The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870–1930. By GeorgiosGiannakopoulos. Manchester University Press, 2025. 304 pp. £85.

Over the past three decades, historians have made strides in examining British engagement with southeastern Europe. Early scholarship, notably that of Larry Wolff (1994) and Maria Todorova (1997), focused on the ways in which British depictions of the region perpetuated ‘balkanist’ discourses of cultural backwardness. Following the end of the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), scholars increasingly moved beyond outlining the lineaments of pejorative discourses to examine the historical contexts in which representations emerged. Studies by Eugene Michail (2011), James Perkins (2017) and Samuel Foster (2021), for example, have explored the channels of engagement through which ideas about southeastern Europe circulated and the ways in which imaginative geographies of the region developed in dialogue with Britain's domestic political concerns. Georgios Giannakopoulos's The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870–1930 makes a significant contribution to this growing historiography on Britain's engagement with southeastern Europe. While earlier studies have focused primarily on patterns of perception, Giannakopoulos situates networks of British historians, archaeologists and journalists – collectively described as ‘interpreters’ – within the broader currents of internationalist thought that emerged during an era of imperial crisis and rising nationalism. Central to the book are the conceptual connections these interpreters drew between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and Britain's imperial domains. Through such comparisons, Giannakopoulos argues, they sought both to interpret and to propose solutions to the rapidly changing political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, advocating novel political frameworks such as federalism, population transfers, minority protection, mandates and self-determination. In doing so, Giannakopoulos challenges conventional assumptions about power asymmetries between Britain and the balkanist periphery, emphasizing instead the multidirectional circulation of ideas between Britain and southeastern Europe. The Interpreters offers an alternative account of the origins of internationalist thinking and demonstrates the importance of southeastern Europe to twentieth-century debates about managing national and ethnic diversity. Giannakopoulos expands our understanding of the development of international thought by recovering the contributions of figures who rarely appear in conventional histories of internationalism, including the archaeologist Arthur J. Evans, the traveller and anthropologist Mary Edith Durham and the Scottish historian Robert Seton-Watson. The book's structure reinforces this intervention: chapters organized around individual interpreters foreground their intellectual trajectories and allow their interpretations of southeastern Europe and the evolving international order to emerge with clarity. Although these figures have long occupied a prominent place in studies of Britain and the Balkans, scholars of international thought would do well to mine Giannakopoulos's extensive bibliography for further primary reading. Part I, titled ‘The Eastern question revisited’, centres on three late Victorian intellectuals: Edward Augustus Freeman, Arthur J. Evans and James Bryce. In different ways, these figures sought to recast the Ottoman Balkans and Armenia as regions connected to the origins of Western civilization rather than as part of the ‘Oriental’ world. While Chapter 1 examining Freeman's and Evans's efforts to uncover ‘Illyrian civilisation’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina revisits themes explored by Neval Berber (2010), Giannakopoulos's discussion of Bryce (particularly the influence of settler-colonial frameworks on his views of Armenian statehood) in Chapter 2 offers fresh insights into the place of southeastern Europe within the transimperial imagination. The final chapter of Part I introduces what is perhaps the book's most recurring theme: Irish home rule. Studies of representations of the Balkans have frequently noted how British visitors compared the region's supposedly backward and rebellious peasantry to that of Ireland. Giannakopoulos moves beyond these balkanist stereotypes to demonstrate how the Irish question was entangled with broader debates about plural governance in southeastern Europe. These debates encompassed the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, proposals for federal solutions to Croatian and Transylvanian demands for self-government within the Kingdom of Hungary, as well as the Irish journalist James David Bourchier's more fanciful proposal for a ‘Balkan confederation’. Part II, ‘Managing diversity across Austria-Hungary and the Balkans’, introduces a new generation of interpreters who came to prominence around the turn of the twentieth century, as international attention focused on southeastern Europe amid nationalist unrest in Macedonia and Crete, constitutional crises within the Habsburg Empire and the Young Turk Revolution (1908) in the Ottoman Empire. This period has been the focus of much scholarship on Britain and the Balkans. Historians have variously interpreted this period as either an intensification of negative perceptions of the region or as a moment when disillusionment with modernity encouraged a more sympathetic view of its peasant