Abstract
The bicentenary of the Greek Revolution of 1821 was a fortuitous juncture for enriching its historiography with perspectives seeking to unsettle conventional understandings of the event. This opportunity was seized on with veritable verve by the authors of The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions. It deploys comparative and transnational frameworks to offer a series of reappraisals of the Greek Revolution as an integral manifestation of the tumultuous era of conflict and change which extended from the French Revolution to the European Revolutions of 1848. Both this and the second book under review here, The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, are edited by the eminent political scientist and intellectual historian Paschalis M. Kitromilides. Published within months of each other, they jointly provide a fitting commemoration of the bicentenary of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution.
Kitromilides introduces the first work with a cogent analysis of the two core historiographical categories contained in the title, reflecting on the origins and evolution of the terms ‘Greek world’ and the ‘Age of Revolution.’ With respect to the first, he identifies the Greek-speaking community as the principal agent which embodied the incipient idea of the Greek nation. Despite being widely dispersed across a vast geographical territory the ρωμιοί had nevertheless managed to cohere around the ecclesiastical institutions of Christian Orthodoxy and gradually articulate their distinct identity. Over time their conceptual self-understanding would evolve from that of a culturally homogeneous diasporic community and a national polity in captivity, as the eighteenth-century thinkers Iosipos Moisiodax and Dimitrios Katartzis saw it, to the privileged constituents of a multicultural republic or a modern liberal democracy, modelled on the Anglo-American polity, as envisioned by the Thessalian Jacobin Rhigas Velestinlis and the preeminent Greek Enlightener Adamantios Korais respectively.
As regards the ‘age of revolution,’ a term coined by Eric Hobsbawm, Kitromilides points out that it is a historiographical concept which has since been refined and endowed with new analytical directions, yet without forfeiting its place as a dominant paradigm. He identifies the globalized perspective as the most crucial element with which it was infused, and evokes intellectual historian Elie Kedourie, who noted that the ideas underpinning the Greek nation-building project were at the forefront of the process of the ‘radiation of Western secular and liberal ideas on a global scale’. Nationalism, and more particularly the notion of the self-determination of national communities unified by a common language, formed the cornerstone of the logic which pervaded the age of revolution. It is on this basis which the contributors of the volume seek to approach the Greek Revolution, considering it through the analytical prisms of comparative history, regional history and various neglected aspects of Greek revolutionary politics.
Annie Jourdan attempts to delineate the essential features which characterize the five revolutionary waves, which began with the American Revolution of 1776 and ended with the ‘People's Spring’ of 1848 in Europe. No one model can be discerned from these events, although each drew lessons from its predecessors – most notably from France and its mixed institutional legacies, Jacobin and later imperial. Universal suffrage, political liberties and social rights gradually ceased to be mentioned and thus natural rights were seemingly abandoned in favour of more restricted demands for freedom of expression and the right to education. Revolutionary coalitions became more dependent on the military and international secret societies, whereas by 1848 the revolutions were spearheaded by liberals and radicals who once more called for the respect of social and political rights, a movement that would soon be defeated.
Expanding on the liberal theory of emancipation, Jose Maria Portillo Valdés points out the parallel trajectory of the Greek revolution with its counterparts in Spanish America, indicating how the age of revolution was shaped by a confluence of domestic factors and great power politics. Miroslav Šedivý expands on the crucial importance assigned to the Greek Revolution by the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, not only as a catalyst for the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but as a serious breach of the political-legal roots of the post-Napoleonic order established at the Congress of Vienna.
Moored in the notion of transnationalism, Anna Karakatsouli's analysis of the role of the rapidly growing publishing industry during the early nineteenth century indicates that it allowed for the global dissemination of the Greek revolutionary cause and made it a mainstream issue in the current political agenda. The links between the Greek revolution and the liberal revolutions of 1820–1823 in Spain, Portugal and Italy are probed by John A. Davis, who uncovers the transnational dynamic of revolutionary movements in Southeast Europe and their impact on refashioning British identities. Chris Clark and Chris Aliprantis employ a comparative perspective to explore the forces leading to the Greek revolution and the transnational networks which gave rise to the upheavals of 1848–1849, pointing to the parallel processes of technocratic transfers which underpinned their state-building. Francesco Scalora and Anna Maria Rao focus on the Italian responses to the Greek Revolution, and more particularly on the transnational networks in South Europe, which connected the Greek struggle with the uprisings against Austrian and Bourbon domination.
