffhausen (where his family owned a small castle, Charlottenfels), Geneva, Bern, Zurich and Stuttgart.⁶⁴ This touring exhibition received 3000 visitors and its success led to subsequent displays of his collection in Paris in 1891 and 1893.⁶⁵

The success of Moser’s travel writing and touring exhibition, combined with his status as an ‘expert’ on the Islamic Orient and familial connections to the Austro-Hungarian elite, attracted the attention of Kállay.⁶⁶ Under Kállay’s direction, the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina was conceived as ‘a paternal government’, much like that of Russia in Central Asia, that was bringing civilisation to a formerly wild, unproductive, and immature country.⁶⁷ In 1878 Ottoman Bosnia-Herzegovina had only 120 administrators, but by the country’s annexation in 1908 there were more than 9500 administrators, mostly comprised of Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks, whose purpose was to impose European culture on the population.⁶⁸ The political goal, as Piro Rexhepi puts it, was to ‘synchronise’ Bosnian Muslims ‘with the historical timeline and space of Europe’.⁶⁹ This process included the building of narrow-gauge railways and roads that connected previously remote parts of the country and the implementation of educational reforms aimed at increasing literacy and building a sense of Bosnian identity to unite the country’s Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic populations.⁷⁰ Although the administration neglected largescale industrial development, they were enthusiastic about modernising farming and established model farms and vineyards to improve agricultural productivity.⁷¹ As Henry Wickham Steed, the Vienna correspondent for The Times reflected, the reforms implemented by Kállay ‘organised and outwardly converted Bosnia-Herzegovina from a neglected and backward Turkish province into a progressive modern colony’.⁷² Nevertheless, Kállay’s modernising policies were ‘uneven and deeply polarising’. Most Bosnians felt few substantial benefits of Austro-Hungarian administration because the regime failed to reform the system of land tenure that favoured a narrow group of Muslim landlords and most infrastructure neglected the rural population, as it was orientated around Sarajevo and other major towns. As Siniša Malešević notes, although designed to create a unitary Bosnian identity, the policies implemented by Kállay generated social discontent that fed into South Slavic nationalism.⁷³

Kállay recognised the exotic appeal that the Islamic and agrarian culture of Bosnia-Herzegovina might have on Western tourists and the beneficial effects tourism could have for economic development. He consequently sought to transform the image of the Muslim population from dangerous fanatics into what Diana Reynolds-Cordileone calls ‘ornamental and graceful subalterns’ through the establishment of government ateliers and craft schools that turned traditional textile and metal crafts into commercial ventures catering to the European fashion for the exotic.⁷⁴ In 1893, Moser was approached by Kállay to oversee the Paris branch of the Österreichisches Handelsmuseum (Trade Museum), which promoted exports from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in the following years he was appointed as Commissioner General for the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Pavilions at the Brussels (1897) and Paris (1900) international fairs. These displays were designed to reach potential investors, traders, and travellers to boost the industry, commerce, and tourism of the country by selling products and sights.⁷⁵

Although less discussed by historians than his role at international expositions, Moser authored the first English language guidebook on Bosnia-Herzegovina, An Oriental Holiday, published in 1895 by the International Sleeping Car Company (based on London’s Cockspur Street). This work was intended to be a lightweight alternative to the János Asbóth’s more academic travelogue, An Official Tour Through Bosnia and Herzegovina (1890). In the English edition of An Official Tour (which was also published in Hungarian and German), Asbóth, a member of the Hungarian Parliament who served as an aide to Kállay for four years, framed Bosnia-Herzegovina as of interest to the British public because ‘England, [was] the greatest power in the Islamic world’.⁷⁶ Despite this, the scholarly tone of Asbóth’s book likely precluded its appeal to a wide cross-section of the reading public: as a review in the Pall Mall Gazette commented, his work was ‘a mine of information for students and newspapermen’ but not for the casual reader.⁷⁷ By contrast, Moser’s handbook adopted a casual tone that presented the propaganda of Kállay’s regime in accessible terms. Predicated on orientalist stereotypes of Western progress and Eastern stasis, he wrote that the ‘indefatigable and enlightened administration’ was ‘sweeping away the turbid waters of fanaticism and social decay’.⁷⁸

The introduction to An Oriental Holiday was primarily concerned with demonstrating to prospective tourists that the Austro-Hungarian occupation had made the country a perfectly safe and comfortable destination. ‘The careless condition which reigned so recently’, he wrote, ‘has given way to increasing order and comfort’: the rule of law was ‘absolute’; roads and railways, ‘level and well laid as in England’, traversed the country ‘in every direction’; and hotels, ‘built under the direction of the Government’, left ‘nothing to be desired as far as European ideas of comfort are concerned’. This juxtaposition between the dangerous Ottoman past – defined by ‘barbarism and brigandage’ – and the safety and prosperity of the Austrian present was a common theme in Moser’s handbook, as well as in subsequent travel writing about the country. Nevertheless, despite emphasising that the modernising reforms of Kállay’s regime were what had made tourist travel possible, Moser reassured prospective holidaymakers that the country remained ‘saturated with a vivid and real Orientalism, still glows with local colour of unequalled brilliancy’.⁷⁹ Indeed, the cover illustration of An Oriental Holiday by the French illustrator Georges Scott, with its armed, turbaned and moustachioed horseman and colourfully clad peasant woman backed by the minareted skyline of Sarajevo, introduced the country as one in which traces of Western civilisation were absent, except from the state symbols of Austria-Hungary and the imperial province of Bosnia in the upper corners that reassured prospective tourists that the country was under ‘civilised’ administration (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The cover illustration of Henri Moser’s An Oriental Holiday by Georges Scott, c.1895.

