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Writing Backward

1We are commemorating the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution of 1821 in something of a mass mobilization of scholars in Greece and abroad. Ministries, schools, universities, research centers, and foundations – all have been holding their strategy meetings to determine what they, too, can do to mark the occasion. Blue-ribbon national commissions for Greece and the abroad add a layer of gravitas and bureaucracy; who was promoted and who was demoted becomes the stuff of academic and cultural gossip. Scholars who were once specialists in some other national history, subdiscipline, or time period are finding their way to Greece in 1821. Overseas universities are doing the same, and specialists in Russia, Serbia, Romania, Latin America, and the Middle East have found ways to take their place in the ranks.

2I am among them. A specialist of Russia and modern Europe of a later period, I am using my expertise in European empires and languages to narrate the Greek Revolution from an imperial angle. I have good cause: the Greeks inhabited empires. But I am as much an opportunist as the next person, seizing on a well-marinated audience of academics and a reading public who are waiting for confirmation that Greece is today, Greece was in 1821, and Greece was before 1821. For all their diversities, they march in step. Some may have a very traditional understanding of the Revolution and tend toward the dances and reenactments; others are more critically minded, less given to myths, and aware that the Revolution was not always heroic. But there is a consensus that 1821 was the foundational moment because the Greek nation existed in 1821, which is why we call the Greeks Greek before, during, and after 1821. There are dimensions to be added and gaps to be filled, but we all agree that 1821 was 1821.

3We are confident in our categories. We assume that the Greeks existed in 1821 in more or less coherent national form. We explain how the inevitable came to pass in 1821 with the uprising of the Greeks and the creation of the nation-state in 1830. It is not a matter of if that would happen, but when, because after all we inhabit the result. We then write that history backward. Looking from 2021, we are in fact explaining not the contingencies and circumstances of 1821, but the lines that lead from today to a time 200 years ago. We project the terms backward. The Orthodox merchant of 1750 Livorno who was many things was fundamentally a Greek waiting for a Greece. The Chimariot mercenaries in Venice and Naples in 1495 were simply Greeks without a state, even if they did not know it.

  • 1 Trouillot 1995.

4Again: we are not explaining 1495 or 1750 as much as 2021, because the terms we use are today’s. This phenomenon – channeling the past through a narrow canal from the present to the past – is common to just about any national history. Many other things happened around 1776, 1789, and 1917 that do not quite fit the revolutionary narrative and suggest other possible histories, but they fall to wayside. I mean slavery for the Atlantic and the Haitian Revolution which do not make sense in a narrative of European liberty1; a shared and persistent Middle Eastern and Asian identity that always animated Europe and is displaced onto a separate Orient; or the very many people everywhere, in fact most of them, who had no clue that they were living a specific moment that would later be capitalized as the Revolution, be it American, French, or Russian.

  • 2 Corney 2004.

5Only later did we decide that these were foundational moments, that the Boston tea merchant who did not want to pay taxes was part of 1776 and a lover of liberty; that the sans‑culotte demanding bread and coffee was part of 1789 and working toward the First Republic; and that the Russian factory woman of Petrograd shaming the menfolk into action was starting 1917 and socialism. A smart colleague argues that the October Revolution of 1917 really took place in 1927 when the USSR and Sergei Eisenshtein mobilized to commemorate and reenact it2. Events happen after they happened. Dates become so fixed that they are not a moment in fluid and indeterminate time but Events, as solid as any building: they have a material reality and all else is narrated in relation to a concretized Year. Like 1776 or 1789, 1821 is a Thing much more than a marker in time. We need only say “’21” as if the rest is obvious to all.

