The Greek Revolution
1821 and the Making of Modern Europe
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize • One of The Economist's top history books of the year
From one of our leading historians, the definitive history of the Greek War of Independence
The Greek War of Independence was an unlikely cause, 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.
Mazower does full justice to the more complicated reality on the ground, as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory fora completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in its sentiments, and radical in its goals. The Greek War of Independence was the first war in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stirring aspirations accompany a squalid reality in this sweeping history of Greece's 1821 war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. Columbia University history professor Mazower (What You Did Not Tell) recounts the revolution's inception among Greek emigrés with an idealistic dream of Hellenic nationalism and its actuality as a murky, eight-year struggle fought mainly by peasants and warlords who were motivated less by patriotism than by religious hatred of Muslims, factional vendettas, and mercenary self-interest. Greek military leaders collaborated with the Ottomans when convenient, Mazower notes, while the Greek navy often descended into piracy. Mazower's narrative has heroism and grit—especially during the epic siege of the western Greek town of Mesolonghi, which captivated Europe by holding out against a large Ottoman army—along with disunion, treachery, and horrifying atrocities on both sides. His lucid, elegantly written, and often gripping account of the chaos contains hopeful developments, including the fitful growth of a constitutional Greek government and the rise of a geopolitics of national self-determination and international humanitarian intervention that led to the break-up of European empires into independent nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Broad in scope and colorful in detail, this is a masterful portrait of a historic watershed.