As this tension between familiarity and alterity suggests, Moser represented Bosnia-Herzegovina as an exotic country that was simultaneously a tamed and accessible destination. This oscillation between the ‘Oriental past’ and ‘Austrian present’ was reflected in the sights that Moser directed the tourist towards. On the one hand, he wrote that one does ‘not go to Bosnia to hear the Tannhauser, or drink cocktails’ and encouraged visitors to admire Ottoman heritage, such as Sarajevo’s čaršija (bazaar), traditional ‘Oriental’ houses in Jezero, Ottoman-era bridges in Mostar and Višegrad and Travnik’s richly decorated mosque. On the other, however, Moser instructed travellers to admire examples of Austrian progress, such as the iron bridges, factories, paper mills, and prisons (‘built after the latest plans and fitted with cells on the Irish system’) that were becoming an increasingly prominent part of the Bosnian landscape. This ‘taming’ of Bosnia, as Robin Okey phrases it, was symbolised in Moser’s description of attractions at the spa resort of Ilidža.⁸⁰ Moser wrote that tourists wanting to experience Bosnian nature without exertion or danger could examine ‘a collection, in cages, of eagles, vultures, bears, and other wild animals indigenous to the country’ from the comfort of the spa’s recently landscaped English garden. Bosnia-Herzegovina, in other words, was envisaged as a domesticated and pacified version of the Orient in which the tourist could experience an exotic culture without any of what Moser called the ‘miseries’ associated with travel in Asia and Africa.⁸¹

Despite the proximity of Bosnia-Herzegovina from Western Europe (‘a day’s journey from Vienna or within fifty-two hours from London!’), Moser asserted that the country was ‘an entirely new field’ for leisure travellers and that those who visited would not meet many fellow tourists.⁸² Reviews of An Oriental Holiday in the British press noted that the country could become an alternative destination for upper-class tourists looking to get away from countries frequented by tourists of a lower class.⁸³ The positioning of Bosnia-Herzegovina as untouched by mass tourism reflected upper-class anxieties surrounding the emergence of democratised leisure travel that had ‘opened … to the remotest provincial, countries and cities which, but for the “personally conducted” tour, he would never have dreamt of visiting’, as the journalist George Augustus Sala wrote.⁸⁴ A critic even proposed that the appeal of Bosnia-Herzegovina to upper-class tourists could be increased by the construction of golf courses. The sport, the reviewer lamented, did ‘not appear as yet to be an attraction in the country’ despite the ‘ideal’ climate.⁸⁵

Moser also promoted Bosnia-Herzegovina via other channels in Britain. In the same year as An Oriental Holiday was published, he spoke about Bosnia-Herzegovina’s attractions at the International Geographical Congress hosted by the Imperial Institute in London.⁸⁶ He was also involved in the organisation of an 1895 International Shooting Meeting in the country ‘with the object of attracting society’. The event’s comité d'honneur included representatives from the British elite, including Lord Dudley (the future governor of Australia) and Lord Westbury.⁸⁷ An account of this event was provided by the sportsman Harding Edward de Fonblanque Cox in his autobiography which detailed how he was approached by Kállay ‘anxious to exploit the sporting possibilities of Bosnia’. No expense was spared for the delegates at the sporting congress, likely to ensure that they promoted the country upon their return to their respective home countries. Cox recalled how ‘Every repast began and ended with beer, with beer between each course and as a topping to each of the various vintages which were handed round’.⁸⁸ This event brought about fresh interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a sporting destination as articles in the press, often written by attendees of the meeting, encouraged tourists to visit the country as they said it offered ‘real good sport’ and ‘the best trout fishing in Europe’.⁸⁹ Furthermore, two years after the meeting, Robert Dunkin, better known by his nom de plume Snaffle, authored an account of hunting in Herzegovina, a pursuit in which he was assisted by the administration that granted him ‘open order’ to the gendarmerie.⁹⁰

Perhaps most importantly, however, Moser arranged tours of Bosnia-Herzegovina for British journalists in the expectation that they would disseminate favourable opinions about the country and its administration in Britain. 1895 proved a landmark year for this form of promotional activity. Two travelogues about the country, the anonymously authored ‘Ten Days in Bosnia’ (1895) and ‘The Rise of Bosnia’ (1895) by the novelist Max Pemberton, were respectively serialised in Illustrated London News and The Sketch. Moser’s involvement was clear in both cases. For instance, Illustrated London News advised readers to write to Moser’s personal address in Paris on Rue des Saussaies for further information and Pemberton, in The Sketch, described An Oriental Holiday as ‘a capital handbook’ and followed the routes described in it.⁹¹ Much like Moser’s guide, travel journalism showcased Bosnia-Herzegovina as an example of progressive Austro-Hungarian governance. The anonymous author in Illustrated London News reported that Kállay had ‘opened the doors of light’ to the country: railways ‘penetrated’ previously ‘insurpassable’ mountains; education had ‘sprung up’; traditional handcrafts were being ‘revived’; the peasantry, ‘who groaned and bled under the lash of Turkish extortion’, had become ‘thrifty husbandmen and ready tax-payers’; and Turkish guesthouses, no better than ‘dirty-sheds’, had been replaced by government sponsored hotels ‘better than any to be found in Italy or Germany’.⁹² Using the paternalistic language of Western colonialism, Pemberton believed that Austria ‘had taken the little Bosnian and washed him, clothed him, watered him, educated him’.⁹³

Despite emphasising that Bosnia-Herzegovina was becoming increasingly up to date and comfortable for tourists, journalists suggested that they felt they ‘had left the West behind us’ and entered a ‘morsel of the True East driven westward … by some wind of ethnological chance’.⁹⁴ Sarajevo, Illustrated London News reported, had ‘a glow of the ultimate East upon it’ and that its bazaar was ‘second only to that of Cairo’, an attraction popular with British tourists to the Middle East.⁹⁵ The country was said to be the ideal destination for the tourist looking to get away from the tourist trails and would be appreciated ‘chiefly by those who live to open up new countries, by those to whom Switzerland is passé and the Tyrol a burden’. For Pemberton, a primary attraction of the country was that its Eastern charms remained ‘untouched by the coupon or conducted party’, reflecting the growing upper-class backlash against the mass tourism that had been established by agents like Thomas Cook.⁹⁶

The growth of Bosnian tourist literature, 1895–1910

The years after 1895 witnessed the proliferation of tourist literature about Bosnia-Herzegovina and the British press reported that the ‘judicious work of M. Henri Moser seems to have created a Bosnian fashion’ as ‘Each season witnesses the production of one or more books of travel in Bosnia’.⁹⁷ The receptiveness of British tourists to Moser’s promotion of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a destination correlated with the flight of elite travellers away from established holiday resorts towards less developed localities, a trend that was driven by a snobbish ‘revulsion from the British masses’.⁹⁸

