The application to the graduate school where I ended up doing my Ph.D. in modern European history required all candidates to write an essay on the following question: which work of historical significance do you wish you had written, and why? This was quite annoying to your typical college student, since none of the other graduate programs required such additional labor. In hindsight, however, the exercise was brilliant, as it made one think deeply about what makes for good history and how historians enrich, and complicate, our understanding of the past. If I were writing that essay today, I might choose John Zametica’s book Folly and Malice: The Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and the Start of World War One.I say that with two major caveats. First, I disagree ardently with the author’s overarching argument that the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire—the “sick man on the Danube,” as the prologue is entitled—was “an anomaly condemned to death by the progress of history” (4). Zametica’s work unfolds as unabashedly determinist in its view that the nation-state was not only ascendant in the nineteenth century, but that national interests make any kind of supranational governing system, including today’s European Union, a largely futile undertaking. Overlooking or willfully ignoring decades of research that has demolished the notion of a decrepit and doomed dual monarchy (and several pages of the prologue are devoted to the “shambles of the [dualist] system” created by the 1867 Compromise), Zametica comes off as such an extreme evangelist for national identity and sovereignty that he specifies the ethnic origins of Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić (actually a Cincar whose real surname was Pasku) and cites a Serbian general’s satisfaction at learning that the June 11, 1903 conspirators who murdered Serbian King Alexander and his dreadful wife Draga Mašin were not Serbs per se, but rather “Cincars, Bulgars, Czechs, Vlachs and Jews” (9, 197).While such ethnic precision points to the awe-inspiring meticulousness that pervades this work and about which I will write more, the above example is also indicative of its second significant flaw: Zametica’s bulky, 643-page tome (not including seventy-five pages of detailed endnotes and a useful bibliography) tips heavily towards exculpating Serbs from any kind of activities that might have antagonized Austria-Hungary in the period before the First World War. The historiography on the war’s origins sorely needed a corrective to the abundant literature, capped in 2012 by Christopher Clark’s more broadly conceived study The Sleepwalkers,1 that makes Serbia out to be the south Slavic nemesis par excellence, whose irredentist pretensions and propaganda explain, if not excuse, Habsburg leaders’ decisive choice of war against the small Serbian thorn in its side in the immediate aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination. Yet rather than nudging the needle toward a more balanced accounting of Austro-Hungarian insecurity and Serb nationalist agitation, Zametica practically leaves the latter out of the big picture altogether. So, for example, we learn that Croatia rather than Serbia was the hotbed for south Slavic nationalism, and that Ilija Garašanin’s famous Načertanije (outline) for “Great Serbia” was originally penned by a Polish exile, revised by a Czech, and in any case had little influence on Serbian foreign policy, making it “a classic example of a historiographical straw man argument” (190). In both instances, the author’s highly detailed clarifications are essential contributions to the scholarly literature. Yet one reads this book wondering whether all the so-called Serbian nationalism ever even existed outside the imaginations of Habsburg officialdom and careless historians.Another case in point concerns the influence on young Bosnians of Serb nationalist Bogdan Žerajić’s suicide after attempting to assassinate Bosnian Governor-General Marijan Varešanin in Sarajevo in June 1910, despite Gavrilo Princip and friends’ Yugoslavist rather than Serb nationalist ideological orientation (which Zametica proves conclusively and crucially, considering how many scholars unthinkingly label the Bosnian assassin a “Serbian nationalist”). Yet here too there is no mention of how the Serbian press heroized Žerajić, including in the August 5, 1910 issue of Politika. Similarly, one finishes this book feeling that Austro-Hungarian leaders in July 1914 were scrambling to find any evidence whatsoever of the anti-Habsburg propaganda alleged in their ultimatum to Serbia; or that Serbs respectfully stopped celebrating the national holiday Vidovdan the moment they heard about the Sarajevo assassination. Instead, Zametica painstakingly documents the relentless efforts of official Serbia to live peacefully with the vast empire to its