The Enlightenment has often been used as a fundamental reference point for understanding the evolution of societies. Nevertheless, the broad nature of this term hides great inequalities between different historiographical traditions, with some countries considered to have 'ownership' of this intellectual and cultural current, which arose in the eighteenth century, while other lands have been considered at best peripheral, or at worst have been wholly disregarded. This is particularly true of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Balkan states, founded in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which have often been studied only through their relationship with France, Great Britain, and German. This, however, is not sufficient for understanding how these countries entered modernity. The studies gathered in this book seek to question the invention of the National Enlightenment, the history of representations of the European Enlightenment and their variations in Balkan space and time, and the phenomena of acculturation and rejection that can be identified in the histories of these lands in order to offer new insights into the contradictory aspirations of nations that have often been torn between several different models of society.