The fall of the Colonels’ junta seven years after its imposition in 1967 is a watershed event for Greek historiography, as it freed the country from the asphyxiating ideological and political framework of the years following the Greek civil war in the 1940s. From the mid-1970s onwards, and as a result of drawing on major international trends, historical research in Greece underwent a spectacular expansion in terms of its subject matter. This involved the adoption of theoretical approaches, techniques and methods that, although not entirely absent, had certainly been the exception within the body of domestic scholarly output until then.Footnote ¹

The polyphony of views within the community of historians over more than thirty years in post-junta Greece did not prevent the creation of specific research agendas. Each of these agendas mobilised a sufficient number of researchers to acquire – on its own or in tandem with other agendas – a dominant position within the field of historical research in Greece (see the first two sections). What is the situation today? Are there specific research agendas – either sufficiently consolidated or under development –in current research production?

A comprehensive analysis of this question is well beyond the scope of this review article. Instead, we propose a less ambitious exercise. We shall present three recent (and, in our opinion, important) books that, in their own particular ways, express common sensitivities that until now have had little impact on Greek historical research. In order to highlight the innovative elements within these works – and as a form of counterpoint – we shall give a brief overview of certain dominant elements in the field of historical production in Greece from 1974 onwards (first section).Footnote ² After presenting the three books (second section), the third and final part of the essay will draw on the preceding material to discuss a few issues that we believe could form the subject matter of fruitful research and discussion by the community of historians interested in modern Greece.

Greece and the West: the modernisation issue

A ghost hovers over a large part of post-junta Greek historical and sociological production dating from the 1970s and 1980s, namely the question of the ‘nature’ of modern Greek society in comparison to the ‘nature’ of the advanced countries of the West. We might call this the modernisation issue.Footnote ³ This theme can be seen as the common denominator in a series of studies carried out by historians and historical sociologists.Footnote ⁴ In examining different periods of modern Hellenism (i.e. from 1700 to the present), such studies have focused on various thematic areas ranging from the history of ideas to economic history and have encompassed the history of the state and its political landscape. But the roots of the issue regarding the modernisation of Greek society are to be found before the 1974 turning point. This question had already been raised by two major scholars of Greek history, Konstantinos Dimaras (1904–92) and Nikos Svoronos (1911–89), who worked in different thematic fields. Dimaras was a specialist in the Greek variants of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, while Svoronos, although a Byzantinist, was also interested in the social and economic history of modern Hellenism.Footnote ⁵ Each tackled their subject matters from a particular methodological perspective and point of departure. However, both the ‘liberal’ Dimaras and the ‘Marxist’ Svoronos were equally interested in the problem of the modernisation of Greek society, an issue that they passed on to subsequent researchers, many of whom were their students or were influenced by their work.Footnote ⁶

For present purposes, and despite a danger of generalising about analyses and positions that bear the personal stamp of their authors, we contend that a major part of the research that focuses on the modernisation issue shares the following characteristics: first, it focuses, for the most part, on the ‘macroscopic’ level of analysis (the national state in its entirety, the major sectors of economy – industry, agriculture, banking, etc.);Footnote ⁷ and, second, it is influenced by an idealised picture of ‘the West’ (a ‘West’ often taken as an undifferentiated whole or bloc). As a result of this idealisation, the evolution of Greek society often takes on the form of a history of omissions and absences, distortions and deviations. We shall now illustrate these two characteristics through a series of important (and extensively discussed) studies in three fields: the history of the Greek state and its relation to society, economic history and the history of ideas.