Eschewing conventional analyses of great power politics regarding the role of Russia in the Greek cause, Simon Dixon emphasizes the multiplicity of sub-state – chiefly societal but also literary – convergences between the Greeks and the Russians. These were manifested most prominently in the virtually contemporaneous trajectories of the Revolution of 1821 and the Decembrist uprising which broke out four years later. Şükrü Ilıcak highlights the importance of the decade-long administrative and military project embarked on by the Ottoman state to reassert itself in the provinces as a catalyst for the Greek revolutionary movement, whose success would itself compel the Sublime Porte to initiate a series of far-reaching reforms. The Serbian and Romanian revolutionary precedents as juxtaposed to the Greek one are the focus of the contributions of Harald Heppner and Maria Efthymiou respectively, who draw attention to the convergences of these two events as well as the dynamics of civil conflicts.
In attempting to explore the plurality of visions and tensions prevalent among Greeks on the eve of their uprising, Olga Katsiardi-Hering indicates that the conditions under which they espoused the revolutionary cause had been brought about by a combination of events, which included the post-1814 economic crisis, the end of the Napoleonic wars and the crisis within the Ottoman edifice, as well as the restoration of prewar normality in the Levantine sea trade. The importance of the insular element in the Greek struggle is the focus of Gelina Harlaftis and Katerina Galani's article, which indicates the critical role played by the maritime factor in the success of the Revolution, through an exploration of the gradual establishment of the Greek navy.
Vaso Seirinidou tackles an especially neglected aspect of the Greek Revolution, namely the extent to which it affected the ‘security dispositive’ of its time, by triggering changes in the internal security policies and repressive mechanisms of the European monarchies, chiefly in the Austrian and Ottoman empires. A useful footnote to this could probably be sought in the underexplored case of the security regime of Russia, which also appears – perhaps counter-intuitively, given the Orthodox convergences which are often presupposed – to have been impacted by the Greek revolutionary activities. Spyros Vlachopoulos and Konstantinos Papageorgiou round up the collection with two chapters focusing, respectively, on the normative political culture infused by the national assemblies in Greek revolutionary action and the inspiration the Greek struggle drew from three prominent political theorists of the Neohellenic Enlightenment, proponents of a subtle understanding of the Ideal of Freedom as an organizing principle of the revolution – Rhigas, Korais and the ‘Anonymous Hellene’ who published the classic tract on freedom, ‘Hellenic Nomarchy’, in 1806.
Surveying the historiographical treatment of revolutions through the conceptual prisms of structural homologies, contagion and disruption, David A. Bell asserts that the Greek Revolution disrupted the post-Napoleonic European order, compelling the great powers to acquiesce to the emergence of nascent states in one form or another. It encouraged similar struggles both in the Ottoman Balkans and Russia as the enthusiasm it generated inspired a host of movements which paid homage to the Greek example. Yet Bell reminds us that the Revolution was also itself a result of a concatenation of events on the Continent and the Mediterranean whose effects rippled through the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In this respect he reaffirms the core argument of the volume, namely that the event cannot be understood in its full complexity without being placed in the broader context of the ‘age of revolution’.
The second work under review here, The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, won recognition with the prestigious 2022 London Hellenic Prize. It is modelled on Furet and Ozouf's critical reflections on selected topics, 1 rather than on Albert Soboul's exhaustive all-inclusive work on the French Revolution. 2 It steers clear both of epic accounts produced by the likes of Constantinos Paparrigopoulos and others, and of monumental, multi-volume collective projects such as the History of the Greek Nation (1975). It revisits conventional understandings of carefully selected subjects and personages, on the basis of both the historical records as well as on novel historiographical approaches. The result is a rich compendium on the revolutionary war which contains important evaluations based on a wide range of reliable sources.