6I emphasize this to make it clear that historians of Greece are in no way exceptional, but emblematic. A historian of modern Greece is writing the history of Greece and the Greek state. History is part of the infrastructure of the modern nation‑state. The historian will be given an education paid for by the state, a teaching and research position financed out of the budget, writing for state-supported students and colleagues who are taught again and again why we are who we are today. In some ways we should not be surprised: why would the Greek state pay for histories of things other than itself? If not the Greek state, who else will make the state the protagonist? And the Greek state is not looking for complexities as much as clarity about the justice of its foundational moment. Programs and foundations abroad likewise support a project that is oriented to the nation-state or a broader Hellenism such as a diaspora – the Greeks who are dispersed beyond the borders of the current state, proceeding from the fixed point that only now we know to be Greece. Given the exceptionally strong and enduring template of the nation-state, whatever we say is in relation to that nation-state, and we produce and reproduce it in everything we write. In fact, when we write about 1821, we are writing not so much the history of Greeks but of those who would become Greeks; not of Greece, but of the land that would become Greece.

  • 3 Cooper and Burbank 2010.
  • 4 Baker 1975.
  • 5 Still best expressed by O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984.

7The problem is that the nation and the nation-state are very new, and ’21 was the beginning of something new rather the completion of something old. We are erudite enough to know that the world until the nineteenth century was not organized into nation-states. I mean this is two senses. In the first place, the preferred form of regime was an empire that encompassed but did not assimilate differences3. Into the 1820s, leading Greek revolutionaries looked for protection by one or another empire, not necessarily an end to empire. Very many languages and confessions existed in the same spaces in ways that were awkward and sometimes violent but not epistemologically problematic. They would become problematic only with the advent of the totalizing nation that rejected one or another difference in the name of a unity that was equal parts Enlightenment (human universalism) and Romanticism (ethnic particularism). Secondly, the preferred form of sovereignty was monarchial, perhaps autocratic (Russia) or aristocratic (Britain), but not national. The population was not sovereign4. The person was invited to obey, not transform; to comply, not become; to be ruled, not to govern5.

8Empires left open large spaces for representing oneself, because the advantages of vast empires and distant autocrats is that they neglect, usually unwittingly. They might intervene randomly through collectives (Christians, merchants, notables) but they lacked the reach into the locality that might give them something more effective than rule: government. The criticism of the Ottoman regime was not quite about religious or ethnic rights. Instead the revolutionaries condemned the regime because it was arbitrary and unpredictable, and thus erratically violent, and the individual insecure. In those spaces of neglect and arbitrariness, new things can germinate, and in one area of neglect and violent arbitrariness a national revolution broke out in 1821. In the Ottoman Balkans, the regime was decentralizing against its will and losing effective control for some decades, to the tsiflikades and notables, to the irregular mercenaries, to foreign powers.

9We know much better now that the Ottoman Empire was not the place where Christians cowered in dark caves to learn their language and religion. The Ottoman Empire was a space of purported tolerance that was learning to rule through the Church rather than against it, but it was less and less able to keep order. It was not a space where a Greek nation could not be a Greek nation, because hardly anyone thought in terms of the nation. If a local community wanted to open a school to teach Greek in Dimitsana, it could and did. Locals feared the unexpected, the avarice of the Sultanic envoy or wrath of a local notable or the unpredictable violence of a commander. The irregular armies of banditry and pacification did more damage to the local population than good.

On the Nation

  • 6 Though it has been tried in a manner that made all violence look alike: Mayer 2000.

10I hasten to add that I am not against narrating the nation and the state. The nation became very real indeed, the place where human existence was reorganized. Rather, I am pointing out that in 1821 national thinking was rare and new; and I am asking the big unaddressed questions of 1821, which is to say Why was there a nationalist revolution at that moment rather than another rebellion, and Why did it take that form. Nor do I categorically condemn the nation for the violence and excesses that accompanied its birth in the nineteenth century, though violent it was indeed. Empires were violent too: ask the Haitians, ask the Tasmanians if only any were left, ask the Namibians and ask the Congolese, Vietnamese, Indonesians, Algerians, and Kenyans. Anyway, I am not sure how to compare one violence (national) against another (imperial), because violence is not an independent variable6. I do think that violence changes in character when it is based on a totalizing category – in this case, the nation – as I think the Greek Revolution was. This creates antithetical categories if only to more completely destroy them.

  • 7 Poggi 1977, p. 349‑352.