The Greek state and its relation to society sparked the interest of many scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, especially historical sociologists. Drawing on the then innovative work of John Petropulos, some researchers placed the concept of ‘clientelism’ (patronage) at the centre of their analyses.Footnote ⁸ According to the historical sociologist Konstantinos Tsoukalas, the lack of strong social classes (bourgeoisie and landowners) during the nineteenth century made the Greek state fertile ground for the development of the ruling class.Footnote ⁹ The latter ‘plundered’ the state and transformed its machinery into the key social mechanism for collecting and redistributing the economic surplus. It also used state resources (mostly public-sector positions) to maintain its dominance through a broad network of ‘clientelism’. As a result of the particularity of the Greek case, Tsoukalas claims that, in contrast to ‘the West’, the state apparatus in Greece has not always functioned in a rational way (according to Weberian criteria of rational bureaucracy). To support his claims Tsoukalas invokes quantitative analyses. He emphasises, for instance, what he considers the exceedingly high number of public-sector employees in Greece, or the disproportionate amount (and non-productive character) of state expenditure in relation to gross national wealth. Another historical sociologist, Nikos Mouzelis, uses the concept of patronage to analyse the process of the integration of the ‘masses’ in the country's political system. For Mouzelis, there is a sharp contrast with advanced capitalist Western societies in which this integration occurred through the emergence of class-based political parties. For the author, this contrast demonstrates once again that the Greek case is a ‘deviation’ from the Western paradigm.Footnote ¹⁰ Finally, for the historian Giorgos Dertilis, the Greek case is characterised by the relative autonomy of politics vis-à-vis social structures and conflict, an autonomy whose intensity and duration transcend the corresponding phenomena in advanced Western societies (the practices of patronage using the state apparatus were supposed to account in large part for this Greek peculiarity).Footnote ¹¹

These analyses of the Greek state and its relation to society emerged mostly from the work of sociologists and political scientists who erected their theoretical edifices on the basis of secondary accounts. But during the 1980s a new generation of economic historians studied the history of Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by drawing on primary sources.Footnote ¹² Despite differences in the subject matters, sources and emphases, the issue of modernisation was not absent from these works. Indeed, they largely focused on the question of the economic development of the country compared with the path taken by the industrialised West: ‘what were the causes of Greece's economic “underdevelopment” [compared with that of the developed West]?’ and ‘why was there no heavy industry in Greece?’ were among the most important questions asked at that time. The main approaches and tools here were once again macroscopic analyses and statistical data such as population censuses, rates of employment, the degree of mechanisation within industrial plants, wages – including gender-related pay – seasonal employment and the cost of living and purchasing power.Footnote ¹³ The analyses led to two main conclusions. First, the delay in industrialisation was the result of a limited labour market and high costs, the absence of state loans, bank strategies, a limited domestic market, and the role of domestic capital and the capital of the Greek diaspora, whose members seldom invested in industry. The second conclusion stressed the absence of a large working class in the form it took in west European countries. The explanation for this absence focused on the predominance of small-scale agricultural holdings that was strengthened by the redistribution of land by the Greek state after 1871 and after the Greek–Turkish Wars of 1912–22 – which also prevented mass migration from agricultural to urban regions.Footnote ¹⁴

The tendency to look for deviations from the Western ‘standard’ is also evident in work that belongs in the field of the history of ideas. Authors belonging to this strand of research tend to focus on the transfusion and grafting of Western ideological currents (such as Enlightenment thought, Romanticism, socialism) on to Greek society. Paschalis Kitromilidis, for instance, claims that although the Enlightenment movement found fertile ground in Greek intellectual circles, the resulting political liberalism did not become a dominant cultural tradition in Greece, despite the fact that the state that emerged after the 1821 Revolution massively adopted modern Western institutions.Footnote ¹⁵

Compared with the historical (and sociological) writing of the 1970s and 1980s, a major part of which incorporated the common issue of (problematic) ‘modernisation’, the historiography of the 1990s and the early twenty-first century is marked by a smaller degree of homogeneity as it witnessed the appearance of several new approaches and topics on the historiographical scene. These benefited to a certain degree from a process of deconstruction from within the modernisation paradigm. Thus, more recent context-sensitive studies that draw on new, more reliable quantitative evidence have questioned the claim regarding the allegedly overdeveloped (‘hypertrophic’ in Tsoukalas's terminology) state apparatus in Greece during the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, most economic historians today acknowledge that the Greek economy throughout the nineteenth century developed slowly, but in a way that allowed it to remain connected to the developed economies of that time, and in some cases to converge with them.Footnote ¹⁷ This assessment is bolstered by recent findings in international historiography (especially with regard to the nineteenth century) that stress that the existence of mechanised establishments did not constitute an indispensable condition for industrialisation and that extensive industrialisation is not a necessary condition for economic development.Footnote ¹⁸ The 1990s have also witnessed criticism of the tendency among the advocates of the paradigm of (problematic) modernisation in the 1970s and the 1980s to idealise an undifferentiated West – thus creating a kind of (positive) ‘Occidentalism’ among the Greek research communityFootnote ¹⁹ – and to highlight the various ‘delays’ and ‘absences’ in Greek society by using not the actual Western societies as a yardstick but representations thereof.Footnote ²⁰