Ironically, the examples of travel journalism considered above which represented Bosnia-Herzegovina as untouched by modern tourism were soon out of date as Thomas Cook inaugurated tours of the country in 1896, which included visits to Dalmatia and an excursion to Cetinje, the Montenegrin capital, on the return leg of the journey. The agent’s magazine, The Excursionist, marketed the country in similar terms to previous promotional literature that boosted the regime.⁹⁹ The country was said to be ‘an entirely new field for the tourist’ that could now be enjoyed by their clients thanks to the ‘comfortable railways’, macadamised roads, and modern hotels constructed by Kállay’s benevolent administration.¹⁰⁰ Running annually between May and September, these tours proved popular as they were referenced in every Baedeker handbook about Austria-Hungary published between 1896 and 1911 and were advertised prominently in the British press as a ‘select’ excursion.¹⁰¹ The introduction of Cook’s tours to Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the company’s ‘embourgeoisement’ and shift away from democratic travel towards exclusive tours in more ‘remote’ locations marketed at the upper-middle classes who wanted the illusion of ‘authentic’ travel even if the itinerary was predetermined.¹⁰² Tours of Bosnia-Herzegovina were clearly aimed at wealthier leisure travellers. By comparison to a two-week Cook’s tour of Switzerland in 1897 that cost £10 and 10 shillings, an excursion to Bosnia-Herzegovina in that same year was priced between £25 and £46, an expense that was out of reach for most Britons when one considers that in the 1901 census the average yearly income was £42.¹⁰³ The growing numbers of wealthy tourists to Bosnia-Herzegovina was notable as William Miller, a self-declared Balkan expert, wrote in the late 1890s that ‘the rage for these Ansichtskarten [postcards]’ had reached the country.¹⁰⁴ Reports of these Thomas Cook tours published in the Cetinje Gazette give an indication of the number of visitors the agent brought to the Balkans. An article from September 1910 noted that although only around half of the Cook’s tour took the excursion from Kotor to Cetinje, they still ‘amounted to about one hundred persons’.¹⁰⁵ The increased number of British visitors to Cetinje was indicated by the fact that the porters who hauled luggage from Kotor ‘nearly all spoke a little broken English’ and showed off their collections of postcards of British landmarks, such as Saint Paul’s Cathedral, that had presumably been gifted to them by previous tourists.¹⁰⁶ The size of Thomas Cook tours and their popularity likely varied over their fifteen year period of operations but it is clear that they introduced a considerable number of British tourists to Bosnia-Herzegovina and the western Balkans more generally.

At the same time as Bosnia-Herzegovina was being incorporated into Thomas Cook’s expanding repertoire of destinations, there was also continued collaboration between travel writers and Kállay’s regime to promote the country as a destination to British audiences.¹⁰⁷ Nearly all British travel writers about Bosnia-Herzegovina in this period had close relations with the country’s administration and enjoyed the Western style amenities that had been established. For instance, Harry C. Thomson’s 1897 travelogue narrated his journey through Bosnia in the official company of Captain von Roth, an Austrian cavalry officer, and, in the preface, he thanked Hugo Freiherr von Kutschera, an Oriental expert of Slovak background who from 1886 to 1903 was the country’s Civil Adlatus, and Johann von Appel, head of the Provincial Government, for their assistance in organising the tour.¹⁰⁸ With such close ties to the administration, Thomson predictably praised Kállay’s ‘dictatorship’ for bringing ‘absolute tranquillity’ to the country. Austria-Hungary, he wrote, ‘has established peace where there was never-ending strife. She has evolved government and order out of anarchy and chaos’. These pro-Austrian sympathies were indicated by his narrative’s title, The Outgoing Turk, which typically suggested Ottoman decay was being superseded by Austrian progress. For the benefit of prospective visitors who still associated the country with the political turbulence of the 1870s, Thomson provided what he considered to be statistical proof of the increased safety and security of Bosnia-Herzegovina, namely the declining rates with which the administration was having to execute ‘criminals’. He admiringly wrote that by 1895 ‘no one was executed … and this in a country where formerly brigandage and murder were crimes of daily occurrence’.¹⁰⁹

Thomson had previously authored an admiring account of British governance in Kashmir and drew comparisons between Bosnia-Herzegovina and colonial administration in India.¹¹⁰ For instance, he believed that Austria-Hungary maintained peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina ‘by placing the Serbs in opposition to the Turks [Bosnian Muslims], much in the same way as we rule in India through the antagonism of Mussulman and Hindu’. Elsewhere in his narrative, he drew parallels between Bosnia-Herzegovina and India in terms of agricultural and legal reforms and the status of Austro-Hungarian and British officials who were both ‘sojourners in a strange land’.¹¹¹ These comparisons are perhaps unsurprising as Kállay’s administration consciously used the policies of the British in India as a template for Bosnia-Herzegovina.¹¹² Thomson’s comments nevertheless underscore the extent to which British visitors constructed Bosnia-Herzegovina out of ‘the discursive material the West had been developing … for usage on its own colonial objects’.¹¹³

The emphasis tourist literature placed on the safety of Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, is arguably best understood as part of a wider set of anxieties expressed by British elites about the dangers of urban-industrial society and nostalgia for Britain’s supposedly more tranquil agrarian past. Late-Victorian cities were perceived by the upper classes as ‘academies of crime and subversion’ whose inhabitants were degenerating towards ignorance, alcoholism, violence, and revolution.¹¹⁴ By contrast, Bosnia-Herzegovina was reassuringly characterised as having what John Patrick Barry, whose travels in the eastern Adriatic were sponsored by the Austrian Lloyd Steamship Company, called a ‘settled air of orderliness and security’, by virtue of both the Austro-Hungarian administration and the pre-industrial character of the country’s society.¹¹⁵ As Henrika Kuklick contends, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, agrarian societies became ‘vehicles for projective fantasy just as vanished British rural communities could’ as both were perceived to have ‘enjoyed the benefits of existence close to nature’.¹¹⁶ For elite tourists, Bosnia-Herzegovina represented an escape from a homeland in which they felt increasingly besieged by the working classes to a pre-industrial ‘ordered world with definite classes and calm transactions’ that had not yet been destabilised by the rush of modernity.¹¹⁷ As this might suggest, the primary signifier of Bosnia-Herzegovina in tourist literature increasingly became its status as a peasant society in which the ills of urban-industrial civilisation were yet to take root. The Islamic cultural heritage of the country continued to be an attraction for tourists but increasing attention was paid to peasants engaged in pre-industrial activities, such as selling agricultural goods, making traditional handicrafts, playing instruments, and dancing the kolo. Although many of these traditions had been ‘revived’ or ‘invented’ by Kállay’s regime to suit the tastes of metropolitan visitors, travellers believed that Bosnia-Herzegovina was an ideal destination to observe peasant traditions that had been preserved by what Thomson called ‘the centuries of oppression’ under Ottoman rule.¹¹⁸ This imagery of Bosnia-Herzegovina chimed with what Frank Trentmann calls ‘the matrix of neo-romanticism’ that developed around the turn of the century and was expressed in Britain’s domestic context through the popularisation of rambling and growing interest in English folk culture, both of which were attempts to restore the nation’s ‘psychic balance wheel’ to the days before the corrupting influence of urban living.¹¹⁹

