Yanni Kotsonis, The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2025)

 

Yanni Kotsonis’s The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism brilliantly revisits the turbulent 1820s in the Balkans, showing how a chain of surprising events shaped Greek, European, and global history. Grounded in evidence from Greek, French, British, Swiss, Italian, and Russian archives and exquisitely written, this book tells a global history of the Greek Revolution. Kotsonis does so, innovatively, through a non-linear narrative and microhistories of Greek merchants, mercenaries, notables, some of them likeable and heroic and others not all. The French, British, and Russian military intervention was critical to the emergence of independent Greece in 1830, but the decisions of Greek actors, embedded in various imperial networks and subjects to multiple empires, shaped what kind of state it would be.

Kotsonis’s groundbreaking history contributes to the study of nationalism by capturing how radical many ideas that we take for granted were in the early nineteenth century. Greek independence was premised on the sovereignty of one people, a bold idea in the age of empires. The very notion of Greece as a country was startling, especially for people living there. Kotsonis demonstrates how, in a short period of time, many Greek Orthodox, who were scattered throughout the region and often spoke different languages, imagined themselves as one people, the Greeks. Meanwhile, local Muslims became the Turks, or the other, who no longer belonged to the land. In ensuing expulsions, mass murder, and foreign occupation, Greece lost a quarter of its population. Kotsonis reminds us how violent nationalism was that forged the first ethnic nation-state. That ethno-national model then spread throughout Europe, Anatolia, and beyond, violently reshaping the modern world. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of nation-making and to Greek, Ottoman, and global history and politics.