Европа като колониален господар: дебатът за железниците във възрожденския печат

The present paper aims to examine the debate instigated by the railway construction across the areas of the Ottoman Empire populated by Bulgarians in the 1870s. This was not the first anti-European debate in the Bulgarian public sphere, but it was the first one to question the very core of the modern idea of progress. Questioning however does not necessarily mean rejecting, since the main issue was the unequal economic status of the participants rather than the technological progress per se. The opponents of the railway project considered it a form of colonization and pleaded for its postponement in order to allow the Bulgarians to acquire economic power. Two major results could be outlined: 1) a shift from utopian to anti-utopian image of Europe; 2) an ideological project to enter modernity without or even against the will of Europe.