From structures to agency: three recent books

The three books presented in this review essay belong to this new and more heterogeneous Greek historiographical production that emerged from 1990 onwards. Despite differences in their subject matters, the books share certain characteristics that make them conducive to a joint presentation and discussion. First, in contrast to the majority of works that focus on the history of the Greek state and economy, that adopt macroscopic approaches and mostly highlight structures, these three studies accord a central position to the historical actors themselves (as agents of historical change) and to the constitution of their social identities.Footnote ²¹ Second, none of the three authors abandons the issue of the modernisation of Greek society, which they examine (albeit arguably as a secondary issue) through the actions of the various actors that figure in their analyses.Footnote ²²

Evi Avdela's book ‘Dia logous timis’: via, synaisthimata kai axies sti metemfyliaki Ellada (‘For reasons of honour’: violence, emotions and values in post civil-war Greece) concerns the 1950s and 1960s and examines the crimes and interpersonal violence committed by people (male or female) who invoke personal or family honour to justify their acts.Footnote ²³ This is not the first time Avdela has examined gender-related issues, a field she has represented consistently in Greece since at least the beginning of the 1980s.Footnote ²⁴ In fact, her personal journey as a historian incorporates a large part of the changes in Greek historiography (such as the shift from structures to agency) from 1975 onwards. Indeed, Avdela is also the author of a work of reference on the sexual division of labour in the public sector in Greece during the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁵ Although the issue of the social identity and life experience of employees is not completely absent from the work (see, e.g., pp. 205–35), this study is, in accordance with the dominant historiographical standards of the time, underpinned mostly by statistical data (number of employees, career patterns and so on) and by an analysis of the related institutional framework. In Avdela's new book, numbers are rare if not completely absent. Instead, they are replaced by meanings. If the author infers from her databaseFootnote ²⁶ certain quantitative conclusions concerning the development of the phenomenon over time – ‘honour crimes’ witnessed a surge in the 1950s, marked by the violence of the civil war of the previous decade, while the 1960s witnessed a significant reduction as they largely disappeared in the years leading up to the Junta (p. 19) – the study ‘belongs less to the history of “criminality” and more to a historical investigation of the way in which the meaning that people attribute to their behaviour and the behaviour of others is constructed and transformed’ (p. 27). By highlighting the issue of ‘honour’ and its role in behaviour (more specifically in violent acts), the author weaves a debate with classic anthropological studies focusing on Greece in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, these had regarded the concept of honour (to which they attributed a gendered character) as an organizing principle of social relations in Greece.Footnote ²⁷ Yet at the same time Avdela is a historian writing after the ‘cultural turn’ and the ‘linguistic turn’. As a result, in the author's opinion, the ‘content of the code of honour is not static’ (p. 28) and does not characterise a specific cultural region (the Mediterranean basin, for instance) (p. 27), ‘but is determined by the historical social and cultural context while it undergoes transformations in time and in function of the social group that invokes it’ (p. 28). By drawing from the body of international literature on the topic, the author claims that honour is not merely a social value but is ‘identified with emotion’, an ‘emotion that is historically and culturally determined’ (p. 29). Finally, given that emotion is, according to the author, a ‘mental construct that is born in the field of social interaction’, it does not exist ‘independently from its articulation’ and ‘assumes a meaning and validity only after it has been carried out in the public field of discourse’ (p. 29).

