Writing the Greek Revolution

This weekend, I read Mark Mazower’s latest book, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (2021). Despite being another in the long list of recent “big books by academic men,” it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Mazower is a good writer and he manages the transform the basic narrative of the Greek Revolution, which is fairly well known among scholars of Ancient and Modern Greece, by infusing it with exceptional detail and nuance.

I am not invested enough in the study of Modern Greek History to offer any kind of critical review of the book, but I can offer a few observations that situate the book in some more popular (and better known) trends in the history of modern Greece. Since I’ll be teaching the History of Greece in the spring, the book did serve both to situate the Greek War of Independence within some broader historiographic trends that I think that an undergraduate student could readily apprehend. My observations below represent my thoughts about the book partly in this context.  

1. A Greek, Greek Revolution. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Mazower’s detailed efforts to unpack and analyze the motives, activities, and positions of the various Greek factions during the revolution. While most of these groups, from the klefts such as Kolokotronis to Peloponnesian grandees such as the Notaras family, shipping families from Hydra and Spetses (e.g. the Kountouriotis brothers) and Greeks arriving from Russia (Capodistrias and the Ypsilantis brothers) and Constantinople via points west (Mavrokordatos) are well-known to even those casually interested in the Greek Revolution, Mazower’s explication of the complicated interplay between these individuals and their factions was revelatory to me. 

This is particularly useful as I’ve tended to understand the Greek Revolution in the context of larger European politics which exerted a significant influence over its outcome especially after 1825. Mazower’s attention to the internal wrangling between groups in Greece and their diversity of motives demonstrates how a Greek identity emerged against a backdrop of various interests during the War of Independence. For example, Mazower argues that Georgios Karaiskakis, the famous armatoloi leader who operated across central Greece before meeting his end at the siege of Athens in 1826, had shifted his political identity from being a leader of an independent armed band (initially in the service of Ali Pasha) to being a fighter for the Greek people or the Greek nation. This shift did not occur through the explicit influence of Enlightenment ideas circulating in Western Europe, but through his experiences particularly during the third siege of Missolonghi. Mazower likewise observes that during the long third siege of Missolonghi, a kind of collective identity emerged among the city’s inhabitants which revealed a sense of shared Greek identity in the chaos and crisis of the war. This stood in clear contrast to the constant wrangling and fighting among various factions in the Peloponnesus who were continuing to fight, for example, over control of Nafplio and found any coordinated strategies against Ibrahim Pasha’s army impossible.

There is something quite Romantic about Mazower’s argument here and perhaps that’s what makes it so compelling. For Mazower, Greek national identity was neither an ill-fitting construct imported from Western Europe or the Ionian Islands, but an organic development spurred by the war itself and the growing realization that Greek and Albanian speaking Christians in Roumeli and the Morea had a shared fate. 

2. Who are the Greeks? Another key argument that emerges from Mazower’s book is that the Greek War of Independence did not rely upon a narrowly ethnic, linguistic, or cultural sense of emergent or incipient national identity. He regularly stressed the diverse backgrounds of major players in the war. The prevalence of Albanian speakers, for example, both in Roumeli and the Morea created connections between groups (who often discussed strategy in Albanian) on the basis of language. In other cases, kleftic leaders like Kolokotronis found common ground with British Philhellenes through their time on the Ionian islands which were under British control. Other groups, were familiar with one another through shared time fighting for and against Ali Pasha, the independent minded provincial ruler in Ioannina, whose semi-independence and life came to end at the hand of an Ottoman army in 1822. 

The diversity of the Greek forces and their leadership in the War of Independence makes clear that narrowly linguistic or cultural concepts of being Greek do not apply during the war. Moreover, Mazower regularly notes that not all Greeks or even most Greeks existed within the area wracked by the Revolution. And Greek communities in Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere often had a jaundiced eye toward the war and its goals (including many of the important early leaders of the Greek state such as Capodistrias!). This, of course, also serves as a useful reminder to those who like to imagine nationalism as depending on cultural, ethnic, and linguistic cohesion. While Mazower leaves no doubt that a sense of shared identity and fate emerged in some corners over the course of the war, he is equally clear that those who fought under the Greek banner during the War of Independence were a remarkably diverse lot. 

3. The Power of Narrative. Finally, Mazower offers a clear reminder of the power of a narrowly defined and detailed narrative. Over the past couple of decades, I have enjoyed the recent outpouring of books that have looked to situate modern Greek identity within the complicated legacy of European Enlightenment thought its commitment to the study of Ancient Greece as a model for new forms of social and political organization. We can appreciate how Greece in some ways was (and is?) a reflection of our veneration of Classical antiquity, but Mazower spends precious little time on the machinations of Philhellenes in the course of events in Greece.

More recently, scholars have argued that the current debt crisis reflects a long term pattern of Greek dependence on foreign capital and traces its origins to the first set of loans extended to Greek government to help finance the war. Without denying that impact of economic colonialism in shaping the modern world, Mazower distances his arguments from this narrative as well.

By focusing more narrowly on the individuals, groups, and relationships that defined the course of the Greek Revolution on the ground, Mazower offers a view of Greek history that avoids both a dismissive (and honestly Orientalist) perspective of Greeks as incapable of real independence outside of Western European support and a view of Greece as a fragile and imperfect reflection of European classicizing fantasies. The result isn’t a tidy and honestly isn’t pretty, but it is distinctly Greek. 

And to my mind, this is the strength of this book. It tells the story of a distinctively Greek revolution.