Aehrenthal’s Legacy: Bosnian Colonial Success and the Italo-Turkish War

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Samuel R. Williamson

Published:

1991

Publisher:

Macmillan Education UK

Accounts of nineteenth-century European imperialism usually omit Austria-Hungary. Yet at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Vienna gained administrative responsibility for the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dual Monarchy thus participated in the liquidation of the Ottoman empire from the start. Cyprus, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and eventually Tripoli (Libya) would thereafter also be lost to Constantinople. Vienna set the pattern that other states would imitate in the scramble for lands in the Mediterranean. Local unrest, fears of political instability, strategic concerns, a collective 'official mind' pressing for action and fears that another government might seize the opportunity first: all spurred Habsburg action as later they would London, Paris and Rome. The problems encountered in administering Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1878 would come to set much of the subsequent strategic and economic agenda for the Dual Monarchy.1

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