The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism

Yanni Kotsonis

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691263625, 9780691215266
• eBook ISBN: 9780691263618
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

A sweeping global history of the birth of modern Greece

In 1821, a diverse territory in the southern Balkans on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire was thrust into a decade of astounding mass violence. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism traces how something new emerged from an imperial mosaic of myriad languages, religions, cultures, and localisms—the world’s first ethnic nation-state, one that was born from the destruction and the creation of whole peoples, and which set the stage for the modern age of nationalism that was to come.

Yanni Kotsonis exposes the everyday chaos and brutality in the Balkan peninsula as the Ottoman regime unraveled. He follows the future Greeks on the seaways to Odesa, Alexandria, Livorno, and the Caribbean, and recovers the stories of peasants, merchants, warriors, aristocrats, and intellectuals who navigated the great empires that crisscrossed the region. Kotsonis recounts the experiences of the villagers and sailors who joined the armed battalions of the Napoleonic Wars and learned a new kind of warfare and a new practice of mass mobilization, lessons that served them well during the revolutionary decade. He describes how, as the bloody 1820s came to a close, the region’s Muslims were no more and Greece was an Orthodox Christian nation united by a shared language and a claim to an ancient past.

This panoramic book shows how the Greek Revolution was a demographic upheaval more consequential than the overthrow of a ruler. Drawing on Ottoman sources together with archival evidence from Greece, Britain, France, Russia, and Switzerland, the book reframes the birth of modern Greece within the imperial history of the global nineteenth century.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Transliteration, Names, and Dates
• Notes of Thanks
• Introduction. The Greek Revolution and Our Modern World
• Chapter 1. The Ottoman Crisis in the Southern Balkans
• Chapter 2. Russia Changes the Balkans
• Chapter 3. Imperial Crossroads: The Napoleonic Wars in the Ionian Islands
• Chapter 4. The Magic Lantern of Empire: Greeks on the March for France since 1797
• Chapter 5. Enchanted: Ottoman Christians, Imperial Service, and National Myth
• Chapter 6. Ottoman Echoes: The New Empires and Balkan Politics
• Chapter 7. Capo d’Istria, Kapodistriia, Kapodistrias: A Short History of Europe, 1776–1831
• Chapter 8. The Greek Merchant Conquers, and Becomes Greek: The Russian Origins of the Greek Revolution
• Chapter 9. Greece-on-Danube: A New Conspiracy and a New Uprising, 1814–21
• Chapter 10. Outbreak, 1821: The Elite Rupture in the Morea
• Chapter 11. The Nation, Unbound
• Chapter 12. The Nation, Limited
• Chapter 13. Republics of the Privileged: Greece in 1823
• Chapter 14. The Second Revolution, 1824: London Bonds, Roumeli, and the Sack of the Morea
• Chapter 15. The Time of Ibrahim
• Chapter 16. Europe Mobilizes
• Epilogue. Violence, Empire, and the Nation
• Notes
• Sources and Readings
• Index