The two co-editors of this volume – Kitromilides and the distinguished sociologist Constantinos Tsoukalas – stress that their work is intended as an introductory guide to all those who desire to become acquainted with the polymorphous Greek revolutionary drama, hoping that it will encourage them to further explore its various political, social and cultural facets. Unlike the swiftly quashed 1820–21 revolts in Piedmont and Naples, they note, the Greek struggle pressed forward for more than a decade, managing to resuscitate liberal nationalist sentiment in the shadow of post-Napoleonic reaction. It would ultimately give an impetus to the cause of social liberation at large, providing a model of action for all those peoples who sought to emancipate themselves from imperial control through the establishment of a viable polity that would mark the Greeks out as Europe's first ‘new nation’ – as Martin Lipset had previously characterized the emergence of American nationhood – in a region whose units would not begin to attain sovereign statehood before the end of the century.
The volume comprises seven sections, themselves subdivided into ‘a selection of paradigmatic topics’. Sections I and II deal with the rich contexts and complex antecedents of the Revolution, traversing regional, incipiently national and transnational experiences which determined the political, economic and cultural landscape in which its protagonists mobilized. The chapters variously focus on the Ottoman state and society (Şükrü Ilıcak), the Balkan hinterlands (Andrei Pippidi and Slobodan G. Marković), the diaspora, both its visible and secretive networks (Mathieu Grenet and Constantinos C. Chatzopoulos), as well as local communities (Vaso Seirinidou). For his part, Vasilis Molos emphasizes the varying motives and leitmotifs which determined the local revolts against the Ottomans over the preceding centuries before the efforts of disparate rebels who sought to assert provincial autonomy would be integrated by ‘transimperial brokers’ into revolutionary networks, culminating with the establishment of a secretive nonimperial entity which ‘mobilized Greek communities to rise against the Ottoman Empire’, the Philiki Etaireia.
Section III seeks to highlight key places of revolutionary activity, chiefly those that, wholly or partly, would eventually be incorporated into Greece's territory, namely Athens (Maria D. Efthymiou), Samos (Christos Landros), Epirus (Dionysis Tzakis), Macedonia (Basil Gounaris), Crete (Kitromilides) and the Ionian Islands (Eleni Angelomatis-Tsougarakis). A number of chapters are focused on the theatre of war itself, most notably on events of great symbolic significance, like the siege of Mesolonghi (Markos Karasarinis), the massacre of Chios (Christos Landros), the showdown at Navarino Bay (Robert Holland) and the role of the Greek fleet (Katerina Galani and Gelina Harlaftis), as well as the military campaigns in the Morea (Tzakis) and in Rumeli (Karasarinis). There are also more particular analyses carried out within region-specific chapters, which focus on critical actors, such as the Souliots in Epirus, the armatoloi in Macedonia and the Zakynthos Committee in the Ionian Islands.
With respect to the easternmost regions of the Hellenic world, in two concise chapters Stavros Anestidis captures, firstly, the devastating impact which the uprising had on the Patriarchate as an institution and on the Greek community of Constantinople as a whole, as well as the only slightly less perilous fate of the Thracian Greek volunteers; and, secondly, the military and political contribution of the Asia Minor Greeks to the struggle for independence. Kitromilides’ chapter on Cyprus is also notable in that it does not betray a narrative reflex readily discernible in most conventional treatments of Cypriot involvement in the Revolution, namely the quasi-teleological notion of a historical linearity in the movement for territorial unification with Greece. Instead, it eschews latter-day reimaginings of the Isle's history altogether, portraying volunteering not merely as a natural consequence of the Cypriots’ belonging to the Hellenic world but, more especially, as a spontaneous manifestation of their drive to liberate their native land.
The following section (IV) separates the personalities of the revolution into six distinct categories: civilian leaders (Dimitris Livanios), military leaders (Dimitrios Papastamatiou), clergymen (Phokion Kotzageorgis), diplomats (Ioannis D. Stefanidis), intellectuals (Roxane D. Argyropoulos) and women (Angelomatis-Tsougarakis). With respect to the first two, Papastamatiou rightly acknowledges the problematic nature of any attempt to demarcate the boundary between the military and the political leadership of the Revolution – a point on which Livanios concurs, stating that the involvement of civilians in military operations often renders the distinction between political, military and religious leaders ‘purely theoretical’. The latter points out that the leadership of the Revolution was formed by deeper divisions or multiple internal cleavages, between Moreots, Rumeliots and islanders; local primates and military leaders; autochthons and heterochthons; the notables and the Moreot peasantry; and between supporters of each of the Great Powers.