Following her theoretical premises, the author organises her archival material (judicial archives, newspapers, magazines, along with contemporary legal, anthropological and sociological texts) into four chapters. These take the reader from the perspective of the protagonists of each individual ‘melodrama’ to a series of ‘official’ discourses regarding ‘honour crimes’. In the first chapter, using newspaper records of ‘honour crimes’, the author engages in a systematic presentation and analysis of the ‘rhetorical devices’ (such as ‘she led a dissolute life’, ‘he corrupted her’, ‘red-handed’) that correspond to the various ‘cultural scenarios’ of ‘honour crimes’ – that is, the reasons invoked by the perpetrators of homicides and serious bodily harm to justify their actions (p. 42).Footnote ²⁸ In the second chapter, the protagonists are the multiple ‘surroundings’ (village, neighbourhood or professional milieu) that underlie and justify the attitudes, behaviour and motives of those involved in ‘honour crimes’. Based mostly on the testimonies of trial witnesses concerning the ‘nature’ (the ‘moral’ quality) of those involved in the ‘honour crime’ – a ‘nature’ that is often expressed through stereotypical characterisations such as ‘decent and hard-working’ for men and, ‘morally upright and a good housewife’ for women – Avdela uses the individual ‘crime stories’ to highlight ‘broader conceptions on social relationships, the family, gender relations, moral standing and decency’ (p. 97) in post-civil war Greece. In the third chapter, the author turns her attention to the institutional actors at each trial: the prosecutors, the judges and the jury and their often antagonistic relations. By drawing her material mostly from legal journals and general content magazines, the author analyses the process through which lawyers, judges, criminologists and journalists have come to question the traditional code of honour – a family-based code that transforms any insult to any family member into an insult to its representatives in the public sphere: father, siblings and so on – invoked by perpetrators to justify their violent behaviour, as an anachronistic residue of a parochial era that does not befit a progressively more modernised (and ‘individualistic’) country. In this context, the attitudes and verdicts of jurors are gradually deemed as being too lenient towards the perpetrators. As a result of this criticism, the role of trial juries was curtailed during the 21 April Dictatorship (1967), which also changed the jury system of criminal law to a mixed court system. The final chapter sheds light on another category of ‘official’ discourse regarding ‘honour’. Avdela analyses the Greek legal and scholarly debate that accompanied the validation of the New Penal Code of 1950, particularly the section that focused on so-called ‘crimes against honour’ (revilement, slander, defamation), as well as the scientific discourse of sociologists, anthropologists and social psychologists investigating the value system of Greek society and its transformation between 1950 and 1970. In doing so, the author is not so much interested in the truth-value of these analyses; by adopting a Foucauldian perspective (scientific discourse creates a web of power relations), Avdela treats these discourses as historical narratives that bear the stamp of their era and will lead to the construction of strong and resistant representations regarding the specificity of Greek society – representations that are still at play in many analyses of contemporary Greece.

All these discourses contributed to the complete delegitimisation of the traditional concept of honour. For the author, this demotion of the concept of honour and its dissociation from interpersonal violence represents a process that came from above, from the state's representatives and from the intellectual elite who tried to promote an ‘authoritarian modernisation’Footnote ²⁹ in post-civil war Greece, for the purpose of controlling social conflict and regulating violence at both political and family level. At the same time, this undermining from above was met and bolstered by other processes from below that were less systematic and controlled, in the context of the major changes that affected Greece in the 1950s and the 1960s, especially regarding the family and social relations with the new (and progressively Westernized) urban conditions of the period (at this stage, the author could have provided some clues as to these developments in the case of Greece). In order to bolster her analysis of the delegitimisation process of the traditional (and family-centred) concept of honour, Avdela broadens her frame of reference and draws on Greek songs and film of the 1960s. The author feels that film in particular captured many of the changes in post-civil war Greece: deconstruction of the old hierarchical relationships in the public and private spheres, presentation of new and perhaps contradictory ideals of manhood, presentation of non-conventional female behaviour that a decade before would have been deemed socially unacceptable.

Kostas Fountanopoulos's Ergasia kai ergatiko kinima sti Thessaloniki, 1908–1936. Ithiki oikonomia kai syllogiki drasi sto Mesopolemo (Work and the labour movement in Thessalonica, 1908–1936: moral economy and collective action during the inter-war period) is a study of the labour movement in the city of Thessalonica during one of the more dramatic periods in the movement's history. Although they address different themes, Fountanopoulos and Avdela overlap on a number of issues. The question of the modernisation of Greek society from above is tackled in both books, and gender also plays a key role in the analyses offered by the two historians (moreover, on a number of occasions, Fountanopoulos actually casts a critical eye on Avdela's workFootnote ³⁰). Last but not least, the identity issue also straddles the two books.

Fountanopoulos's book, like Avdela's work, is the result of theoretically informed empirical research. On several occasions the author explicitly discusses questions of a methodological and theoretical nature and refers to the theses of a number of authors (without always convincing the reader of the relevance of the authors being quotedFootnote ³¹). Of all the authors referred to by Fountanopoulos, one in particular has pride of place: E. P. Thompson, who coined the celebrated expression ‘the moral economy’,Footnote ³² which Fountanopoulos actually puts on the cover of his book. It is the author's determination to restore subjectivity to the subjects that he studies, namely their system of beliefs and values (pp. 17–18). This aspect undoubtedly lends originality to his work within the body of historiographical production dealing with Greek workers, which is largely focused on the objective conditions of the working class (such as economic and social factors).Footnote ³³

