090112 VO The Beginnings of the Modern Greek State, 1830 - 1870 (2015W)

As Greece is once again coming to the forefront of a European crisis, this course proposes to go back to the beginnings of the Modern Greek state, in the period from the Restoration following the Napoleonic Wars until the rise of the era of nationalisms. During that period, the fates of the small kingdom on the southern edge of the Balkan peninsula, comprising less than half of the Greek territories of today, were linked to the so-called Eastern Question, that is the antagonism between the Great Powers for spheres of influence in the countries and territories belonging to the “sick man of Europe”, the declining Ottoman Empire.
A Bavarian bureaucracy that accompanied King Otto on his investment as King of the Greeks in 1833 first put the state apparatus of the newborn Kingdom of Greece together. As the main part of the Greek-orthodox populations of the Empire still remained beyond the borders of the state, the formation of the new state and its transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy after 1844, was marked by the tensions between autochthones (natives) - veterans of the war of independence and people born within the limits of the Greek State and heterochthones (non-natives) - those who were born and educated abroad. Taking into account the complex demography of a nation composed by various ethnic groups, we will revisit the formation of the Greek State as a joint Nation- and State-building process. Within the changing context of European cultural and political geographies, the creation of institutions of a modern state on pre-modern social and cultural foundations together with the precarious geopolitical position of the country, made for a constitutive ambivalence in the identity of the new nation, between East and West.
The course will cover subjects such as the dialectics of public debt and the subsequent defaults of payments; the formation of the legal field and the history of competing economies of violence (between law enforcement agents, pirates and bandits); the making of a national education system and the emergence of national historiography during the period under consideration.