Jozo Tomasevich

Josip "Jozo" Tomasevich (1908 – October 15, 1994; Josip Tomašević) was an American economist and historian whose speciality was the economic and social history of Yugoslavia. Tomasevich was born in the Kingdom of Dalmatia, then part of Austria-Hungary, and after completing his formal schooling, he earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Basel in Switzerland. In the mid-1930s, he worked at the National Bank of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and published three well-received books on Yugoslavia's national debt, fiscal policy, and money and credit respectively.

In 1938, he moved to the United States as the recipient of a two-year Rockefeller fellowship and conducted research at Harvard University before joining the academic staff of Stanford University. During World War II, Tomasevich worked for the Board of Economic Warfare and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and post-war he joined the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. In 1948, he joined the staff at San Francisco State College (later San Francisco State University). He combined research and teaching there for twenty-five years until his retirement in 1973, which was broken by a year of teaching at Columbia University in 1954. Between 1943 and 1955, Tomasevich published two positively reviewed books on economic matters; one focused on marine resources and the other on the peasant economy of Yugoslavia.

Tomasevich then embarked on an extensive research and writing project on Yugoslavia in World War II – War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945 – which was planned to include three volumes. Supported by grants and fellowships, he published the first volume titled The Chetniks in 1975, which explored the development and fate of the Chetnik movement during the war. The book was well received, and twenty-five years later was described by the Yugoslav and Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein as still the "most complete and best book about the Chetniks to be published either abroad or in former Yugoslavia". After his retirement he was appointed professor emeritus of economics at San Francisco State University, and he died in California in 1994.

His final book was the second volume of the series – War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration – which was edited by his daughter Neda Tomasevich then published posthumously in 2001. It focused on collaboration and the quisling governments in Yugoslavia during the war with a strong emphasis on the Axis puppet state, the so-called Independent State of Croatia. The book was highly praised by historians. The third volume on the Yugoslav Partisans remains unpublished despite being 75 per cent complete at his death. The scholarly standard Tomasevich achieved with the first two volumes in the series made his death before completing the series "a tragedy keenly felt even by those who never knew him", according to Klaus Schmider, a Royal Military Academy Sandhurst lecturer and German historian. In his obituary in the Slavic Review, Tomasevich was described as "a master of scholarly skills, a person of bountiful erudition, wit and human dignity".

Early life, education, career and family
Josip "Jozo" Tomašević was born in 1908 in the village of Košarni Do on the Pelješac peninsula in the Kingdom of Dalmatia, which was then part of Austria-Hungary. Košarni Do is a hamlet of Donja Banda and is now part of the Orebić municipality within the Dubrovnik-Neretva County of Croatia. His father, known to the family as Nado, travelled to California in the 1870s. Nado returned to the village in 1894, and he married the daughter of his first cousin and worked as a farmer. The couple had four sons.

Jozo completed his secondary education in Sarajevo – then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – before moving to Switzerland to study at the University of Basel where he earned a doctorate in economics in 1937. During his time studying in Switzerland he supported himself through employment in a dry cleaning business and doing farm work. In the mid-1930s, he was employed as a financial expert at the National Bank of Yugoslavia in Belgrade. In 1938, he was the recipient of a two-year Rockefeller fellowship and moved to the US, thereby "availing himself of the rich resources of Harvard University". At this time, Tomašević assigned his share in the family farm at Košarni Do to one of his two brothers who remained there. The other brother living in Košarni Do received the share of the fourth brother who, by then, was a merchant mariner living in New Zealand.

Before the outbreak of World War II – and then known by the anglicised Tomasevich – he moved to California. He was on the scholarly staff of the Food Research Institute within Stanford University. During the war, he worked with the Board of Economic Warfare and then the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Washington, D.C. from 1944 to 1946. After the war, he initially worked at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. His preference was for a position combining teaching and research, so in 1948 he joined the San Francisco State College (later San Francisco State University). Tomasevich taught there for twenty-five years until he retired in 1973 – except in 1954 when he taught at Columbia University. After his retirement, he was appointed professor emeritus of economics at San Francisco State University. According to his obituary in the Slavic Review written by the historian Alexander Vucinich, Tomasevich "gave his lectures rich and pertinent content, precise organization and warm delivery".

In 1937, Tomasevich married Neda Brelić, a high school teacher. They were happily married for 57 years and had three children – Anthony, Neda Ann, and Lasta. In 1976, Tomasevich contributed an essay to a book in which he conducted a sociological and historical analysis of his extended family reaching back to the early nineteenth century. He became an American citizen. Tomasevich died on October 15, 1994, aged 86, in Palo Alto, California. His widow Neda died in Palo Alto on July 5, 2002, at 88.

Scholarship
According to Vucinich, from when Tomasevich was 25 until his death at 86, he engaged himself in a succession of research projects of which some were very extensive. He describes Tomasevich as having "a temperament that encourages inner discipline... he gave undivided attention to each of the research projects until full completion had been achieved". Vucinich divides Tomasevich's scholarly work into three distinct phases: his work regarding the finances of Yugoslavia during the Great Depression; two studies in the 1940s and 1950s regarding international marine resources and the economic problems of the peasants of Yugoslavia; and the final phase focusing on the historical events in Yugoslavia during World War II.

