Chronology of Key Orienting Dates -- Introduction: The Archival Imagination at Work -- Terminal Loyalties and Unruly Archives : On Thinking Past the Nation -- The Horizons of the "Peasant" : Circuits of Labor and Insurgency -- The Oath and the Curse : Subversions of Christianity -- The Archive and the Account Book : Inscriptions of Terror -- The Četa and the Jatak : Inversions of Tradition, Conversions of Capital -- Guns for Sale : Feud, Trade, and Solidarity in the Arming of the MRO -- Conclusion: The Archival Imagination and the Teleo-Logic of Nation -- Appendix 1: Documents of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization -- Appendix 2: Biographies from the Ilinden Dossier -- Glossary
Summary
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-kee