11And like the nation or not, it was the vessel that would deliver entitlement and citizenship as well as death and displacement. It was the basis on which more and more people could demand better and better. It did offer a commitment to the individual member that an empire never could, given the latter’s employment of various forms of indirect rule, collective responsibility, and distant sovereignty. The nation did devolve onto the individual certain dignities and rights, especially the one that allowed the citizen to become a better person – healthier and literate, most importantly – though this right was equally a duty. For better or worse, the nation-state endowed on the person – notice the very careful choice of words – “a certain political significance,” making it promising and ominous7. And if the demands of the nation were inescapable, then that’s not always a bad thing. In the midst of an epidemic, I would like my neighbor to wash their hands, wear a mask, and be tracked when infected. As a friend told me recently, “More biopolitics, please!”

  • 8 Kellner 1989.

12My objection to the historiography is different: we assume that the nation was already there before 1821. We have created an implausibly straight line from the present to the past, and let too much fall off the pages of our narratives because they do not fit into the simplified story of national awakening. We have lost the uncertainty that dominated the moment, the plurality of beings and possibilities and aspirations. In order to make the Livorno merchant Greek, we have deracinated and abstracted him, stripped him of the many other things he was or may have become. That merchant could have joined the Carbonari or melted into a banal obscurity in Italy. We have made the fascinating mess of the pre‑1821 period too neat, the beautifully crooked lines to 1821 and 2021 too straight8. Written this way, it seems to me, the history of the nation and of Greece is much more interesting and indeed gripping, especially if we, like historical actors, do not know what came next.

Writing Forward

  • 9 De Tocqueville 1856.
  • 10 Kremmydas 1977, p. 16‑33.

13If the Ottoman space was not a place of mass persecution and oppression, what was it? It was an old regime, with local inflections. Tocqueville offers us two relevant lessons on old regimes and the coming of revolutions9. They were in most danger when they tried to reform themselves, as Selim III and Mahmud II attempted in their efforts to stamp out local power centers and faced counter-forces; the Greek Revolution was one of those counter-forces. And revolutions do not happen because of poverty (in which case revolutions would happen every day) and abject repression (ditto). They happen because enough people think that things might be better, and the Christians of the Balkans decided that things might be better. The late Kremmydas’s works on the economic depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars in the region may be usefully read with that in mind: not the fact of unemployment and idle industries, but the fact of a better life that they had experienced before 1815. It was about dashed hopes, new expectations, and new assumptions about how life should be lived10.

  • 11 A story I tell in Kotsonis 2021a and Kotsonis 2021b.

14With that in mind, we can begin to write forward. One might begin in 1821, when the possibilities were still quite open, but it should be earlier. I chose 1797 because the Pax Ottomana (already in doubt) and the Pax Venetica (scarcely able to justify itself) were disrupted by the French Republic11. With the rapid succession of new empires in the neighborhood – the Russians, the French again, and the British – the Ionian Islands and the Ottoman mainland were exposed to vastly increased possibilities for political organization, fueled by the commercial boom of the Napoleonic Wars and the military careers offered to thousands of people in the region. It means to situate ourselves in, say, Tripolitza in 1801 and pretend that we do not know what befell the city in October 1821.

  • 12 Febvre 1947.

15Looked at this way, the possibilities for the future were in no way predetermined and myriad trajectories were still possible. At the same time a national revolution did happen and a nation-state did come into being; the revolution that began in 1821 did not consolidate the nation as much as create it. So our job at that moment – the decade 1821‑1830 – is to account for the historical circumstances, contingencies, and choices that produced this Greece and not, say, the one imagined by Righas Feraios; that produced these Greeks (in substance, Christian Orthodox) and not the others that could have emerged. Imagine a Turkish speaking Muslim Greek nationalist in 1821; it’s not outlandish though it became so. Lucien Febvre and his question of unbelief – what was imaginable in a given moment – is still a model12: at one point it was hard to imagine a nation; soon after it was hard to imagine the world without it.

  • 13 Zanou 2018.
  • 14 Hill 2021.

