Albania, the Foundling State of Europe (Paperback)

Paperback. Albania declared independence at Vlore on 28 November 1912. By the spring of 1914 the Conference of Ambassadors in London had drawn its borders, a German prince had arrived in Durres, and the Ottoman Pasha had been replaced by a European ruler. Wadham Peacock, formerly attached to the British Consulate-General at Scodra, wrote this book in that brief and unrepeatable interval-after Ottoman departure, before the World War swept Albania back into chaos. The result is a working consular officer's portrait of a country emerging from four centuries of Ottoman administration: the bazaar at Scodra, the Malissori clans of the northern mountains, the rituals of blood-feud and besa, the Sunni majority alongside Catholic and Orthodox minorities, the Italo-Austrian rivalry for influence, and the federal future Peacock thought the Albanians ought to be given. A primary document of the moment Albania entered the modern map of Europe. Albania, the Foundling State of Europe is a working consular officer's book-part travel narrative, part ethnography, part political brief-written by a man who had lived inside the British Consulate-General at Scodra (Shkoder) during the closing years of Ottoman rule. Across seventeen chapters and roughly three hundred pages Peacock moves from the postal road up from San Giovanni di Medua, through the bazaars and clan households of the north, into a long historical chapter on the Shkypetar past and a concluding political argument about the federal constitution Albania ought to adopt. The voice is conversational and unhurried; the detail is the detail of someone who actually rode the trails, sat through the weddings, and watched the diplomatic post arrive on Austrian Lloyd steamers. The book is one of perhaps half a dozen English-language treatments of Albania published between the country's 1912 declaration of independence and the outbreak of the World War, and it is the only one written from inside the British consular apparatus at Scodra itself. The book belongs to a very specific publishing moment. Albania declared independence at Vlore on 28 November 1912. The Conference of Ambassadors in London settled the new state's borders during 1912 and 1913. The Treaty of London on 30 May 1913 ended the First Balkan War. Prince Wilhelm of Wied disembarked at Durres on 7 March 1914 as the European-imposed sovereign. Peacock signed his preface in London that same month. He is writing into the narrow window between the Ottoman departure and the catastrophe of August, and he knows it: his preface admits the Albania he describes is already passing away, but insists that "in the Near East things, when they change, change slowly," and that the underlying country will outlast the constitutional novelties Europe has just imposed on it. The book's stance is British-clear-eyed about Austro-Italian rivalry, sceptical of pan-Slav narratives, openly impatient with Gibbon's dismissal of the Albanians as a "vagrant tribe of shepherds and robbers"-but it is not propagandist. Peacock had served the Crown in Montenegro and at Scodra; he writes from inside the Foreign Service tradition of detailed reporting, not from a London chair. The closing chapter, "The Albanian Roman Catholic Church," is a remarkably detailed survey of the Latin sees of northern Albania from the medieval period forward, the kind of material a working consul accumulated because he had to deal with it in his cables. For a present-day reader the value of the book is precisely that it was written at the right moment by the right kind of observer. Almost everything in it-the federal proposal modelled on Canada or Australia, the assumption that the Catholic Mirdites and the Muslim Geg tribes would govern themselves under a loose central administration, the polite optimism about Prince Wilhelm-was overtaken within months by Sarajevo and the World Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…