communities. Giannakopoulos, however, contends that previous studies have overstated the dominance of discursive frameworks and overlooked the innovative proposals for international governance advanced by the interpreters. The cases of Crete and Macedonia, examined through the writings of the liberal radical Henry Noel Brailsford in Chapter 4, are convincingly presented as imperial experiments serving as testing grounds for international oversight in the management of ethnic conflict. Giannakopoulos introduces Robert Seton-Watson, perhaps the most influential of the interpreters, through his critiques of the assimilationist policies of Austria-Hungary in the context of the South Slav question in Chapter 5. For Seton-Watson, the South Slav question posed a fundamental challenge to the cohesion of multinational empires. He therefore advocated new constitutional formulas capable of reconciling self-government with imperial unity, including proposals for the political union of Serbs and Croats modelled on the Anglo-Scottish union within a federal Habsburg framework. While Seton-Watson's proposals for regional cooperation were innovative, Giannakopoulos's explanation for the Scottish historian's romanticized view of southeastern Europe as an antidote to modern cosmopolitanism will be familiar to readers of scholarship on Britain and the Balkans. The final chapter of Part II turns to debates about Ottoman reform and minority protection. The discussion of the Albanian question, however, does not address perspectives on the International Control Commission that administered Albania before the First World War – a surprising omission in a study concerned with the history of international governance. Part III, ‘Nationalism and internationalism during the Great War’, examines the increased demand for expertise on southeastern Europe during the First World War. Chapter 7 traces the wartime struggle for influence among competing interpreters and their preferred national causes, as figures such as Seton-Watson gained political influence, while others became increasingly critical of the international system. Chapter 8 turns to the intellectual circle associated with The New Europe, including Seton-Watson, Evans and Henry Wickham Steed, whose ambitious, if selective, vision of national self-determination for the Habsburg and Ottoman empires exerted a significant influence on wartime foreign policy. Returning to the theme of Irish home rule, Giannakopoulos highlights the contradictions within this group's internationalist thought, which championed national self-determination in central and southeastern Europe while largely ignoring analogous struggles within Britain's own empire. The most innovative chapter of Part III examines the dissolution of the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires in comparative perspective. Histories of southeastern Europe have often remained narrowly regional in focus. Giannakopoulos instead situates the region's post-war settlement within wider debates about federalism in Russia and the emerging frameworks for international administration in the Middle East. Ultimately, Part III illuminates the tensions between ideals of self-determination and the pragmatic constraints of wartime diplomacy. The final section of The Interpreters, ‘New orders and old questions’, examines the afterlives of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires during the 1920s and 1930s. Against the backdrop of authoritarianism in the successor states of Austria-Hungary, Giannakopoulos explores Seton-Watson's enduring hopes for democracy in the region and his suggestion that new states such as Czechoslovakia might address minority questions by drawing on the Scottish experience of balancing local autonomy with loyalty to a broader national framework. The final chapter turns to Arnold J. Toynbee's experiences in Anatolia during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22). Drawing on Toynbee's reframing of the Eastern Question as a ‘Western Question’, Giannakopoulos persuasively argues that the Greek defeat and the ensuing Chanak Crisis, which brought Britain and Turkish nationalists to the brink of war, accelerated a crisis of cohesion within the British Empire. The episode inflamed religious nationalism in Britain's Muslim colonies, challenged London's monopoly over imperial foreign policy as Canada opposed military intervention in Anatolia and signalled the end of liberalism as a unifying imperial ideology. The Interpreters concludes with a brief reflection on the legacies of the interpreters in Britain and the southeastern European countries they championed, as well as on ‘contemporary interpreters’, such as Timothy Garton Ash and Noel Malcolm. Giannakopoulos's coda prompts a sobering reflection: if southeastern Europe once served as a testing ground for international expertise, the authority of such expertise in public debate now appears far less secure. Despite some minor limitations and omissions, The Interpreters represents a significant contribution to the historiography of Britain and the Balkans. By situating British intellectual engagement with the region within wider debates about imperial governance and managing national diversity, Giannakopoulos convincingly demonstrates that southeastern Europe functioned as a laboratory for modern ideas of international order. In this light, the Balkans emerge not as the periphery of European politics, but as a central arena in which the political languages of the twentieth century were first tested.