Misfire Audiobook Libro.fm

Description

The story has so often been told Archduke Franz Ferdinand heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire was shot dead on June 28 1914 in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo Thirty days later the Archdukes uncle Emperor Franz Joseph declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia producing the chain reaction of European powers entering the First World War

In Misfire Paul MillerMelamed narrates the history of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I from the perspective of the Balkans MillerMelamed embeds the incident in the longerterm conditions of the Balkans that gave rise to the political murder He thus illuminates the centrality of the Bosnian Crisis and the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century to European power politics while explaining how Serbs Bosnians and Habsburg leaders negotiated their positions in a dangerous geopolitical environment Despite the absence of evidence tying official Serbia to the assassination conspiracy MillerMelamed shows how it spiraled into a diplomatic crisis that European statesmen proved unable to resolve peacefully

Contrasting the vast disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war that would leave ten million dead Misfire contends that the real causes for the world war lie in civilized Europe rather than the endlessly discussed political murder