The growing association between Bosnia-Herzegovina and the pastoral was exemplified by the Aberdonian academic Robert Munro’s travelogue Rambles and Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1900), which combined an account of an archaeological conference in Sarajevo (organised by Kállay in 1894) with a description of ‘these singularly picturesque’ regions for prospective visitors. Owing to advances in photographic technology and their reproduction, Munro’s travel narrative was the first to contain extensive photographs of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As the pastoral connotations of the word ‘rambles’ in the title of his travelogue indicated, his photographs mainly focused on rural scenery and the agrarian traditions and picturesque clothing of the country’s Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic peasant communities.¹²⁰ By contrast, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s towns and cities received less coverage in Munro’s narrative, arguably because of growing delineation in the British imagined geography between the virtuous countryside and the corrupt town.¹²¹ Rambles and Studies reflected the trend in ‘aesthetically motivated’ tourism identified by Katarina Gephardt which after 1900 offered a selective representation of the ‘idyllic vanishing charm of Eastern Europe that resembled England’s past before industrialisation’.¹²² This pastoral imagery struck a chord with British critics increasingly attracted to ‘the ethnic, the local, and the homespun’.¹²³ ‘From all points of view, scenic, social, and scientific’, a reviewer in the Westminster Gazette commented, ‘Bosnia appears in Dr. Munro’s book as a most desirable land for a leisurely tour’.¹²⁴

The concept of agrarian tranquillity became the dominant prism through which tourist literature represented Bosnia-Herzegovina to British audiences after the turn of the twentieth century, even although these were years of accumulating crisis for the administration, headed by István Burián de Rajeczi from 1903 to 1912, as the nationalist demands of Bosnian Serbs undercut its authority.¹²⁵ Although Bosnia’s leadership changed and Moser was no longer involved in the country’s promotion, the regime continued to construct the country as a destination through travelogues and the press. A steady stream of travel articles appeared in regional and national British newspapers authored by journalists that had been invited to join group tours of Bosnia-Herzegovina organised by the Ministry of Railways in conjunction with the British International Association of Journalists and the writer James Baker, a noted Austrophile who had been awarded the Order of Franz Joseph for his promotional activities.¹²⁶

1907 marked the highpoint for this strategy as numerous travel articles by regional and national journalists provided readers across Britain with a largely identikit portrait of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a ‘glorious revelation’.¹²⁷ The invitation of local journalists to the country ensured that an attractive imagined geography reached a broad cross section of British society as the local press was cheaper than national newspapers and more widely read than published travel guides that had a specialist audience.¹²⁸ These travel articles also positioned Bosnia-Herzegovina as an ideal base for further excursions to Dalmatia. Alderman Campion, writing for the Northampton Mercury, suggested the country ‘might well serve as a centre for a lengthened holiday’ because of its rail connections to the Adriatic ports of Metković and Gruž.¹²⁹ These articles followed the established literary template for writing about Bosnia-Herzegovina that praised the ‘civilising’ influence of Austria-Hungary for opening up the picturesque country to tourism. In the Northern Whig, a journalist admiringly wrote that the country, once ‘almost as inaccessible as Tartary or Tibet’, had been transformed into ‘a progressive and orderly European state … where life and property are as secure as in Austria or in Germany’.¹³⁰ Likewise, the Fermanagh Times found that the country was now ‘quieter than Ireland’ and that its exotic sights were perfect for ‘the jaded business man, the variety hunter, the pleasure or health seeker’.¹³¹ As this Irish journalist’s comments suggested, nationalist tensions in Bosnia-Herzegovina were dismissed as inconsequential in travel articles: the editor of a Warwick newspaper wrote that ‘Perfect equality is granted to every race and religion and the different nationalities get on very well together under Austrian rule’.¹³²

Close collaboration between the administration and travel writers continued during the 1908 Bosnian Crisis. The direct annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina attracted widespread condemnation in British political circles with commentators writing that ‘the sudden and most inopportune annexation … has disgusted every lover of justice’.¹³³ Travel writing about the country from this period, however, made little reference to these geopolitical changes, which Hajdarpašić argues is evidence that Austro-Hungarian advisors urged authors ‘to stay the course and produce largely apolitical guides for tourist purposes’ at a time when the monarchy was attracting negative attention in Britain.¹³⁴ For instance, the Anglo-Indian military officer, Percy Henderson, made no direct mention of the annexation in his 1909 travelogue that portrayed Bosnia-Herzegovina as an ideal destination for ‘the lover of the picturesque’ as the local inhabitants had not adopted ‘the slop suit of Western civilisation’.¹³⁵ Although generally well received, critics expected Henderson’s work, titled A British Officer in the Balkans, to be ‘a military treatise or a military officer’s comments on the present political situation in the Balkans’ but were surprised to find instead a description of ‘a new field for the holiday-maker’.¹³⁶

In the same year as Henderson’s travelogue, the watercolourist Mary Janet Whitwell downplayed the significance of the annexation for British audiences. She opened Through Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Paintbrush (1909) by asserting that the 1908 declaration of independence by Bulgaria – ‘the bantam in the poultry yard’ – was more dangerous to European peace than Austria-Hungary establishing formal control over Bosnia-Herzegovina. For the rest of her narrative, Whitwell avoided international politics but emphasised on numerous occasions that ‘the Bosnian is not at all dissatisfied’ with Austrian rule and claimed that a delegation of Orthodox peasants had travelled to Vienna to thank Emperor Franz Josef in person for fully incorporating the country into the monarchy. Typically for a British travel writer, she argued that the Austro-Hungarian administration had brought with it ‘a great deal … of improvements’, notably ‘gendarmes to keep order’. The country, Whitwell claimed, was so safe that women tourists ‘can travel alone in these parts quite well’.¹³⁷

The collaboration between travel writers and the regime was clearest in the case of another female traveller: Maude Holbach, author of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings (1910). Having penned a favourable account of Dalmatia in 1908, she was approached by the Austro-Hungarian administration to write a similar book about the attractions of Bosnia-Herzegovina.¹³⁸ Holbach believed these regions of Austria-Hungary were best visited as part of one trip: she described Bosnia, Herzegovina and Dalmatia as ‘three twin sisters of equal though varied charm’ and recommended readers to visit Dalmatia in spring before proceeding to Herzegovina and onto ‘the more northerly climate’ of Bosnia to escape the summer heat. Going against the wishes of her publisher, John Lane, who wanted a political work on the annexation, she instead leaned towards imagery that appealed to the upper-class attraction to pre-industrial societies and chimed with Austro-Hungarian political imperatives.¹³⁹ Bosnia-Herzegovina, she wrote, was ‘a primitive pastoral land, where shepherds still play upon their flutes and shepherdesses wander with distaff in hand spinning as they watch their flocks; a land untouched by the fret and hurry of modern life, still wrapped in ancient peace’. For Holbach, the tranquillity of the country was a direct result of the imperial administration which had ‘brought peace and prosperity to a land which little more than a decade ago was given up to bloodshed and sedition’.¹⁴⁰

