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The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism
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.
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.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionGreece
392 pages, Hardcover
Published January 14, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 7, 2025
An excellent and accessible scholarly work about an oft-overlooked revolution in European history. The Greek Revolution has often been cited as the first ethno-nationalist revolution in world history (the nationalist spirit of the French Revolution was civic rather than ethnic based), and it set the pattern for the many that would follow over the next two centuries. Kotsonis falls clearly into the Anderson school of nationalist theory, demonstrating how the Hellenic nationalism that swept Greece in the late 1810s and early 1820s was entirely fictive.
Rather than a storied and ancient people reasserting their identity again, we see that Greek identity simply did not exist before the revolution. The ancient citizens of Classical Greece, so often invoked by these revolutionaries, would not have considered themselves ‘Greek’ in any modern sense of the word, and were in fact more likely to identify with their individual city-states over some sort of ethnic community. Then, following the conquest of the Greek lands by the Romans in the first-century BC, and especially after the establishment of the Eastern Roman Empire with Constantinople as its capital in the 300s, those whom we would today called Greeks self-identified as ‘Romans’ for 1500 years! Their endonym was ‘Romioi’, and when the Byzantines were conquered by the Ottomans, they did not take any Greek title, but instead referred to themselves as ‘Sultans of Rome’. Kotsonis shows how just months before this revolutionary outbreak, those who would go on to be the most passionate ‘Greeks’ had no set identity, working for Muslim or Orthodox or Catholic forces, whichever was paying the highest. The creation of a ‘Greek’ self-conception was one born in the literary salons and university offices, in far away European capitals and amongst the intellectual classes. In fact, it is through the philhellenism of the post Napoleonic elites of the great European powers that the Greek revolution got off the ground. His work shows that here, as in all nationalist movements which followed, identity is highly contingent, often performative, and built upon the appropriation of historical narrative and figures to whom it would seem quite foreign.
Kotsonis also shows how the formation of a nationalist movement is always tied to violence. The creation of a nationalist in-group requires the conceptualization of an otherized out-group. In the Greek case, that ‘Other’ was the Ottoman Turks, and all Muslims generally. This is a pattern we see repeated in every nationalist movement worldwide, with the consequence often being ethnic cleansing and genocide. We see this amongst various groups in the Yugoslav Wars, the Israel genocide of the Palestinians, the American genocides of Native American, etc. The Greek Revolution saw ethnic cleansing against Turks and other Muslim/Slavic groups which had lived peacefully alongside their ‘Greek’ Orthodox neighbors in Greece for centuries. Kotsonis demonstrates that ethno-nationalist identity building and political movements are directly tied to ethnic violence, they can not be separated. Overall this was an excellent work and the best book I’ve read so far published in 2025!
Rather than a storied and ancient people reasserting their identity again, we see that Greek identity simply did not exist before the revolution. The ancient citizens of Classical Greece, so often invoked by these revolutionaries, would not have considered themselves ‘Greek’ in any modern sense of the word, and were in fact more likely to identify with their individual city-states over some sort of ethnic community. Then, following the conquest of the Greek lands by the Romans in the first-century BC, and especially after the establishment of the Eastern Roman Empire with Constantinople as its capital in the 300s, those whom we would today called Greeks self-identified as ‘Romans’ for 1500 years! Their endonym was ‘Romioi’, and when the Byzantines were conquered by the Ottomans, they did not take any Greek title, but instead referred to themselves as ‘Sultans of Rome’. Kotsonis shows how just months before this revolutionary outbreak, those who would go on to be the most passionate ‘Greeks’ had no set identity, working for Muslim or Orthodox or Catholic forces, whichever was paying the highest. The creation of a ‘Greek’ self-conception was one born in the literary salons and university offices, in far away European capitals and amongst the intellectual classes. In fact, it is through the philhellenism of the post Napoleonic elites of the great European powers that the Greek revolution got off the ground. His work shows that here, as in all nationalist movements which followed, identity is highly contingent, often performative, and built upon the appropriation of historical narrative and figures to whom it would seem quite foreign.