Drawing inspiration from Thompson, Fountanopoulos considers working-class consciousness as a dynamic process of construction whose analysis involves three interacting levels, which the author terms ‘empirical’, ‘cultural’ and ‘symbolic’ (pp. 389–90). The division of labour into production sites, government policy, the attitude of employers to their employees, union employment policies, economic conditions, and individual and collective worker survival strategies all relate to the empirical level of class identity. The ‘cultural level’ essentially concerns what Thompson calls the ‘moral economy’, namely conceptions rooted in cultural traditions of how workers view their work and how work should be exercised and distributed in society. Finally, the third level, which embodies the lessons of the ‘linguistic turn’,Footnote ³⁴ concerns the various symbolic practices (including discursive practices) whereby the working class gives meaning to and represents its experiences and which help to forge a sense of group unity. In particular, this level includes the vocabulary and arguments used by workers in their confrontations with other groups such as bosses and various representatives of the state.

Fountanopoulos uses this theoretical prism to interpret the multi-ethnic labour movement – with the tobacco workers at its vanguard – in Thessalonica in the inter-war period.Footnote ³⁵ In the first part, the author contends that until the late 1920s at least, social antagonism between workers and employers mainly related to control of work process at production sites as well as to the definition of the modus operandi of the labour market. In the author's view, while employers essentially saw the work process in terms of hard economics (keeping production costs down), for workers – and particularly the most skilled among them – the manner in which they perceived work-related issues was a function of their own specific ‘moral economy’. The author claims that this consisted of three separate components: first, the absence of a clear separation between ‘work’ and ‘outside work’ (the only thing that counts in the workers’ opinion is the end product); second, the family-oriented nature of work (presence of all family members on the shop floor); and third a division of labour following a gender-based pattern.

After identifying the ‘moral economy’ of the workers of Thessalonica, the author looks at their collective forms of action over this period (strikes, street protests and union organisation). He contends that the strikes of the 1914–28 period were principally aimed at controlling the work process (as a means of tackling unemployment among other things) and were generally triggered when employers tried to change the existing rules of the game. Conversely, labour unrest between 1929 and 1936, when the dictator Ioannis Metaxas (1871–1941) came to power, was mainly caused by the economic crisis of the 1930s and the problem of unemployment. Labour-movement strategy during this period was targeted less on employers and more on the state. According to the workers’ ‘moral economy’, it was the state's responsibility to provide acceptable living standards for its citizens, by protecting them from increases in the prices of subsistence goods fuelled by speculation, for example. The author makes a series of comments concerning the specific features of collective action during this period (which, as Fountanopoulos reminds us, often triggered state-sponsored violence that has now been largely forgotten).Footnote ³⁶ Thus between 1914 and 1928, and more particularly during the 1922–28 period marked by the massive arrival of Greeks from Asia Minor and the exodus of the Turkish community, the strikes, which were designed to send a strong message to employers, were especially long. They reached their annual maximal intensity at a time when, from a labour-market perspective, the bargaining power of employers was considerably diminished. Conversely, strikes over the 1929–36 period were considerably shorter and fragmented over time as the purpose was mainly to send a strong political message to the state.

Thanks to his analysis of the labour-movement actions in inter-war Thessalonica, Fountanopoulos concludes that strikes are not merely an automatic result of established class consciousness but an activity whereby workers forge their identities through confrontation with other groups: the author contends that it is not union activity that causes strikes, but strikes that facilitate and encourage union activism (which was particularly intense in Thessalonica during this period.)Footnote ³⁷ However, although very important, collective mobilisation is not enough in itself to forge a collective identity. As such, the role of language and an intellectual framework through which the working class perceives itself and gives a sense to its work experiences and struggles is also decisive. Fountanopoulos analyses the rhetoric used by the workers of the city to back up their claims. Both they and their union representatives happily invoked the principles enshrined in the bourgeois country's Constitution of time in order to thwart the action of the representatives of the state. Or they harked back to a past that they had in common with their adversaries. Consequently, the battle appeared to be waged more around gestures of ‘appropriation’ and a strategy of using the adversary's ideology against him than a frontal opposition between conflicting ideological systems.Footnote ³⁸

