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History · ·5 min read

Sarajevo — a British historian came four times, interviewed the conspirators, and dedicated the book to his wife

The British historian visited Bosnia in 1912 and 1913 before the assassination, returned in 1920 and 1925 to interview the surviving conspirators, and published Sarajevo — A Study in the Origins of the Great War in London that November. It was dedicated 'to my wife, as a memory of four Jugoslav journeys together.' A century later, Grayson Myers's 2020 historiography names Seton-Watson as one of the founding voices of the Bosnian Initiative school — the argument that the plot was Bosnian in origin, not Serbian.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The corner where the twentieth century started has never lacked for commentary. Every anniversary produces another paperback, another Sleepwalkers, another Folly and Malice. The historiography of the 28 June 1914 assassination is now more than a century deep and still, in Grayson Myers’s summary phrase, “contradictory and elusive.”

The founding voice of the English-language side of that argument is a British historian who had already been to Sarajevo twice before Gavrilo Princip pulled a revolver on Franz Ferdinand. R.W. Seton-Watson visited Bosnia in 1912 and 1913, returned in 1920 and 1925 to interview the survivors of the conspiracy, and published his book Sarajevo, A Study in the Origins of the Great War in London that November. The dedication reads: “To my wife, as a memory of four Jugoslav journeys together (1912, 1913, 1920, 1925).” It was the first serious English-language attempt to work out where the murder had come from.

The four journeys

Seton-Watson was already a specialist. He held a D.Litt. from Oxford, honorary doctorates from Prague and Zagreb, an honorary membership of the Roumanian Academy, and the Masaryk Chair of Central European History at the University of London. He had spent his professional life on the Habsburg lands and on what Vienna called the Southern Slav Question.

The first two journeys, 1912 and 1913, were made before the shots on Franjo Josip Street. He toured Habsburg Bosnia in the eighteen months before Sarajevo became a word every foreign reader knew, and interviewed the political and student circles that would, within a year, produce the conspirators. Those two visits gave him something no subsequent Western historian ever quite recovered: a picture of the atmosphere in Bosnia when the assassination was still a possibility, not yet a memory.

The third journey came in 1920, immediately after the peace settlement. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had been declared. Seton-Watson went back to talk to survivors from the pre-war revolutionary movement, several of whom were now living in a country that had not existed the last time he’d seen them.

The fourth journey, spring 1925, was the working trip for the book. His preface, dated 15 November 1925, names its purpose exactly: “During a long visit to Jugoslavia last spring I was able to obtain much additional information from first-hand sources, and especially from the survivors of the revolutionary movement inside the Dual Monarchy, whose spontaneous nature has been too often overlooked.” He was interviewing them at their kitchen tables.

The Bosnian Initiative thesis

The book that came out of those four journeys, published by Hutchinson in London in November 1925, made a specific historiographical argument that the twentieth century has never fully settled. Seton-Watson’s case: the Sarajevo conspiracy originated in Bosnia, among the Young Bosnia movement, and was assisted only in a supporting capacity by figures in Belgrade. The plot was Bosnian, not Serbian, in initiative.

His account of the mechanics is the one Myers’s 2020 paper cites for the Bosnian Initiative school. In January 1913, Vladimir Gaćinović, one of the Young Bosnia leaders, invited a small group of Bosnians to a meeting in Toulouse, at which they discussed killing the Habsburg military governor of Bosnia, General Oskar Potiorek. Around the same time, Danilo Ilić was independently working on the same target. When Ilić’s friend Pušara read in the newspaper of the Archduke’s planned visit to Bosnia, he cut out the clipping and sent it to Nedeljko Čabrinović in Belgrade. Čabrinović showed the clipping to Gavrilo Princip, and the pair transferred the plot from the Governor to the Archduke.

Only then, per Seton-Watson, did the Bosnians in Belgrade approach the Serbian irregular network, Milan Ciganović, whom they knew as a Bosnian émigré, and Voja Tankosić, whom Princip had tried to enlist under during the Balkan Wars. Tankosić briefly trained the two in firearms and arranged their passage across the border with Trifko Grabež. That is the Bosnian Initiative in Seton-Watson’s telling: a Bosnian plot, cross-fertilised with Belgrade help at a late stage, not the reverse.

Myers’s paper documents the century of disagreement that followed. Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers (2013) and John Zametica’s Folly and Malice (2017) reached “essentially diametrically opposite conclusions” about the exact role Belgrade played. A hundred years after Seton-Watson filed his preface, the field is still divided along the axis he first defined.

The Foreign Affairs piece, six months earlier

Seton-Watson’s argument reached American readers first. In April 1925 he published a condensed version of the same argument in Foreign Affairs under the title “The Murder at Sarajevo.” Twenty pages, no footnotes, aimed at the Council on Foreign Relations readership: the murder was “merely the spark that fired the powder magazine of Europe,” and its ultimate cause was “the internal unrest in Austria-Hungary produced by misgovernment and lack of statesmanship. Under such circumstances Serbia’s very existence as an independent and progressive state was obviously a challenge. But for that it is hardly possible to blame Serbia.”

That is not a neutral sentence. It is the sentence that positioned the English-language history of 1914 for a generation.

Why Sarajevo was worth four journeys

What holds up a hundred years later is the fact of the four journeys themselves. Sarajevo, in the early twentieth century, was a city that a serious Central European historian, Oxford D.Litt., Masaryk Chair at the University of London, judged worth returning to four times across thirteen years, because he thought the truth of it could only be reached by walking the streets, sitting with survivors, and taking the trouble to hear the story from the people who had been in the room. He came before the murder. He came during the peace. He came after.

That level of attention has not stopped. It runs from Seton-Watson’s 1925 book through Kenneth Morrison’s 2016 Palgrave study of the Holiday Inn, through Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt’s 2017 Berkeley dissertation on the Habsburg building programme, through Boris Trapara’s 2019 joint PhD on the Vienna–Sarajevo architectural genealogy, through the 2020 Macksey Journal paper that gave this piece its opening argument, all the way to Nermina Zagora and Dina Šamić’s 2021 monograph on the city’s five urban rooms. Sarajevo has been a city that scholars come to, not just report on, for a hundred years and counting, and the shelf keeps growing.

The most cheering practical detail: the 1925 book is out of copyright and freely readable at Archive.org. So is the Foreign Affairs article (at JSTOR, open access). You can read the sentence that positioned the English-language history of Sarajevo, in the sitting-room, tonight. The dedication to his wife is on page five.

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