Bosnia: A Short History

Noel Malcolm’s Bosnia A Short History is the first in a two part series which valiantly attempts to produce an historic reading of the roots of the contemporary conflict in the former Yugoslavia. This book attempts, through rigorous academic research, to provide a fluent narrative of the many sub-stories of Bosnian history from Roman times to the destruction of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as manifested in the Vance-Owen Plan. This is a work for novices to the region and for those who may have some knowledge of contemporary Bosnian politics yet lack the historic dates that are essential to the claims of the competing national ideologies of Bosnia’s Moslem, Serbian and Croatian communities.

The weakness of this book lies in its tendency to review sources that are heavily linked to the creation of national ideology of the many regimes within the region without necessarily exploring the role that the historians themselves played in the formulisation of the respective policies of states.