The belief British visitors had in the political stability of Bosnia-Herzegovina was likely entrenched by their lack of direct engagement with local populations. Indeed, Holbach speculated that her impressions of the country may not have been entirely accurate, as she lacked knowledge of local languages and was unable to converse with locals.¹⁴¹ As a Swedish historian visiting Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1890s remarked, ‘For a stranger it is difficult to estimate the true mood among the people, and the officials’ calming assurances should be taken with diplomatic reserve’.¹⁴² Rare moments of cross-cultural engagement in British tourist literature are, however, revealing of the sentiments of the Bosnian population towards the Austro-Hungarian administration. According to visitors, Bosnian Muslims were ‘much interested in India’ and asked ‘about the status and conditions of the Mohammedans’ in the British Empire, demonstrating an awareness of the colonial dimension of Austro-Hungarian rule.¹⁴³ Such lines of enquiry from local populations, as Dženita Karić, Piro Rexhepi and Harun Buljina note, problematise Emily Greble’s assessment that Bosnian Muslims did not view themselves as ‘a product of the systems of European colonialism that shaped Muslim lives around the world’.¹⁴⁴

Despite this absence of local voices, Holbach’s narrative was likely the most successful authored about Bosnia-Herzegovina before the First World War and was praised as an ‘unhackneyed’ and ‘contagious’ account of a country ideal for the ‘picturesque tourist’.¹⁴⁵ ‘No one’, the Manchester Courier declared, ‘could now doubt the beauty of Bosnia and Herzegovina’.¹⁴⁶ The country had become ‘a capital holiday combination’ in the mind of the reviewer for the London Evening Standard.¹⁴⁷ The popularity of Bosnia-Herzegovina for British tourists at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century was indicated by Whitwell’s claim that the traveller did not need much knowledge of foreign languages to travel in the country as ‘at the Hotels they all speak English’.¹⁴⁸

Conclusion: the decline of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a tourist destination, 1910–1914

Holbach’s tourist guide to Bosnia-Herzegovina may have been well received, but it was also one of the last to be published about the country before the First World War. The rapid decline in interest in the country for British tourists arguably had less to do with its perceived qualities as a destination and more to do with Austria-Hungary’s political alignment with an ambitious Germany intent on challenging British interests on the world stage.¹⁴⁹ As tensions between Britain and Germany increased, articles criticising Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina appeared with greater frequency in the British press, particularly regarding the suppression of South Slavic nationalism that developed out of social grievances and was energised by the 1908 annexation and military success of Serbia during the Balkan Wars (1912–13).¹⁵⁰ Articles on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s picturesque attractions were replaced by reports that an assassination attempt by Serb nationalists had been made on the new governor of the province, Marijan Varešanin, that ‘martial law’ had been declared by the Austro-Hungarian government to suppress nationalist sentiment, and that students had been shot dead by gendarmes during protests in Sarajevo.¹⁵¹

The few works of tourist literature published in the years immediately before 1914 expressed newfound anxiety regarding Austria-Hungary’s intentions in Bosnia-Herzegovina. For instance, Roy Trevor, a noted sympathiser with the Southern Slavs who went onto author a guide to Montenegro, warned of the Dual Monarchy’s ‘secret policy’ to settle colonies of ‘German-speaking folk’ in the country. Although primarily concerned with the detrimental effect these demographic shifts would have on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s pre-industrial charms, Trevor also speculated that this was part of a Germano-Austrian masterplan to create ‘a great Northern Empire … extending unbroken from the North Sea to the Adriatic’.¹⁵² Certainly, the days in which British travellers parroted the propaganda of the Austro-Hungarian administration were gone and in their place was a sense of suspicion set against a backdrop of mounting international crises.

The status of Bosnia-Herzegovina as an elite touring destination faltered in the early 1910s because of growing Anglo-German tensions and was decisively curtailed by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Nevertheless, as this article has sought to demonstrate, the country was by no means a no-go zone for tourists before 1914 as previous imagological historiography has suggested. The development of British tourism to Bosnia-Herzegovina represents a hitherto underexplored component of the upper-class reaction to what Veblen termed the process of ‘social emulation’, a component of which involved the middle-classes demonstrating their newfound status by imitating elite patterns of leisure travel.¹⁵³ To return to Harry de Windt with whom this article began, Bosnia-Herzegovina was no longer a constituent part of what he called ‘Savage Europe’ but became in the eyes of the British upper-classes ‘a smiling country’ where they could escape lower-class tourists and experience an exotic and agrarian culture that was perceived to contrast favourably against industrial civilisation.¹⁵⁴ Tourist travel to Bosnia-Herzegovina therefore exemplifies Urry’s claim that by the late-nineteenth century ‘where one travelled to became of considerable significance’ as destinations acquired ‘differences of social tone’.¹⁵⁵ In the final analysis, scrutiny of tourist literature to Bosnia-Herzegovina helps to elucidate the complexity with which the Balkans entered the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination and arguably represents the most forceful counterpoint to existing imagological historiography, which suggests the imagined geography of the region was defined solely in terms of discord and violence.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities for their support and to Dr Mirna Šolić, Professor Churnjeet Mahn and Dr Nataša Urošević who advised on drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

AHRC SGSAH DTP Studentship (Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities Doctoral Training Partnership).

Notes on contributors

Ross Cameron

Ross Cameron is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD researcher based at the University of Glasgow. His thesis, Reimagining the Balkans: Edwardian Travellers in Southeast Europe, examines the diversity of ways the Balkans entered the Edwardian imagination. He is the co-organiser of the 2023 Borders and Crossings Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing and has recently undertaken a visiting doctoral researcher position at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, sponsored by the AHRC.

Notes

1 Harry de Windt, My Restless Life (London: Grant Richards, 1909), 61–2, 25.

2 Harry de Windt, From Pekin to Calais by Land (London: Chapman Hall, 1889).

3 See, A Ride to India: Across Persia and Baluchistan (London: Chapman Hall, 1891); Siberia As It Is (London: Chapman Hall, 1892); The New Siberia: Being an account of a visit to the penal island of Sakhalin, and political prison and mines of the Trans-Baikal District, Eastern Siberia (London: Chapman Hall, 1896); Through the Gold-fields of Alaska to Bering Straits (London: Chapman Hall, 1899).