Kotsonis also shows how the formation of a nationalist movement is always tied to violence. The creation of a nationalist in-group requires the conceptualization of an otherized out-group. In the Greek case, that ‘Other’ was the Ottoman Turks, and all Muslims generally. This is a pattern we see repeated in every nationalist movement worldwide, with the consequence often being ethnic cleansing and genocide. We see this amongst various groups in the Yugoslav Wars, the Israel genocide of the Palestinians, the American genocides of Native American, etc. The Greek Revolution saw ethnic cleansing against Turks and other Muslim/Slavic groups which had lived peacefully alongside their ‘Greek’ Orthodox neighbors in Greece for centuries. Kotsonis demonstrates that ethno-nationalist identity building and political movements are directly tied to ethnic violence, they can not be separated. Overall this was an excellent work and the best book I’ve read so far published in 2025!
May 3, 2026
“The Greek Revolution” joins an encouraging line of recent books which dig into history without the traditional blinkers (e.g. Legacy of Violence; The Jakarta Method). Asked in an interview if he expected much push-back, he replied “Lots”! Reading a book like this gives me hope that times are changing - and because it’s digging deep into the past, it also helps us rethink what’s going on today behind the facade.
So what’s it about? Kotsonis puts a bomb under the traditional story of Christian Greeks coming together to kick out the Muslim Turks and form the first modern nation in a world dominated by old empires. And he does it by telling real stories from diverse original sources in a human way. This is not an academic book!
The story he describes is the messy detail of a region under the heal of various empires, fighting among themselves for advantage within the chaos of weak government. And not even fighting for themselves, for their home, but more often as mercenaries and pirates. History turns out to be more messy and more brutal, when you take away the convenient simplification of a fight between Greeks and Turks, Christianity and Islam.
In visits to Greece I’d read the story of Greek shipping and trade prowess, which translated into naval strength during the war of liberation. Think instead of overseas-based Greeks growing rich trading wheat from the Ukraine, with the cash to fund mercenaries. Think about seas with rampant piracy from any and every nation, filling the void left during a spell when the great-power naval focus was elsewhere.
As Kotsonis explains “Banditry was the symptom of a deep poverty that made banditry common and reasonable. The arrival of new empires gave the region more empires to choose from. The pay was good, the punishment for failure was something other than (the traditional) slavery and beheading.” And he similarly isn’t condemning the fight for the new Greek state because its creation was violent. Life was already violent, without a guarantee of security. The new Greek state created the future potential for stability, security, profits - and even rights for the downtrodden population.
Kotsonis has a nice informal style too. He’s happy to take a break from tales long past, to point out the implications for today’s Greece. He certainly doesn’t join the Europeans happy to blame the Greeks for their modern economic problems. He’s quick to point out how patronising those views are, and the culpability of the banks who loaded Greece with debt and afterwards forced austerity on everyday people.
“‘Independent’ Greece entered into a new kind of empire where small or poor states used their sovereign power to borrow, and thus surrender much of their sovereignty. Greece was showing the way to the newly independent states that covered the globe over the next two centuries and blanketed it with debt. Certain especially scandalous cases make the news – the work of vulture capitalists in Argentina, the financial debilitation of Haiti by French banks ever since Haitian independence – but the phenomenon is ongoing and ever-present.
From the moment of independence Greece accepted the burden of debt; there was no choice. The new state took responsibility for two London loans (to the independence movement) of 1824 and 1825, and this debt – useless paper really, since Greece had no way to repay it – would be used by speculators into the 1870s who ensured that Greece was banned from the capital markets. Over the years gunboats visited Greek ports to seize revenues, using the debt as a pretext and forcing one or another political concession.
And in the 2010s, loans to repay European banks came with austerity, privatisation, and control over spending, a warning to any country that might object to a new economic orthodoxy. European visitors arrived with something creepier than gunboats: iPad and tablets that monitored the implementation austerity. At times it seemed that the only thing that was sovereign about Greece was its sovereign debt.”
However, Kotsonis remains optimistic for the future in his conclusion: “Destruction and empowerment; murder and liberation; effacement and entitlement; dependence and sovereignty. The nation is problematic, to be sure, and the point of this book has not been to glorify it or make excuses. But like it or not, the nation was the vessel that carried the population into an era of popular sovereignty where it could demand more and better. Imperial power is far away; national sovereignty is next door and in every person.”
