“The story of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (MRO) from its rise until the Illinden Uprising of 1903 . . . a fascinating account.” —PoLAR

The underground Macedonian Revolutionary Organization recruited and mobilized over 20,000 supporters to take up arms against the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1903. Challenging conventional wisdom about the role of ethnic and national identity in Balkan history, Keith Brown focuses on social and cultural mechanisms of loyalty to describe the circuits of trust and terror—webs of secret communications and bonds of solidarity—that linked migrant workers, remote villagers, and their leaders in common cause. Loyalties were covertly created and maintained through acts of oath-taking, record-keeping, arms-trading, and in the use and management of deadly violence.

“This book is, to my mind, exactly the kind of work that needs to be done in order to understand civil wars, insurgencies, nationalism, and rebellions, and to get away from what the author rightfully critiques as ‘pidgin social science.’” —Chip Gagnon, Ithaca College

“An innovative work that should inspire debate.” —Slavic Review

“A subtle and compelling account of revolutionary insurgency in turn-of-the-century Macedonia. His analytical focus on loyalties, rather than identities, goes beyond critiques of nationalism in enabling powerful new understandings of the region’s histories and its continuing social dynamics.” —Jane K. Cowan, University of Sussex