4 Harry de Windt, From Paris to New York by Land (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1904), vii–viii.

5 Harry de Windt, Through Savage Europe (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1907), 15–6.

6 Katarina Gephardt, ‘“The Enchanted Garden” or “The Red Flag”: Eastern Europe in Late Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing’, Journal of Narrative Theory 35, no. 3 (2005): 301.

7 De Windt, Savage Europe, 95–6.

8 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1999). See also, John Urry, ‘The ‘Consumption’ of Tourism’, Sociology 24, no. 1 (1990): 24.

9 E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (London: Edward Arnold, 1908), 92.

10 John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995), 130.

11 John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 265.

12 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 202–3.

13 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 48–76.

14 For further discussion on the ambiguous line separating travel from tourist literature see, Graham Dann, ‘Writing Out the Tourist in Space and Time’, Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 (1999):159–87.

15 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage, 2002).

16 Rudy Koshar, ‘‘What Ought to be Seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 325.

17 William Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 45.

18 Josef Ploner, ‘Tourist literature and the ideological grammar of landscape in the Austrian Danube Valley, ca. 1870–1945’, Journal of Tourism History 4, no. 3 (2012): 240.

19 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 74–5.

20 Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, ‘Touring History: Guidebooks and the Commodification of the Salem Witch Trials’, Journal of American Culture 30, no. 3 (2007): 272.

21 Kalyan Bhandari, Tourism and National Identity: Heritage and Nationhood in Scotland (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2014), 1.

22 Peter M. Sánchez and Kathleen M. Adams, ‘The Janus-Faced Character of Tourism in Cuba’, Annals of Tourism Research 35, no. 1 (2008): 28.

23 Edin Hajdarpašić, Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 188–90.

24 Jill Steward, ‘The Image of Austria in British Travel Literature before the First World War: 1860–1914’, in Austria and the Austrians: Images in World Literature, ed. Wolfgang Goertschander and Holger Klein (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2003), 112-11; Nataša Urošević, ‘The Brijuni Islands – recreating paradise: media representations of an elite Mediterranean resort in the first tourist magazines’, Journal of Tourism History 6, no. 2–3 (2014): 122–38.

25 For further information on discourses that presented Austria-Hungary’s presence in Bosnia as a colonial ‘civilising mission’ see, Robin Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism: The Habsburg ‘Civilising’ Mission in Bosnia, 1878–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

26 John Allcock and Antonia Young, ed., preface to Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), xxvi.

27 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 1. Maria Todorova’s work describes the ‘discovery’ of the Balkans by Western travellers as the period between 1800 and 1914 and she only uses the word ‘tourism’ twice in her entire study. See, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Andrew Hammond likewise fails to consider the extent to which tourism shaped images of southeast Europe and asserts that ‘exploration’ was the dominant mode of travel to the Balkans before the First World War. See, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 205.

28 Peter Whitfield, Travel: A Literary History (Oxford: Bodelain Library Press, 2011), 180.

29 See, Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: the case of former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); David Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999).

30 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 49. For a comprehensive definition of the concept of ‘imagined geography’ see, Caroline Desbiens, ‘Imaginative geographies’, in The International Encyclopaedia of Geography, ed. Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2017), https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/doi/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0865 (accessed May 1, 2023).

31 James Perkins, ‘Peasants and Politics: Rethinking the British Imaginative Geography of the Balkans at the Time of the First World War’, European History Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2017): 65.

32 Jill Steward, ‘The ‘Travel Romance’ and the Emergence of the Female Tourist’, Studies in Travel Writing 2, no. 1 (1998): 90; Maureen Healy, ‘Europe on the Sava: Austrian Encounters with ‘Turks’ in Bosnia’, Austrian History Yeabook 51 (2020): 75.

33 Eugene Michail, The British and the Balkans: Forming Images of Foreign Lands, 1900–1950 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 23.

34 Neval Berber, Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844–1912) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2007), 1–2.

35 Radovan Subić, ‘Adventurers, Agents, and Soldiers: British Travel Writers in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1844–1856)’, in Voyages and Travel Accounts in Historiography and Literature, Volume 2: Connecting the Balkans and the Modern World, ed. Boris Stojkovsky (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2020), 95.

36 Katarina Gephardt, The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives 1789–1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 152.

37 Hammond, The Debated Lands, 48.

38 Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–1999 (New York: Viking, 2000), 70.

39 Robert J. Donia and John V.A. Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 75–6.

40 Healy, ‘Europe on the Sava’, 80.

41 Humphry Sandwith, ‘A Trip into Bosnia’, Fraser’s Magazine, December 1873, 698–713. Sandwith published a popular account of his experience at Kars which made him something of a celebrity in Britain. See, A Narrative of the Siege of Kars (London: John Murray, 1856).

42 Donia and Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina, 87.

43 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation in the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 74; Hammond, The Debated Lands, 73–4.

44 Berber, Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina, 6–7.

45 Arthur J. Patterson, ‘From Agram to Zara’, Fortnightly Review 11, no. 64 (1872): 366–7.

46 T.W. Legh, ‘A Ramble in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, The New Review 5, no. 30 (1891): 471–2.

47 Arthur J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1876), 88–90.

48 Omer Hadžiselimović, ‘Two Victorian Ladies and Bosnian Realities, 1862–1875’, in Allcock and Young, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, 3; G. Muir Mackenzie and A.P. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, vol. 1 (London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1877), 25, 32, 8–9.

49 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 4. For recent imagological scholarship see, James Perkins, British Liberalism and the Balkans, c. 1875–1920, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (2014); Samuel Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants Before Tito (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

50 Mackenzie and Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces, vol. 1, 1.

51 W.J. Stillman, Herzegovina and the Late Uprising: The Causes of the Latter and the Remedies (London: Longmans, Green and Co., I877), 155.

52 Donia and Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina, 93–5.

53 See for instance, ‘Murder of an Austrian Colonel’, Dublin Daily Express, April 7, 1879, 5; ‘Military Justice in Bosnia’, Edinburgh Evening News, February 13, 1879, 4; ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Illustrated London News, February 18, 1882, 149.

54 R. Hamilton Lang, ‘The Austrians in Bosnia’, Fortnightly Review 26, no. 155 (1879): 653–4.

55 ‘Adventures among the Austrians in Bosnia’, Blackwood’s Magazine 133, no. 808 (1883): 197.

56 Ardern Hulme-Beaman, ‘Notes of a Fortnight in Bosnia’, Fortnightly Review 46, no. 273 (1889): 397.

57 James Creagh, Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah: A Journey through Hungary, Slavonia, Servia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Montenegro, vol. 1 (London: Samuel Tinsley, 1877), 2.