So what’s it about? Kotsonis puts a bomb under the traditional story of Christian Greeks coming together to kick out the Muslim Turks and form the first modern nation in a world dominated by old empires. And he does it by telling real stories from diverse original sources in a human way. This is not an academic book!
The story he describes is the messy detail of a region under the heal of various empires, fighting among themselves for advantage within the chaos of weak government. And not even fighting for themselves, for their home, but more often as mercenaries and pirates. History turns out to be more messy and more brutal, when you take away the convenient simplification of a fight between Greeks and Turks, Christianity and Islam.
In visits to Greece I’d read the story of Greek shipping and trade prowess, which translated into naval strength during the war of liberation. Think instead of overseas-based Greeks growing rich trading wheat from the Ukraine, with the cash to fund mercenaries. Think about seas with rampant piracy from any and every nation, filling the void left during a spell when the great-power naval focus was elsewhere.
As Kotsonis explains “Banditry was the symptom of a deep poverty that made banditry common and reasonable. The arrival of new empires gave the region more empires to choose from. The pay was good, the punishment for failure was something other than (the traditional) slavery and beheading.” And he similarly isn’t condemning the fight for the new Greek state because its creation was violent. Life was already violent, without a guarantee of security. The new Greek state created the future potential for stability, security, profits - and even rights for the downtrodden population.
Kotsonis has a nice informal style too. He’s happy to take a break from tales long past, to point out the implications for today’s Greece. He certainly doesn’t join the Europeans happy to blame the Greeks for their modern economic problems. He’s quick to point out how patronising those views are, and the culpability of the banks who loaded Greece with debt and afterwards forced austerity on everyday people.
“‘Independent’ Greece entered into a new kind of empire where small or poor states used their sovereign power to borrow, and thus surrender much of their sovereignty. Greece was showing the way to the newly independent states that covered the globe over the next two centuries and blanketed it with debt. Certain especially scandalous cases make the news – the work of vulture capitalists in Argentina, the financial debilitation of Haiti by French banks ever since Haitian independence – but the phenomenon is ongoing and ever-present.
From the moment of independence Greece accepted the burden of debt; there was no choice. The new state took responsibility for two London loans (to the independence movement) of 1824 and 1825, and this debt – useless paper really, since Greece had no way to repay it – would be used by speculators into the 1870s who ensured that Greece was banned from the capital markets. Over the years gunboats visited Greek ports to seize revenues, using the debt as a pretext and forcing one or another political concession.
And in the 2010s, loans to repay European banks came with austerity, privatisation, and control over spending, a warning to any country that might object to a new economic orthodoxy. European visitors arrived with something creepier than gunboats: iPad and tablets that monitored the implementation austerity. At times it seemed that the only thing that was sovereign about Greece was its sovereign debt.”
However, Kotsonis remains optimistic for the future in his conclusion: “Destruction and empowerment; murder and liberation; effacement and entitlement; dependence and sovereignty. The nation is problematic, to be sure, and the point of this book has not been to glorify it or make excuses. But like it or not, the nation was the vessel that carried the population into an era of popular sovereignty where it could demand more and better. Imperial power is far away; national sovereignty is next door and in every person.”
August 18, 2025
I give the author credit for doing about as good a job as possible trying to sort out all this history surrounding the creation of the modern Greek State. The story is a sad one with death, destruction, and enslavement as the end result for many Christian and Muslim people living in that part of the world. I knew little of the Ottoman Empire after 16th century, and I can see how deep the decay had become by 1821. How Greece came into being as a country with the total chaos surrounding Revolution is an interesting story that kept my attention,.
March 4, 2026
A fascinating and insightful book about the violence and exclusion inherent to the project of national identity creation. Going into this I didn’t know too much about the Greek Revolution outside the broadest of strokes. I will say that I don’t know that this is the best intro to the subject as it is more an analysis of the history than it is a chronicling of it. That said, this book really kindled my interest in the subject and provided a compelling framework not only for understanding the Greek Revolution but for understanding nationalist movements of the last two centuries generally.
April 30, 2026
Nationalism more convenient than logical
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews