What are the roots of murderous "ethnic cleansing", extreme nationalism and the re-invention of historical myths in the modern Balkans? This study of socialism among the Ottoman communities of Macedonians, Bulgarians, Armenians, Greeks and Jews of Salonika, in the late-Ottoman and early Turkish period (1876-1923), seeks to lay bare these origins. These communities saw the primacy of class-struggle and the development of national unity as essential to the development of socialism. Thus the "national question", a by-product of the drive towards socialism, became predominant and with it the ethnic and religious demarcations within the Ottoman Empire. The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam has brought together leading scholars from Turkey and the Balkan region, western Europe and America, to consider these questions. They survey the early history of the socialist and communist movements, the historiography and sources.
In the process they examine the socialist groups within their communities, the social and political environment of the times, ethnic and religious questions, relations with the Young Turk movement, masonic organizations, links with revolutionary and radical groups operating abroad and with international socialist movements.