Hvar in the Modern Age

A history of southeast Europe and the Adriatic Sea since 1800 through the lens of the Croatian island Hvar, focusing on changing states, modernization, identity and tourism.

In this open access book, Florian Bieber traces the history of the island of Hvar during the 19th and 20th centuries. Bieber uses Hvar as a novel lens to tell a larger story about modernity, changing states and identity, tourism and the transnational entanglements of the Adriatic Sea and the region of southeast Europe. The book shows how ordinary people dealt with the challenges of the rise of nations, as well as transnational connections such migration and tourism and the changing of empires and states. Based on a wealth of archival materials from Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, the UK and the USA, Hvar in the Modern Age also reveals the complexities of the history of the Habsburg Monarchy and Yugoslavia from a bottom-up perspective and the realities and challenges of island life in southeast Europe during the modern period.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).