British travel writers visited Bosnia and Herzegovina in two waves: in the 16th and 17th centuries and again after the middle of the 19th century. The few early travelers visited Bosnia at the end of the 16th century and in the first half of the 17th century. Their descriptions of Bosnia are brief but invaluable as they offer rare insights into the life of that Balkan country during the first centuries of Turkish rule. The renewal of British travel interest in Bosnia in the first half of the 19th century was spurred by the revival of the Eastern Question in that period--the cluster of political and military issues regarding the fate of the Turkish Empire in Europe. The first British visitor to Bosnia at this time who left a description of the country was the egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson. His book Dalmatia and Montenegro; with a Journey to Mostar in Herzegovina, published in 1848, describes the region along the Adriatic coast and the lower Neretva River in 1844. Several years after Wilkinson, author and diplomat Andrew Archibald Paton went on a mission to examine the Bosnian southern and northern borders, at that time the westernmost limits of the Turkish Empire. He gave an account of this in his book Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic (1849).
Bosnia became the focus of British interest in 1850 when the Turkish general Omer-Pasha Latas came to crush the rebellious landed aristocracy there who resisted Western-style reforms initiated by the central government in Constantinople. In the 1850s and 1860s three British visitors wrote travel narratives with valuable information about the Bosnian political and military scene. Captain Edmund Spencer rode at mid-century across the mountainous parts of the Balkans and wrote about his experiences in his work Travels in European Turkey in 1850 (1851). Diplomat James Henry Skene spent much time with Omer-Pasha in Travnik in 1851 and his book The Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk (1853) described among other things the aftermath of the general's pacification campaign in Bosnia. Similarly, diplomat George Arbuthnot accompanied Omer-Pasha a decade later in Herzegovina on another campaign of pacification. He recorded his stay in Herzegovina, and later also in Bosnia, in the fall of 1861 in his book Herzegovina; or Omer-Pacha and the Christian Rebels (1862).
Another group of British travelers went to Bosnia in the mid-1870s during the Bosnian-Herzegovinian insurrection against Turkish rule. An Irishman, James Creagh, made a journey in 1875 and his travel description Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah (1876) reads like an adventure narrative. The young Arthur J. Evans, the future famous archaeologist, covered the same ground in the same year, but walking; his book about that experience is Through Bosnia and Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875 (1876). Evans' later book, Illyrian Letters (1877), deals more directly with the insurrection. So does that of the London Times correspondent William J. Stillman, who reported from the scene of military operations in Herzegovina in 1875/76. His book is entitled Herzegovina and the Late Uprising (1877). Two British women, A.P. Irby and G. M. Mackenzie, who traveled in the Balkans in the early 1860s, devote three chapters to Bosnia in the second edition of their Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in- Europe (1877).
In the last decades of the nineteenth century more English travelers left the records of their journeys in Bosnia and Herzegovina, now an occupied Austrian territory. Their writings, including newspaper and magazine articles, are on the whole more informative and historically and geographically more reliable than those of their predecessors, the visitors during the Turkish period. Among these later travel writings are the books The Outgoing Turk (1897) by journalist Harry C. Thomson, and Travels and Politics in the Near East (1898) by historian William C. Miller.
Generally, British travel writing on Bosnia and Herzegovina in the nineteenth century provides a wealth of information--political, military, geographical, economic and anthropological. We learn much about the roads, khans (inns), towns and villages, Turkish and Austrian political officials, military officers, ordinary people, customs and costumes, insurrections, and religious and national attitudes. Some of this information was used for various purposes in England--from planning the British policy regarding the Eastern Question to assessing British economic interests in "European Turkey" or "Austrian "Occupied Territory," including plans for communication lines across the Balkans. Facts and attitudes from these travel writings entered the editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Significantly, the British travellers' texts also display the boomerang nature of travel writing: the writers' views and cultural attitudes. These travelers were attracted--or repulsed--by what they regularly perceived as a very different world from theirs. Bosnia for them was a strange culture--oriental, exotic, and fascinating. For some, as for W. Miller, Bosnia and the Balkans even at the end of the nineteenth century were part of the "Near East," the lands where everything was different from what a European might normally expect. And the travelers often saw themselves as members of a more advanced civilization who sometimes openly articulated their attitudes. The general picture of Turkish or Austrian Bosnia that they communicate is that of a backward, stagnant land lagging far behind the European West.
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