The underground Macedonian Revolutionary Organization recruited and mobilized over 20,000 supporters to take up arms against the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1903. Challenging conventional wisdom about the role of ethnic and national identity in Balkan history, Keith Brown focuses on social and cultural mechanisms of loyalty to describe the circuits of trust and terror-webs of secret communications and bonds of solidarity-that linked migrant workers, remote villagers, and their leaders in common cause. Loyalties were covertly created and maintained through acts of oath-taking, record-keeping, arms-trading, and in the use and management of deadly violence.

Evolution of an early 20th-century terrorist organization

About the Author

Keith Brown is Professor at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. He is author of The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation and editor of Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the former Yugoslavia.

Reviews

Loyal Unto Death is a fascinating account of an anti-imperialist struggle that pushes readers to think beyond the nation. It will serve as a powerful resource for both students and scholars embarking on historical ethnography . . . Likewise, the book will be extremely valuable for those working on revolutionary movements in search of strategies to draw out the lived experiences of underground movements.

* POLAR *

[Keith Brown] takes as his central problem the question of how at the start of the twentieth century the Secret Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (MRO) was able to grow so rapidly from a tiny band of conspirators to an organization capable of fielding some 20,000 participants in the Ilinden uprising of 1903. 119.5

* American Historical Review *

Loyal unto Death is an innovative work that should inspire debate.

* Slavic Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253008404
Author Keith Brown
Format Paperback
Page Count 282
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 431g