Insurrections, Wars, and The Eastern Crisis in the 1870s; Vol. XVII

Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1985. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good. xxii,[4], 421, [1] pages. Mapes. Notes. Biographical Index. No DJ present. This is East European Monographs No. CICVII and Atlantic Studies Brooklyn College Studies on Society and Change No. 36. Dr. Béla Király (14 April 1912 - 4 July 2009) was a Hungarian army officer before, during, and after World War II. After the war, he was sentenced to life in prison under the Soviet-allied regime, but was later released. After his release, he commanded the National Guard in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He then fled to the United States, where he became an academic historian. He returned to Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and was elected a member of Hungarian Parliament. From 1964 he taught Military History at Brooklyn College, and became chairman of the history department. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1982. During his tenure he served as director of the Society In Change Program on East Central Europe, supervised Brooklyn College Press (the College's Publishing House), and was an adviser to the Brooklyn College Military History Club. The Brooklyn College Bela K. Kiraly Award, awarded to undergraduate students for outstanding work in modern history, bears his name. In 1968, Gale came to Rice University, where he remained until his retirement in 2005. A distinguished scholar of nationalism, eastern European, and Balkan history, he was the author of six books, over 40 articles, and hundreds of public lectures. The Great Eastern Crisis of 1875-78 began in the Ottoman Empire's territories on the Balkan peninsula in 1875, with the outbreak of several uprisings and wars that resulted in the intervention of international powers, and was ended with the Treaty of Berlin in July 1878. After the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, Austria-Hungary stationed military garrisons in the Ottoman Vilayet of Bosnia and Ottoman Sanjak of Novi Pazar, which formally (de jure) continued to be Ottoman territories. In 1881, France occupied the Ottoman Beylik of Tunisia, with the excuse that Tunisian troops had crossed the border into their colony of Algeria, which also formerly belonged to the Ottoman Empire until 1830. A year later, in 1882, the British Empire occupied the Ottoman Khedivate of Egypt, with the pretext of giving military assistance to the Ottomans for putting down the Urabi Revolt. It is worth noting that the Ottoman government had frequently declared the tax revenues from Egypt as a surety for borrowing loans from British and French banks. The Ottoman government had earlier leased Cyprus to Britain in 1878, in exchange for British support at the Congress of Berlin in the same year. By obtaining Cyprus and Egypt, Britain gained an important foothold in the East Mediterranean and control over the Suez Canal; while France increased its lands in the West Mediterranean coast of North Africa by adding Tunisia to its empire as a French protectorate.