16Looking at the Greek Revolution, we have squeezed diversity and trimmed the facts so that they fit in 1821 as both time and place. The goat herder of Corinthia whom Kolokotronis taught to kill at Dervenakia, the Albanian Christian mercenaries of Epirus, the Italian speaking aristocrats of Zante, the Morean kotsabashis, the Vlach notables of Rumeli: we act as if they all belonged together already in 1821 because they were Greeks, a priori. In fact the Corinthian goat herder could have continued to think that he should mind his sheep and not kill strangers, or he could have become an Egyptian soldier-fellahin under Ibrahim pasha had it not been for Navarino. The Zantiote could and often did decide that he was Italian and then changed his mind; others remained aristocrats to whom the national labels were unseemly13. Others decided they were French and Russian. Had the Turkish speaker of Paleokastro been allowed to keep the Turkish language and his life, Greece could have been officially polyglot, as it was in practice well after 1944 and unofficially still remains. The Vlach could have sent his children to Greek public school to learn to write in Romanian. Tzavellas could have barked his commands in Albanian as he rose to be a general in the Hellenic Army (and for all I know he did). Our official documents may have been issued in a few languages. This is again not outlandish: Switzerland did just that in 1814, guided by the Russian foreign minister, Kapodistriia. Lebanon by the 1840s would cite the Greek Revolution and then organize itself around multiconfessionalism14. Albania does so today. Of course Greece did not turn out that way; we need context to explain why.

17Our task then is not to show how a sleeping nation was awakened, but to show how contingencies and long-term trajectories created a nation. This happened mainly during the Revolution itself. The complexities of the Ottoman Balkans were reduced to a remarkably simple binary of Christian and Muslim. This was a space of languages, localisms, and confessions, and none of them were exclusive and they could be transcended. The Muslim tsiflikas offered wheat to the Christian merchant and together they spoke the language of money. The ayan and the kotsabashi shared in the spoils extracted from the peasant and spoke the shared language of status, resources, and power. The Christian notable went to church with the peasant and the moneylender. Of these possibilities, only the last had a future.

  • 15 Though Christians, too, had some problems getting with the program: Karabicak 2020.

18It seems to me that we are dealing with the Revolution as equal parts Enlightenment and emancipation (the quest for security, the better life, and reasonable government) and Romantic nationalism (the primacy of the members over anyone else because of their innate, inner characteristics). The familiar confessional distinction of believer and Rum became so total so that only one could remain, translated quickly and neatly into the idiom of the Romantic nation: Greek and Turk. Looked at in a certain way (to paraphrase Churchill) the adversaries of the 1820s were two peoples separated by the same languages: Romaic Greek, Albanian, Vlach, Turkish, local Slavic forms, Roma, Italian, and increasingly Russian, French and English. This is part of what made the Revolution a revolution: the 1820s was a process of sorting myriad differences into two warring camps. The history of that decade is not of how the Greeks and the Turks fought, but of how they became Greeks and Turks, how the diversities were reduced to two. And at the end of the decade the Europeans sanctified what had occurred on the ground: the French Morea Expedition evacuated not only the Egyptian soldier-fellahin, but the native Muslim Moreans who spoke Greek, could not understand why they were not Greek too, and never quite understood the new logic of the nation15.

19If these diversities still did not fit the binary framework after the squeezing and trimming, we ponder their exceptionalism, exoticism, and liminality. Marginal cases may be intrinsically interesting, but we should use them to ask the bigger question: How and why did they become marginal? This in turn leads us to the related question: How was the new norm created? I have in mind the Slavic speaking villager of Laconia, the Greek speaking Muslims of Mourtatochoria, the Catholic Greek-speakers of Anapli or Syra, and the Roma into the present day. They are liminal only because of what happened after 1821 and especially after 1830. They are exceptional only because we have produced a new norm. The Greek speaking converts to Islam in the Mourtatochoria were part of the Ottoman flow and mosaic, but we explain them as an anomaly, victims, or opportunists, soon to be brought back to their natural place among the Greeks.

  • 16 Doxiadis 2010.
  • 17 Kousouris 2021; Mazower 2008, ch. 1.
  • 18 A rhetorical manœuvre that is traced through Kapodistrias and Stourdza in Arsh 2003.
  • 19 Pylia 2001.