north—even after the regime annexed what he attests are the irrefutably Serb lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina—and in the days following the Archduke’s murder.Yet document it does, and therein lies the main reason that any historian of the origins of World War I should take this book seriously. If the author’s presentation is one-sided, the case he makes for Serbia is firmly grounded in a close reading of primary sources, their context, and all the major literature in every relevant language. Whether Zametica is explaining why Franz Ferdinand—a “die-hard paleoconservative” (635)—was not the peace-loving and reform-minded Successor he is often made out to be (the Archduke’s alleged Trialism, which still crops up in serious literature, is decisively and, one hopes, lastingly undermined here); showing how the 1903 regicide was not the turning point in Serbian foreign policy away from Austria-Hungary and toward Russia (in fact, he shows how, right up to the July Crisis in 1914, Russia was never a dependable ally and support for Serbia); or dissecting the hidden aggression behind the June 1914 Matscheko Memorandum, which most scholars interpret as being devoid of war planning against Serbia, his cascade of revisionist arguments are intricately sourced and fastidiously reasoned.Indeed, this book is as much a polemic with other historians as it is a narrative of the origins of World War I in the Balkans. On numerous occasions, Zametica feistily takes scholars to task—Christopher Clark, Luigi Albertini, and Sean McMeekin earn particular opprobrium—for uncritically accepting and enthusiastically furthering such “fantastic hogwash” (401), “false constructs” (456), “misleading legends” (482), and other “myths” (634), as the appearance of a telegram from Russia fortifying Serbian leaders on the deadline of the ultimatum (July 25), or the role of the Black Hand in the Sarajevo assassination.Regarding the latter, Zametica’s erudition is awesome, the pace and detail of the narrative exciting (he exactingly corrects both the order of the cars in the imperial procession and of the assassins lining the Appel Quay), and no scholar will ever again be able to write on the political murder without first reading him. For what Zametica has essentially done is not to prove conclusively what individual or organization was behind the Sarajevo assassination (confoundingly, definitive documentation is just not there), but to reason his way through the maze of original sources and testimonies (including an impressively close reading of the assassins’ trial transcript) to show the origins and weaknesses of the near century-long obsession with Apis’s “terrorist” Black Hand Society. In a chapter wittily entitled “Black Hand—Red Herring,” Zametica contextualizes Apis’s actions within the domestic political crisis in Serbia in order to undermine the Black Hand leader’s own confession (at the 1917 Salonika show trial) to having organized the Sarajevo conspiracy. Rather, he argues, the loose cannon Major Vojislav Tankosić, who was named in the ultimatum and whose personality is given great attention in this work, handed over the weapons to Princip and friends on his own initiative. Apis, concludes the author, actually tried to stop the assassination (both through the Serbian ambassador to Vienna and directly with the assassins in Sarajevo) once he learned about his freewheeling subordinate’s precipitous action in support of the young Bosnians (who, again contrary to many standard historical accounts, initiated the conspiracy on their own rather than being “recruited” by the Black Hand).It may be easy to criticize Zametica for the broad, pre-determined brushstrokes that encompass his arguments and for what he leaves out in terms of Serbian nationalist activities. But dismissing his work outright, say because of the author’s unseemly support for Radovan Karadžić during the Yugoslav secessionary wars and at the Bosnian Serb leader’s trial in the Hague Tribunal, would be an easy way for scholars to continue avoiding some of the fictional hand-me-downs about this critical era that are rooted in the work of the likes of Luigi Albertini and Stanoje Stanojevic on the Sarajevo assassination, and which Zametica has finally rooted out. It’s one thing to write “a rip-roaring good [his]story” (396), but it’s quite another to do so based on the primary sources rather than relying on dated secondary literature that often played fast and loose with such critical facts as the ideology of the Sarajevo assassins and an alleged last-minute Russian telegram bolstering Belgrade before the ultimatum expired. Zametica’s blatant biases aside, Folly and Malice is a breathtaking display of how expert historical sleuthing works, and how easily even the most respected academics incorporate and transmit “false constructs” in the process of writing their complicated works.