Bibliographical Essay

Works such as Jeremy Black's Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) clearly show how cartography has helped shape modernity. But while Black's study considers war, nationalism and geo-politics, the connection between geography and genocide is absent.

However, there has been keen interest in recent studies of the impact of imperial collapse on Europe's borderlands and its people. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) exemplifies the contemporary scholarship in the field, including a growing awareness of how and where genocide became a key vector of postimperial nation-building. That this also included Soviet ‘nation-building' is acutely developed in Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing', Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 813-61. Martin's study is also exemplary in its situating of Soviet ethnic cleansing within a borderlands landscape which needs to be read as a whole, as well as disaggregated into discrete zones of violence.

While the broad, systemic picture of genocide in its relationships to historical time and geographical space is yet to be fully explored, there have been suggestive regional studies including of the Macedonia-Thrace arena. Henry R. Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1951) was a notable forerunner in assessing how competing, mythic and increasingly belligerent nationalist claims on territory were dependent on the creation of allegedly accurate, supporting ethnographic maps. More recently the subject has been brilliantly reconsidered in Ipek Yosmaoglu, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1906 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), not least in demonstrating the connecting threads between cartography and censuses and an ensuing mass violence.

Finally, for further, recent but significant intervention cross-relating genocide, the specific political geography of Macedonia-Thrace and modernity, see Raz Segal, ‘The Modern State: The Question of Genocide and Holocaust Scholarship', Journal of Genocide Research 20.1 (2018), 108-33, and Mark Levene, ‘“The Bulgarians Were the Worst!”: Reconsidering the Holocaust in Salonika within a Regional History of Mass Violence', in Giorgos Antoniou and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 36-57.

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