From the wide array of topics treated most thoroughly in the following two sections, on institutions (V) and intellectual and creative factors (VI) respectively, those that stand out include: Nicos Alivizatos’ chapter highlighting the unique role of the four revolutionary constitutions as products of ‘unhindered deliberation’, which would serve as an invaluable democratic and liberal acquis that would help Greece overcome its future authoritarian challenges; Kostas Kostis’ crisp account of the funding sources of the Revolution, from its earliest days until the various unsuccessful schemes devised during the First Republic to put the monetary sector into order; and Kitromilides’ analysis of the growth of the Greek Enlightenment as an ‘expanding horizon’ throughout the Mediterranean, which utilized the Greek liberation struggle as a vehicle to spread the notion of a modern, secular national self-conception.
The final section (VII), which traces the global ‘resonances’ (as it is titled) of this pivotal episode in modern European history, contains forays into philhellenism (Roderick Beaton and Ioannis Evrigenis) and its representation in the arts (Fani-Maria Tsigakou), literature (Rosa Mucignat and David Ricks) and music (Katerina Levidou) as well as two poignant articles on the evolving national identity of the Greeks as manifested in three anniversaries of the Revolution (1871, 1921, 1971), together with critical discussion of its symbolic commemorations to the present day (Gonda van Steen and Tsoukalas). Pericles Vallianos’ article offers a perspicacious overview of the main historiographical traditions and debates surrounding the Greek uprising, focusing on the early treatments of the Revolution by French, English, German, Italian and American diplomatic, military and civilian participants, as well as Greek protagonists (the primate Kanellos Deligiannis, the Peloponnesian military chief Theodoros Kolokotronis, the Rumeliot veteran Ioannis Makrygiannis, the politician Spyridon Trikoupis, the journalist Ioannis Philimon) and latter-day historians, chiefly Constantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose magnum opus, History of the Greek Nation (1860–1874) he characterizes as the ‘crowning achievement’ of Greek historiography in the nineteenth century.
It should be stressed that, of the four historiographical issues which Kitromilides expands on in the introduction – origins of the Revolution, Greek archaeological heritage, population displacements and statecraft – it is surely the latter that must command the fullest attention of scholars of early modern Greece in the coming years. For it is ultimately institution-building processes – or the lack thereof – to which these substantive issues can be traced, all the more so if one elects to take seriously the antiteleological shift in recent Greek historiography. To limit ourselves to the other three issues set apart by Kitromilides, firstly, the events which triggered the revolution must be re-embedded in the context of the broader institutional disarray that was discernible within both the consular services of Russia (reflective of the deeper sociopolitical ruptures within the Empire leading up to the Decembrist uprising) and the Ottoman administration of the western provinces alike. Secondly, historical monuments and works of art had been prey to an uninhibited onslaught until regulatory interventions afforded them full legal protection and symbolic-national restitution. Finally, an inquiry into the refugee problem necessitates analysis of the evolving institutional capacities of local communities to integrate them into their fabric, the regulation of citizenship and migratory rights, as well as the ongoing diplomatic negotiations on the delimitation of Greece's borders. To this end, it is only proper that Kitromilides should refer to Capodistrias’ statecraft, numerous aspects of which the present volume addresses – chiefly in Part V – but many of which remain to be developed more fully in a future collection: one whose intellectual labours must be directed towards uncovering the post-revolutionary state-building enterprise of the First Hellenic Republic (1828–1832).
In recent years we have witnessed a reanimation of interest in revolutions and their comparative study, an indication that perhaps the distrust of metanarratives may have begun to erode. This has given rise to a modest harvest of publications variously based on novel methods of ‘global’ and ‘Atlantic’ history, 3 as well as on the concept of ‘revolutionary scripts’. 4 To this collection of works, but chiefly to those continuing on the trajectory established by the pioneering work of Jacques Godechot, Robert R. Palmer and Eric Hobsbawm on the ‘age of democratic revolutions’, 5 the two collections of interdisciplinary studies under review here constitute welcome supplements. Offering critical and timely reappraisals of the Greek struggle for liberation, they both portray it as a major international event which triggered the revival of revolution in Europe, in defiance of both the disrepute into which the French exemplar had thrown the revolutionary enterprise as a whole and of the subsequent, putative, triumph of the Restoration.
