Yanni Kotsonis on The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism

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.

What’s the big idea of this book??

YK: The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism is about how the world took its current form by organizing into nations. Nations are new, maybe only 200 years old, and some people had to do things to bring them about. Nationalists re-ordered the old empires to produce one or another homogeneity. They overthrew the monarchies to introduce one or another popular sovereignty. This can happen gradually over the course of decades, or suddenly in a violent upheaval, or both. This book is about the first nationalist revolution, the Greek one. It is about the gradual emergence of a nation in one part of the Ottoman Empire before 1821, the pounding of a nation into existence over the next 10 years of total war, and the disappearance of Islam from the new state.?

Seems the overthrow of the empires was unfortunate??

YK:?There’s a lot of nostalgia about the empires, but empires were not happy places. They stood in the way of popular sovereignty for some or even all their subjects. They denied rights on a massive scale. They were bloody. Before the Greek Revolution, for example, the empires fought a global war for about 20 years, the Napoleonic Wars. Some regions were subjected to shocking violence. Think Spain and the Vendée. Some campaigns were wars of near extermination, like Haiti. Most of the future Greeks lived in the Ottoman Empire, and it was the site of daily violence and insecurity. The nationalist revolution in Greece was to put a final, violent end to the insecurity. It removed the Ottoman order but also the Muslims altogether.?

But was the cost of a nation too high in terms of human life??

YK:?How do we measure imperial violence against national violence? I can say that they were different. Nations are necessarily coercive in one way or another. They force a new form of human community into being, often at the expense of another human community. Nations are total, their violence is total, they create outsiders and total enemies. But like it or not, the nation is the form that the world has taken, and it was the vessel of popular sovereignty. It’s how we’ve secured our rights: education, political voice, legal equality, security, and in some places food, shelter, and healthcare. I wonder whether these national rights can become human rights, which is where they started in the Enlightenment before the rise of nations. The nation is not going away, but I’d like this book to be a reminder: Human action produced one kind of nation and it can produce another.?

I gather this is a broad, macro sweep.?

YK:?It’s lots of human stories strung into a large story. It had to begin with the small scale because of the nature of the subject. There was no place called Greece in 1821, no Greek state, and no state archives. So, it took scouring the old imperial spaces for their archives and publications: Ottoman, French, British, Swiss, Venetian, Russian, and Greek. There I found all sorts of people who would later be called Greek, but before the Revolution they were imperial subjects. I can watch some of them become Greek, others opt for the empires. It had a lot to do with individual circumstances and choices, and I tell those individual stories. It tells us that there is no straight line to the nation, that the nation was not the obvious choice in a world of empires.?

In the story of nationalist movements, what’s special about Greece??

YK:?It was prototypical. It was a nation that claimed to be exceptional, as all later nations would do. The Greek revolutionaries claimed a unique origin story in Classical Greece and could claim to be the source of organized Christianity in Byzantium. In other words, they claimed to be ancient and pre-existing. In fact, the Greeks produced something that was not old at all. The nation was new, tracing to around 1800, and it took hold very quickly.?

That sounds like a gradual process. Why the violence??

YK:?The revolutionaries took a complex demographic of religions and dialects and localities and produced a simple binary: the Greeks and the Turks. It’s fascinating to see it happen, and it truly was revolutionary. They hurled at each other in a shockingly violent decade. It probably killed off about a quarter of the population of what became independent Greece. This is what made the Greek Revolution a demographic revolution, first and foremost. And then this model spread. The model traveled up the Balkans to create largely Christian states, across the Ottoman space to produce the Middle Eastern states and republican Turkey as mainly Muslim peoples. Of course, they all claimed to be unique and exceptional. And then it spread across the world.?

There have been other histories of the Greek Revolution. What’s different about this one??

YK:?It’s a global history told through the traveling Greeks of the many empires. The future Greeks were multilingual imperial creatures. They were embedded in the commercial routes and strategic throughways. We go from Haiti to the Peloponnese, St. Petersburg to Marseille to Corfu, Mariupol to Alexandria to Geneva to London. What became Greece was a crossroads of five empires. To explain how many of them became Greek nationals, I show the revolution as a massive demographic reordering, not just an overthrow of a regime. It penetrated the last household and the last person. I treat the Muslims of the region as indigenous, not alien, and consider them as part of Greek and European heritage that we should recover. It makes for a Greece that is more interesting and textured. The bland heroic stories that we were taught in school are frankly boring.?

Did you have any surprises??

YK:?Yes, the role of Russia which was largely unwitting. In Russia, or what is mainly Ukraine today around the Black Sea, waves of migrants came for careers and wealth. They grew rich on the trade in Russian wheat. These Greeks of Russia financed a blossoming of Greek culture and the Revolution itself. Arguably Greek nationalism was incubated in Russia and exported to what became Greece along with the wheat, but the Russians did not know it. The tsar disavowed the Revolution when it broke out. And then, paradoxically, Russia secured Greek independence and opened a Pandora’s box, nationalism.?

Do you expect pushback??

YK:?Lots.

About the Author

Yanni Kotsonis is professor of history and founding director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. He is the author of States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic and Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914.