20I doubt that anyone in 1820 thought of these cases as a Problem. I doubt they were suffering an identity crisis. I can’t find one who came forward to discuss his or her hybridity or feel the need to propose intersectionality as the correct solution. They already wore several hats and as a matter of course changed them. Until recently these liminals were hardly noticed at all, lost as they were in the totalizing binary. Historians have recently taken an interest in Jews16. Very good work is being done on Catholics who remained in Greece as Catholics, thanks in part to French protection17. Greek Islam in 1821 is still treated as an oxymoron. The consensus of Greece and Europe by 1830, that the Muslims were a foreign conqueror and still outsiders after being here for 350 years, has animated the histories as well. Walk into a bookshop and the Ottoman period is still under “tourkokratia.” After over three centuries, we might consider this the Ottoman period, a regime sooner than an occupation, and ask how a regime was turned rhetorically into an occupation: that’s also what made it a revolution18. In fact, into 1821, the Ottoman regime required the work of kotsabashis and church hierarchs and merchants and moneylenders who were, like all inhabitants, Ottomans19.

  • 20 Erdem 2007.

21The forced reduction of populations into two opposing camps is illustrated by the fate of Albanians in our writings. They are split up and reorganized in ahistorical ways to fit the new binary. The Albanians who fought for the Revolution are Arvanitès: Albanians-lite. Those who fought for the Ottomans were Tourkalvanoi: full-calorie Albanians. The latter is a misnomer because (1) Muslim Albanians hated the Ottoman Turks even more than the Rum, (2) few if any at the time used such a term, and (3) only non-Turks called the Turks Turks20. Those who are referred to as Turks by the Greeks and Europeans could have been Anatolians, Kurds, Circassians, or Africans. The people we call Turks called themselves believers. The term Turk was not at all a demographic fact but a political process of creating the neat binary, placing all Muslims in the same basket. And it bears remembering that in 1821 they were natives to the Morea and Rumeli. Where then is the history of the Morean Muslims? Where for that matter is the ephorate of Ottoman antiquities?

22These then are some useful ways to write about the Revolution: a process of forcing all demographics, and there were many, into two; the process of labeling part of the population foreign. This then brings us to the conjuncture of the 1820s that made all this possible. This calls for a different understanding of Europe, as a collection of imperial regimes, with the southern Balkans as their crossroads and Greece as a product.

A Nation out of An Empire

23It makes much more sense to see the eastern Mediterranean before 1821 as an imperial space, which in fact it was. The population comprised subjects, not citizens. This deprived them of certain rights when their master was the tsar in Odessa, Napoleon I on Cerigo, or George on Paxos, but it also offered them a vast imperial space of good careers and useful obscurity. They could choose and change loyalties quite easily before the nation offered them a stark choice – either in or out – or no choice at all. Their choices and options varied. By the standards of the nation, Karaiskakis and Androutsos were traitors; by the standards of the Empire in which they were raised, they were good warlords. Giovanni Capo d’Istria the Corfiote could become Ioann Kapodistriia of the Russian foreign ministry and then Ioannis Kapodistrias, defending his new nation in Italian and French to the end, while his colleague in the foreign service Alexandre Sturdza retired in Russia. Katsonis as a Russian naval and land officer was too soon for any nation, while the Ypsilanti brothers did have that option. The Souliots fought for and against every conceivable power in the region before they, too, ran out of options with the fall of their last employer, Ali pasha, and became decidedly Greek.

  • 21 Dialla 2021.

24All this points to a different appreciation of the European Powers. I have in mind the historiographic dead zone of 1815‑1821. In general it is treated as a pause in what historians consider to be the real history – more revolutions – so that we move rather quickly from 1815 to 1848, coming up for air in the July Monarchy, Belgium, and Greece. The Congress period is seen as a reaction and a postponement of the revolutionary reckoning (which I think it was) where nothing lasting happened (which I think is wrong)21. Add the Holy Alliance and we can see how the period prepared the ground for the Greek Revolution, in two broad ways. In the first place, it foreclosed certain outcomes: with the revolutions of Spain, Piedmont, and Naples put down by the armies of France and Austria, it was not the time to proclaim a liberal revolution. The revolutionaries learned to emphasize the legitimist dimension of their cause, one that would restore freedom to Christians, fought against a Muslim foreigner. And, secondly, the wider context of the European empires showed the way to what kind of revolution would work: a Christian one that set aside or disavowed liberal and social causes.

25To put it another way: in our effort to place the Greek Revolution in the tradition of the Enlightenment, 1789, and 1848, we too easily forget that in 1821 the European courts were anything but liberal and enlightened. They were decidedly legitimist and conservative and the enemy of all revolutions, and for five years after 1821 the revolutionaries had to content themselves with recognition by only one independent state, Haiti, and the Knights of St. John. The tsars Alexander and Nicholas never forgave Ypsilanti and left him to rot in an Austrian prison. It was not the moment for proclamations of our shared humanity and malleability. Hence the Greek uprising was roundly condemned in 1821. When it was embraced in 1826 by Russia and Britain, it was as an uprising of a Christian people against a Muslim occupier. The state that was finally imposed by the empires was legitimist, absolutist, and based on religious belonging. This raises the question of what the Greek uprising and outcome was about: in hindsight it was a War of Independence but not as a revolution in the style of 1776 or 1789; its distilled outcome was the nation. At that moment in 1830, what triumphed was Romantic nationalism, which was indeed a revolution but of a new kind.

  • 22 As explicated so intelligently in Bourget, Lepetit, Nordman, Sinarellis (eds), 1998.
  • 23 Arsh 1970.
  • 24 Holland 2012.

26The other triumph was of the European balance of powers, and Greece was a compromise between Russia, Britain, and France about the fate of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, Greece was the byproduct of wider geopolitical thinking. For France it was part of an imperial projection to the Orient that began in Egypt in 1798 and continued in Algiers in 183022. For Russia it was an outcome of one more Ottoman war that ended with the Treaty of Adrianople; the fighting took place in the Caucasus, the northern Balkans, and the Black Sea, and not at all in the lands that would become Greece23. For Britain Greece was a way to maintain regional stability and commerce24.

27But 1830 was not at all the end of the story, and the new nation-state was a beginning. The politicians of the 1820s treated the new absolutist regime of Otto as a start; at least it was a country. And it is worth repeating that nationalism, ultimately, devolved sovereignty onto the population and made their demands difficult to ignore. The person was now entitled. In 1844 Greece was suddenly more liberal than any other European state, soon land reform would be addressed, poverty could be brought to the forefront, and waves of immigrants and refugees assimilated or integrated – all on the basis of a national belonging which was afforded to the survivors of 1821‑1830. They emerged from that catastrophic decade with a priori rights that expanded over time, until a very poor boy with Nigerian parents could become a national hero, the child of Albanians could carry the flag on 25 March and Roma communities are visited by officials in the midst of an epidemic not as Roma but as Greeks in economic need. The nation continues to evolve.

281821 was a beginning that we are still living, well worth commemorating.

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Bibliographie

Arsh 1970 = Grigorii L. Arsh, Eteristskoe dvizhenie v Rossii. Osvoboditel’naia bor’ba grecheskogo naroda v nachale XIX v. i russko-grechskie sviazi, Moscow, Nauka, 1970.

Arsh 2003 = Grigorii L. Arsh, Ioann Kapodistriia v Rossii, 1809‑1822, St. Petersburg, Aleteiia, 2003.

Baker 1975 = Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet, from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1975.

Bourget et alii 1998 = Marie-Noëlle Bourget, Bernard Lepetit, Daniel Nordman and Maroula Sinarellis (eds), L’Invention scientifique de la Méditerranée. Égypte, Morée, Algérie, Paris, EHESS, 1998.

Cooper and Burbank 2010 = Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010.

Corney 2004 = Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2004.

Dialla 2021 = Antonia Dialla, “The Congress of Vienna, the Russian Empire, and the Greek Revolution: Rethinking Legitimacy,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, special section on 1821, forthcoming spring 2021.