Yugoslavia's economy
Between 1934 and 1938, Tomasevich had three books published. The first appeared in German during 1934 and was titled Die Staatsschulden Jugoslaviens (The National Debt of Yugoslavia). According to Vucinich, the book "provided a solid and much-cited analysis of government efforts to stabilize national finances at the outset of the Great Depression". The following year, he had Financijska politika Jugoslavije (Fiscal Policy of Yugoslavia) 1929–1934 published in Serbo-Croatian, which covered much of the same material but was more accessible to Yugoslavs. His 1938 treatise Novac i kredit (Money and Credit) "helped train an entire generation of Yugoslav financial experts", according to Vucinich. A 1940 review of the book in Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, by Professor Mirko Lamer – who later served with the United Nations as an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization – described Novac i kredit as an important work that filled a large gap in Yugoslav economic literature, and it also gave a vivid picture of then-current economic theory. In a 1997 article, Zvonimir Baletić, director of the Croatian Institute of Economics, described Tomasevich as one of the most prominent advocates of Keynesian economics in interwar Yugoslavia and concluded that Novac i kredit was an "authoritative" work that had a strong impact on students and among Yugoslav economists.

International marine resources and Yugoslav peasants
After he arrived in the US, Tomasevich undertook two significant projects. The first book was International Agreements on Preservation of Marine Resources, that was published by Stanford University Press in 1943. Vucinich described this work as "a highly competent inquiry into international relations in the Pacific basin centered on an issue of vital economic importance". The second book, Peasants, Politics, and Economic Change in Yugoslavia was published in 1955, and was described by Vucinich as "a study of monumental scope [which] has been widely recognized as the most comprehensive and accomplished study in the field". Vucinich observed that the book was an "impressive testimony to Tomasevich's ability both to penetrate the depths of messages carried by documentary material and to be scrupulously careful in drawing conclusions". He concluded that Tomasevich had been "eminently successful in placing the economic problems of the Yugoslav peasantry within a larger social, political and historical framework". The political scientist Zachary T. Irwin described the book as "magisterial". Irwin T. Sanders of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky reviewed the book in 1956 and stated that it was "the best book available for anyone wishing to understand the socio-economic pre-Communist background of Yugoslavia". He went on to write that the book contained realistic evaluations of the peasant political parties, and concluded that "there is little question about the soundness of his economic analysis or his description of the participation of the peasant in national life".

World War II
In 1957, Tomasevich received a grant from San Francisco State University for Slavic and Eastern European studies. This led to work on a planned trilogy of the history of Yugoslavia during World War II, with an overall title of War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945. The first volume focused on the Chetnik movement led by Draža Mihailović, which was subtitled The Chetniks and was published in 1975. According to Vucinich, it was "basically a study in politics, ideology and military operations, although the role of the economic factor has not been overlooked". Soon after it was published, the book was reviewed by Phyllis Auty, who was a professor of modern history at Simon Fraser University. Auty described the work as "a most impressive... scholarly examination of evidence", that was meticulously referenced, and a "deceptively lucid account of a most complex and difficult subject". Auty praised Tomasevich's detachment from the subject, she stated that it was "likely to remain the standard book on this subject for a long time." In Tomasevich's obituary, Vucinich observed that The Chetniks was "clearly the most exhaustive study so far of the military forces of Yugoslavia dedicated to the restoration of the Serbian monarchy after the end of World War II", and that the book "casts significant light on the multiple facets of the conflict between the Chetniks and Partisans". The Yugoslav and Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein, writing in 2002, stated that The Chetniks "is still the most complete and best book about the Chetniks to be published either abroad or in former Yugoslavia". An alternative view of the book was advanced by the Serbian-American political scientist and professor at Vanderbilt University, Alex N. Dragnich, who accused Tomasevich's book of consistent bias against the Chetnik movement and a lack of understanding of its problems, as well as significantly overstating Chetnik collaboration with the enemy. Dragnich considered that the book's concluding chapter betrayed "an almost gleeful view of Serbian misfortunes". He also stated that the book was excessively long and repetitive. John C. Campbell of the Council on Foreign Relations reviewed the book positively and stated that The Chetniks provided "mountains of evidence that [the Chetnik] collaboration was manifold, massive and continuous". In 1974, Tomasevich received a fellowship for his postdoctoral research into volume two of the trilogy from the American Council of Learned Societies, and this was followed in 1976 by a fellowship supporting his work on the planned third volume on the Yugoslav Partisans. In 1989, Tomasevich received the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

The second volume of his planned trilogy – War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration – concentrated on collaboration and the quisling governments in Yugoslavia during the war, with a strong emphasis on the Axis puppet state, the so-called Independent State of Croatia led by Ante Pavelić, the head of the fascist Ustaše movement. The book was published posthumously in 2001 with editing from his daughter Neda Tomasevich. Goldstein reviewed the book in 2002 and concluded that the book's most valuable contribution was the part dedicated to the Independent State of Croatia, making up almost half of the work. While he identified a few shortcomings and minor errors of fact, Goldstein described Tomasevich's work as a complete and lucid description and explanation of Yugoslavia's occupying and collaborationist forces. He concluded that "this book, together with its predecessor, is an invaluable foundation that no new research into World War II on the territory of former Yugoslavia will be able to bypass. It promises to remain [so] for a long time to come." In a review of the book published the following year, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst lecturer and German historian Klaus Schmider described Tomasevich's grasp of the sources in five languages as "stupendous", and he observed that the result was well worth the twenty-six-year wait between the volumes. He wrote that even though he had criticisms about minor gaps in the work, compared to the "scale of the overall achievement, these are but minor quibbles". Schmider concluded that "the scholarly standard achieved by Jozo Tomasevich in his two volumes of War and Revolution in Yugoslavia and the thought of what he would have made of volume three of the series make his death a tragedy keenly felt even by those who never knew him". The third volume in the planned trilogy, which was to cover the Partisans, was 75 per cent complete at the time of his death, and it remains unpublished.

Legacy
According to Vucinich, Tomasevich was "a master of scholarly skills, a person of bountiful erudition, wit and human dignity, and a leading expert on the economic and social history of the former Yugoslavia. In 2004, Tomasevich's papers were acquired by the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University.