Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize * One of The Economist's top
history books of the year From one of our leading historians, an
important new history of the Greek War of Independence-the ultimate
worldwide liberal cause celebre of the age of Byron, Europe's first
nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of
the Ottoman Empire-published two hundred years after its outbreak
As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new
account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the
facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an
unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of
Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied
empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all
the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans
embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring
of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against
the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was
Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the
nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord
Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece
to fight and die-along with many more who followed events
passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and
humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to
find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious
forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans.
Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a
revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a
fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and
then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic
cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time
the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever.
It was a victory for a completely new kind of
politics-international in its range and affiliations, popular in
its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It
was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful
revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for
themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it,
transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European
politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states,
the world in which we still live.
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