De Tocqueville 1856 = Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Paris, Michel Lèvy Frères, 1856.

Doxiadis 2018 = Evdoxios Doxiadis, State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Erdem 2007 = Hakan Erdem, “‘Perfidious Albanians’ and ‘Zealous Governors’: Ottomans, Albanians and Turks in The Greek War of Independence”, Antonis Anastasopoulos, Elias Kolovos (eds), Ottoman Rule and The Balkans, 1760‑1850: Conflict, Transformation, Adaptation, Rethymno, 2007.

Febvre 1947 = Lucien Febvre, Le Problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle : La religion de Rabelais, Paris, Albin Michel, 1947.

Fleming 2010 = K. E. Fleming, Greece: A Jewish History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010.

Hill 2021 = Peter Hill, “Mount Lebanon and Greece: Mediterranean Crosscurrents, 1821‑1841”, Historein, Special Issue on the Greek Revolution, forthcoming 2021.

Holland 2012 = Robert Holland, Blue‑Water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean since 1800, London, Penguin, 2012.

Karabicak 2020 = Yusuf Karabicak, “Local Patriots and Ecumenical Ottomans: The Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ottoman Configuration of Power, 1768‑1828”, PhD dissertation, McGill University – EHESS, 2020.

Kellner 1989 = Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Kotsonis 2021a = Yianni Kotsonis, Η Ελληνική Επανάσταση και οι Αυτοκρατορίες. Η Γαλλία και οι Έλληνες, 1797-1830, Athens, Alexandria, 2021.

Kotsonis 2021b = Yianni Kotsonis, The Greek Revolution, Athens, Epitomé/EFA, forthcoming 2021.

Kousouris 2021 = Dimitris Kousouris, “The Catholic Communities of the Greek Archipelago during the Greek Revolution, 1821‑1830”, Historein, Special Issue on the Greek Revolution, forthcoming 2021.

Kremmydas 1977 = Vasiles Kremmydas, “Η οικονομική κρίση στον ελλαδικό χώρο και οι επιπτώσεις της στην επανάσταση του 1821”, Mnimon 6, January 1977, p. 16‑33.

Mayer 2000 = Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Mazower 2008 = Mark Mazower (ed.), Networks of Power in Modern Greece. Essays in Honor of John Campbell, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008.

Poggi 1977 = Gianfranco Poggi, “The Modern State and the Idea of Progress”, in Gabriel A. Armond et al. (eds), Progress and Its Discontents, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977, p. 349‑352.

Pylia 2001 = Martha Pylia, “Les notables moréotes, fin du xviiie-début du xixe siècle : fonctions et comportements”, PhD dissertation, University of Paris 1, 2001.

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Notes

1 Trouillot 1995.

2 Corney 2004.

3 Cooper and Burbank 2010.

4 Baker 1975.

5 Still best expressed by O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984.

6 Though it has been tried in a manner that made all violence look alike: Mayer 2000.

7 Poggi 1977, p. 349‑352.

8 Kellner 1989.

9 De Tocqueville 1856.

10 Kremmydas 1977, p. 16‑33.

11 A story I tell in Kotsonis 2021a and Kotsonis 2021b.

12 Febvre 1947.

13 Zanou 2018.

14 Hill 2021.

15 Though Christians, too, had some problems getting with the program: Karabicak 2020.

16 Doxiadis 2010.

17 Kousouris 2021; Mazower 2008, ch. 1.

18 A rhetorical manœuvre that is traced through Kapodistrias and Stourdza in Arsh 2003.

19 Pylia 2001.

20 Erdem 2007.

21 Dialla 2021.

22 As explicated so intelligently in Bourget, Lepetit, Nordman, Sinarellis (eds), 1998.

23 Arsh 1970.

24 Holland 2012.

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Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Yanni Kotsonis, « 1821 »Bulletin de correspondance hellénique moderne et contemporain [En ligne], 2 | 2020, mis en ligne le 23 décembre 2020, consulté le 22 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/452 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/bchmc.452

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Auteur

Yanni Kotsonis

Professor of History & Russian & Slavic Studies, New York University

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