58 Biographical details, unless referenced otherwise, are from Roger Nicholas Balsiger, ‘Honoring Henri Moser Charlottenfels’, in À l’Orientale: Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Francine Giese, Mercedes Volait and Ariane Varela Braga (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1–7.

59 Ágnes Sebestyén, ‘Henri Moser as the Commissioner General of the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris’, in Giese, Volair and Braga, À l’Orientale, 129.

60 See, À Travers l'Asie Centrale: Impressions de Voyage (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1886) and L'irrigation en Asie Centrale: Étude Géographique et Économique (Paris: Société d’Éditions Scientifiques, 1894).

61 Alban von Stockhausen, ‘“Our aim is to perform something that remains after we are gone”: The Oriental Collection Henri Moser Charlottenfels at Bernisches Historisches Museum’, in Giese, Volair and Braga, À l’Orientale, 189.

62 ‘Occasional Notes’, Pall Mall Gazette, July 14, 1885, 3; ‘Russia in Central Asia’, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, January 1, 1889, 3.

63 Elika Palenzona Djalili, ‘Business, Diplomacy and Arts: Two Swiss Collectors of Persian Art’, in The Reshaping of Persian Art: Art Histories of Islamic Iran and Beyond, ed. Iván Szántó and Yuka Kadoi (Piliscsaba: Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 2019), 43

64 Stockhausen, ‘“Our aim is to perform”’, 189.

65 Djalili, ‘Business, Diplomacy and Arts’, 52.

66 Sebestyén, ‘Henri Moser’, 127.

67 Healy, ‘Europe on the Sava’, 75.

68 Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (London: Routledge, 2001), 245.

69 Piro Rexhepi, ‘Unmapping Islam in Eastern Europe: Periodisation and Muslim Subjectivities in the Balkans’, in Eastern Europe Unmapped: Beyond Borders and Peripheries, ed. Irene Kacandes and Yuliya Komska (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 55.

70 Donia and Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina, 97.

71 Cathie Carmichael, A Concise History of Bosnia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 41.

72 Henry Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years, 1892–1922: A Personal Narrative, vol. 1 (London: William Heinemann, 1924), 202.

73 Siniša Malešević, ‘Forging the Nation-centric World: Imperial Rule and the Homogenisation of Discontent in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878–1918)’, Journal of Historical Sociology 34, no. 4 (2021): 673; Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism, 65–6.

74 Diana Reynolds-Cordileone, ‘Displaying Bosnia: Imperialism, Orientalism, and Exhibitionary Cultures in Vienna and Beyond, 1878–1914’, Austrian History Yearbook 46 (2015): 30, 35.

75 Sebestyén, ‘Henri Moser’, 135.

76 János Asbóth, An Official Tour Through Bosnia and Herzegovina (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890), viii.

77 ‘A Tour through Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Pall Mall Gazette, September 24, 1890, 3.

78 Henri Moser, An Oriental Holiday: Bosnia and Herzegovina (London: The International Sleeping Car Company, 1895), 2.

79 Ibid., 3–6.

80 Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism.

81 Moser, An Oriental Holiday, 19–20, 11, 26, 1.

82 Ibid, 1.

83 ‘The Opening of the Tourist Season of 1895’, The Queen: The Ladies’ Newspaper, July 1, 1895, 993.

84 George Augustus Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1896), 186.

85 ‘An Oriental Holiday’, Golf, July 19, 1895 378.

86 ‘International Geographical Congress’, Morning Post, July 27, 1895, 2.

87 ‘Pigeon Shooting Meeting in Bosnia’, London Evening Standard, July 16, 1895, 3.

88 Harding Edward de Fonblanque Cox, A Sportsman at Large (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1922), 48, 161–2.

89 Harding Edward de Fonblanque Cox, ‘Sporting Congress in Bosnia’, Field, September 11, 1897, 445.

90 Snaffle [Robert Dunkin], In the Land of the Bora; or, Camp Life and Sport in Dalmatia and Herzegovina (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1897), 16–7.

91 ‘Ten Days in Bosnia’, Illustrated London News, March 2, 1895, 256; Max Pemberton, ‘The Rise of Bosnia. I – The Journey’, The Sketch, July 17, 1895, 658.

92 ‘Ten Days in Bosnia. I – A Retrospect’, Illustrated London News, January 26, 1895, 115; ‘Ten Days in Bosnia. III – Jajce and Jezero’, Illustrated London News, February 9, 1895, 179.

93 Pemberton, ‘The Rise of Bosnia. I – The Journey’, 658.

94 ‘Ten Days in Bosnia. II – From the Frontier to the Capital’, Illustrated London News, February 2, 1895, 147; Max Pemberton, ‘The Rise of Bosnia. II – Round the Town’, The Sketch, July 24, 1895, 710.

95 ‘Ten Days in Bosnia. II – From the Frontier to the Capital’, 148.

96 Pemberton, ‘The Rise of Bosnia. I – The Journey’, 658; Max Pemberton, ‘The Rise of Bosnia. III – Valleys and Mountains’, The Sketch, July 31, 1895, 50. For the growing anti-touristic backlash to the increasing rationalisation and organisation of travel see, Buzard, The Beaten Track, 59–64.

97 ‘Our “Daily News” War Correspondent’, The Sketch, August 11, 1897, 92.

98 Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion, 265.

99 Evidence indicating involvement of the administration in the decision for Thomas Cook to inaugurate tours to Bosnia may be held in the Thomas Cook Archive that has been inaccessible since the agent’s bankruptcy in 2019. The archive has recently been acquired by the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland but is not yet fully accessible to researchers.

100 Thomas Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Travel (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1991), 236.

101 See, Karl Baedeker, Austria including Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia and Bosnia (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1896); Karl Baedeker, Austria including Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia and Bosnia (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1900); Karl Baedeker, Austria-Hungary including Dalmatia and Bosnia (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1905); Karl Baedeker, Austria-Hungary with excursions to Cetinje, Belgrade and Bucharest (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1911).

102 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 64.

103 Statistics on average income can be found in the National Archive online exhibition on the 1901 census, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/census/events/polecon3.htm (accessed May 1, 2023).

104 William Miller, Travels and Politics in the Near East (New York: Frederick Stokes, 1897),15.

105 ‘Dnevnik’, Cetinjski Vjesnik, September 25, 1910, 4.

106 Douglas Goldring, Dream Cities: Notes of an Autumn Tour in Italy and Dalmatia (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 261.

107 Hajdarpašić, Whose Bosnia?, 190.

108 Biographical details for these two prominent figures in Kállay’s administration are provided in Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism, 58–9.

109 H.C. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk: Impressions of a Journey through the Western Balkans (London: William Heinemann, 1897), viii-xi, 4, 14.

110 See, H.C. Thomson, The Chitral Campaign (London: William Heinemann, 1895).

111 Thomson, The Outgoing Turk, 123, 37, 50 189. American travellers drew parallels between Bosnia-Herzegovina and their own colonial project in the Philippines. See, William Elroy Curtis, The Turk and His Lost Provinces: Greece, Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1903), 273, 297.

112 Brigette Fuchs, ‘Orientalising Disease: Austro-Hungarian Policies of Race, Gender and Hygiene in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, ed. Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turba (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 76; Catherine Barker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Post-socialist, post-conflict, post-colonial? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 101. There is rich literature discussing the coloniality of Bosnia-Herzegovina. For a recent overview of this historiography see, Dženita Karić, Piro Rexhepi and Harun Buljina, ‘Feel Good Orientalism and the Question of Dignity: A Review Essay of Emily Greble’s Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe’, https://themaydan.com/2023/02/feel-good-orientalism-and-the-question-of-dignity/#_ftnref25 (accessed May 1, 2023).

113 Andrew Hammond, ‘The Uses of Balkanism: Representation and Power in British Travel Writing, 1850–1914’, The Slavonic and East European Review 82, no. 3 (2004): 603.

114 Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion, 128.

115 J.P. Barry, At the Gates of the East: A Book of Travel Among Historic Wonderlands (Longmans, Green and Co., 1906), 247.

116 Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: A Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5–6. See also, Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth Century Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 583–625.

117 Stefan Zweig, World of Yesterday (London: Cassell and Company, 1943), 25.

118 Cordileone, ‘Displaying Bosnia’, 35–9; Thomson, The Outgoing Turk, ix.

119 Trentmann, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, 584; Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49.

120 Robert Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1900), 4.

121 Perkins, ‘Peasants and Politics’, 65; Trentmann, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, 585.

122 Gephardt, The Idea of Europe, 172.

123 Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion, 143–6, 265–6.

124 ‘Travels in Bosnia and Elsewhere’, Westminster Gazette (9 June 1900), 3.

125 Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism, 123–43.

126 ‘British Journalists Visit to Austria’, Westminster Gazette, May 15, 1907, 7. Baker wrote numerous travel books that promoted Austria-Hungary as a destination. See, Pictures from Bohemia (London: Religious Tract Society, 1894) and Austria: Her People and Their Homelands (London: John Lane, 1913).

127 Alderman S.S. Campion, ‘Glimpses of Austrian Places and Peoples’, Northampton Mercury, 26 July, 1907, 8.

128 The number of promotional articles published in 1907 alone was vast. See also, but not exclusively, Jesse Quail, ‘A Tour in Central Europe: The Tyrol, Salzburg, Styria, Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina’, Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, September 3, 1907, 5; A.S. Berwick, ‘In Adorable Austria and at the Heart of Europe’, Berwickshire News, October 1, 1907, 4; Hubert Briscoe, ‘Off Beaten Tracks: Where West Meets East’, The Irish Independent, July 2, 1907, 4; ‘Austria’s Many Charms: A Tour Through Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina’, Belfast Evening Telegraph, June 24, 1907, 6; ‘A New Route to an Unknown Land: Through Austria by the New Mountain Railways to Dalmatia’, The Sphere, July 6, 1907, 16; ‘To the Gates of the East: Impressions of a Traveller’, Forres, Elgin and Nairn Gazette, September 18, 1907, 3; ‘British Journalists in Austria’, Bristol Times and Mirror, June 6, 1907, 3.

129 Campion, ‘Glimpsed of Austrian Places and Peoples’, 8.

130 ‘Touring in Bosnia’, Northern Whig, July 6, 1907, 8.

131 ‘A Holiday in Austria with a Glance at Bosnia and Herzegovina’ Fermanagh Times, August 8, 1907, 2.

132 ‘A Tour in the Adriatic and Bosnia’, Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, July 20, 1907, 6.

133 Viator, ‘The Truth About Bosnia and the Herzegovina’, Fortnightly Review 84, no. 105 (1908): 1007.

134 Hajdarpašić, Whose Bosnia?, 190.

135 Percy E. Henderson, A British Officer in the Balkans; the account of a journey through Dalmatia, Montenegro, Turkey in Austria, Magyarland, Bosnia and Hercegovina (London: Seeley and Co., 1909), 105.

136 ‘A British Officer in the Balkans’, Irish Times, February 12, 1909, 7.

137 Mrs E.R. Whitwell [Mary Janet Whitwell], Through Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Paintbrush (Darlington: William Dresser and Sons, 1909), 1, 56, 63, 75–6.

138 See, Maude Holbach, Dalmatia: The Land Where East Meets West (London: John Lane, 1908).

139 Hajdarpašić, Whose Bosnia?, 190.

140 Maude Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings (London: John Lane, 1910), unpaginated preface, 16, 21.

141 Ibid, 17.

142 Alfred Jensen, quoted in, Svein Mønnesland, Bosnia and Herzegovina in pictures and words through the centuries (Oslo: Sypress Forlag, 2001), 267.

143 Thomson, The Outgoing Turk, 121. See also, Henderson, A British Officer in the Balkans, 75–6.

144 Karić, Rexhepi and Buljina, ‘Feel-good Orientalism and the Question of Dignity’; Emily Greble, Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 7.

145 ‘Travel and Touring’, Westminster Gazette, October 9, 1909, 14; ‘The Case of Bosnia’, The Graphic, October 23, 1909, 528.

146 ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Manchester Courier, October 30, 1909, 11.

147 ‘Life in the Near East’, London Evening Standard, December 7, 1909, 11.

148 Whitwell, Through Bosnia and Herzegovina, 56.

149 Hammond, The Debated Lands, 86.

150 Donia and Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina, 113–5.

151 See for instance, ‘Attempted Murder of the Governor’, The Globe, June 15, 1910, 8; ‘Fatal Riot in Bosnia’, The Scotsman, February 20, 1912, 5; ‘Martial Law in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, London Evening Standard, May 5, 1913, 9.

152 Roy Trevor, My Balkan Tour: An account of some journeyings and adventures in the Near East together with a descriptive and historical account of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia, and the Kingdom of Montenegro (London: John Lane, 1911), xii. See also, Roy Trevor, Montenegro: A Land of Warriors (London: A.C. Black, 1913).

153 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 103; Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion, 265.

154 Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 16.

155 Urry, Consuming Places, 130.