Petar Korunić

Life

He was born on 6 July 1939 in Smokvica on the island of Korčula, not far from the cove and small harbour of Brna, of which he spoke fondly all his life. After his early years on Korčula he moved to Zagreb, where in 1967 he graduated in history and philosophy from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For several years he taught at grammar schools in Zagreb, Drniš and Hvar. In 1971 he joined the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb as an assistant, and spent most of his working life there, rising through every rank to full professor (1995). He received his doctorate in 1982 with a dissertation on Croatian–Slovenian political relations during the formation of Yugoslav ideology, 1848–1874.

He taught the courses History of Central and South-Eastern Europe in the 19th Century (1790–1918) and, under the Bologna curriculum, European Regions and Croatian History in the 19th Century (1790–1918). He also lectured in the postgraduate programmes of the Department of History and of the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb. As a university teacher he was methodical and demanding, yet fair; generations of students remember his tables drawn on the blackboard and an exam reading list of some fifty titles.

He retired on 1 October 2009, exchanging his days at the faculty for days in the reading room of the Croatian State Archives. He died in Zagreb on 7 August 2018. He was awarded the Order of Danica Hrvatska with the image of Antun Radić.

“Professor Korunić was a diligent scholar, a true torchbearer of the muse Clio and an inspiring humanist of broad vision.”

Scholarly work

He studied many questions of 19th-century Croatian history: Croatian–Slovenian, Croatian–Serbian and Croatian–Hungarian relations, Yugoslavism and federalism, ideas and ideologies, Croatian national programmes, the revolution of 1848–1849, the phenomenon of the nation and of ethnicity, the emergence and formation of the modern Croatian nation, the beginnings of modern statistics in Croatia, and the history of education in Croatia and Slavonia. He was principal investigator on several research projects.

He argued that the modern nation is not the result of an “awakening of national consciousness” but a product of modernisation, and that modern nations arise and develop over the long modern era, from the late 18th to the late 20th century, not in the Middle Ages. He held that Croatian national-party politicians, already in the Illyrian movement and especially in 1848–1849, clearly committed themselves to a Croatian national programme and to reorganising the Habsburg Monarchy as a Central European confederation, rather than to a South Slav “national” state. He saw 1848–1849 as the moment the foundations of civil society were laid in Croatia, and the modern statistics of the Habsburg Monarchy as a key source against myths and stereotypes about nationality.

Major books

• Jugoslavenska ideologija u hrvatskoj i slovenskoj politici: hrvatsko-slovenski politički odnosi 1848.–1870. 1986
  Yugoslav Ideology in Croatian and Slovenian Politics: Croatian–Slovenian Political Relations, 1848–1870
• Jugoslavizam i federalizam u hrvatskom nacionalnom preporodu 1835.–1875.: studija o političkoj teoriji i ideologiji 1989
  Yugoslavism and Federalism in the Croatian National Revival, 1835–1875: A Study in Political Theory and Ideology
• Rasprava o izgradnji moderne hrvatske nacije: nacija i nacionalni identitet 2006
  The Structuring of the Modern Croatian Nation: Nation and National Identity
• Naselja i stanovništvo hrvatskih pokrajina 1750.–1857. godine, vols. 1–2 2018
  Settlements and Population of the Croatian Provinces, 1750–1857
• Naselja i stanovništvo hrvatskih pokrajina 1828./1830. godine 2019
  Settlements and Population of the Croatian Provinces, 1828/1830

Archival research

In retirement he continued years of extensive archival work. He researched the history of education in Croatia and the Habsburg Monarchy, the emergence and development of modern historical statistics, population censuses in the Croatian provinces, the social, economic and cultural position of peasants after 1848, the level and structure of their taxation, the size and productivity of their holdings, and the organisation of public health in the 19th century.

He located and photographed a vast body of historical sources, most of it unexplored: tens of thousands of photographs of archival documents from some twenty collections in several archives:

• on education in Croatia and Slavonia, 1848–1861: more than 80 boxes of material from several collections;
• the 1849 census of Croatia and Slavonia: ten extensive volumes of sources;
• the 1851 census of Croatia and Slavonia: more than 15,000 images of documents;
• the still unpublished censuses of the Military Frontier of 1869 and 1872;
• the so-called Kukuljević survey of 1850, an exceptional ethnographic and statistical survey whose transcription he organised;
• material on every area of life in Croatia and Slavonia, 1848–1861, bearing witness both to modernisation and to the very hard conditions of most of the population.

He systematically collected old books, compilations and encyclopaedias of the 18th and 19th centuries on education, the economy, population, ethnicity and nations: more than 10,000 volumes intended for the Croatian State Archives. This work produced several thousand manuscript pages on the settlements and population of the Croatian provinces from 1750 to 1857; he lived to see the last book of that work only in page proofs.