Blood Ties is an extremely important and insightful look into the processes that led to the division of Macedonia, and indeed all of Rumeli (the European part of the Ottoman Empire), into nationally defined states. Yosmaoğlu first shows how the Great Powers viewed the region as unnatural, primitive, and disordered because it had no clear ethnic definition. “Balkan national elites…imported and internalized [these perceptions],” resulting in “carefully strategized methods used to substantiate one ethnic group’s claim to territory over another’s” (90). With the beliefs and norms determined by the Great Powers in the background, events in the Balkans took a predictable turn.
The battle for territory became a battle to impose ethnic identities, in one way or another, on populations without any. Yosmaoğlu devotes individual chapters to the way in which cartography, the educational system, statistics and censuses, and church rivalries entered into the larger attempt to match ethnicity with...