Thus, Fountanopoulos's book tackles a series of important and – within the Greek historiographical context – frequently original questions, and offers a number of answers based on the inter-war labour movement in Thessalonica. It is obligatory reading for any historian interested in the Greek labour movement as well as in the social history of the country in general. Nonetheless, as it covers a relatively long period (1908–36), adopts a broad perspective on the working community – from small production units to ‘large’ factories – and addresses a broad range of subjects affecting the city's working population, from the organisation of labour to different forms of collective protest: strikes, union action, street protests and the rhetoric employed by the labour movement, we believe that the book tackles some issues less successfully than others. So, for example, while the work process is accorded its due importance in understanding worker behaviour, the description of how work is organised in various different sectors is not as thorough as we may have wished (here we regret the absence of corporate archives as a source of information).Footnote ³⁹ And, in the same vein, while Fountanopoulos's theoretical model stresses the importance of the adversary (employers, but also the state) for forging a working-class identity, his description of these actors in interaction with the labour movement is relatively simplistic. For example, who exactly were these representatives of the Greek state (works inspectors as well as other central government officials in Thessalonica, such as the chief of police) whose modernising zeal, in the author's opinion, frequently prevented them from fully understanding worker attitudes?

Among the many merits of Giannis Antoniou's book Oi Ellines michanikoi. Thesmoi & Idees, 1900–1940 (Greek engineers: institutions and ideas, 1900–1940) is its focus on Greek engineers as a particular group of Greek modernisers. Avdela and Fountanopoulos evoke in their books other groups of modernisers (such as judges, journalists or factory inspectors), but do not make them the central focus of their work. Antoniou's book is currently also the only work devoted entirely to this professional group: up to now, Greek historians and sociologists have largely neglected the groups comprising the country's economic and social elite.Footnote ⁴⁰

The general subject matter of Antoniou's book is the national identity of Greek engineers, mainly during the inter-war era, although the period between the creation of the Greek state in 1832 to the beginning of the twentieth century is covered in a less detailed fashion in chapter 2. The author investigates both the ‘objective’ dimensions (demography, education, sectors of activity and the profession's organisational structure) and the corresponding ‘subjective’ dimensions of this identity, as they were formed through a spectrum of ideological representations of the role of Greek engineers and the profession's prospects in the country. By drawing on a multitude of sources (training institute archives, the technical press of the time, etc.), the book narrates the ‘success story’ of the ‘professionalisation’ of Greek engineers (although we feel that the author could here have made more use of the resources of the sociology of professions).

By the mid-nineteenth century, Greece counted just a few dozen engineers. They were mostly members of the army engineering corps (founded in 1829), but were used in all kinds of tasks and assignments carried out by central government authorities (such as roads, hydraulic and marine engineering works, city planning and public building projects). At that time, the Military School, founded in 1828, was the sole engineering training institute in Greece.Footnote ⁴¹ Less than one hundred years later, in 1941, the profession numbered about 3,000 (half of whom were civil engineers) (p. 307). Just as in the nineteenth century, the state was again the main employer of Greek engineers, through large public works projects. In fact, in 1934, about 43 per cent of engineers worked for the State – many in the Ministry of Transportation which was set up in 1914 – and for local government, 26 per cent worked on a freelance basis and only 4.5 per cent worked in industry (pp. 313–314).Footnote ⁴² And although one-third of these graduated from foreign technical schools (p. 308), the professional community already had its alma mater, the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). The origins of this school date from 1837, when the Polytechnic School of Athens was established as a Sunday school for training workers and foremen in building techniques. In 1914–17, NTUA became the academic equal of the University of Athens, and between 1915 and 1940 about 2,000 engineers graduated from it (including the first sixteen female engineersFootnote ⁴³) (pp. 245–6), most of them of upper- and upper-middle-class origin; between 1929 and 1937, only 1.5 per cent of graduates came from a working-class background (p. 253). With the creation in 1923 of the Technical Chamber of Greece, a corporatist organisation where membership was obligatory and the profession's sole and exclusive representative, the engineering profession gained further momentum. Moreover, the Technical Chamber was the official technical consultant to the Greek state. The establishment of the Chamber paved the way for the official ‘closure’ of the profession at the beginning of the 1930s, thus securing it an elite social identity which has held fast in spite of the continual swelling of its ranks since the mid-nineteenth century.

The section that deals with the subjective components of Greek engineers’ identities proves to be the most interesting part of Antoniou's book.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his final chapter the author analyses the specific dominant ideological currents reflected in the public discourse of engineers during the inter-war era. During the early 1920s the profession laid claim to a hegemonic role for itself in the name of applied science and the ideology of rationalisation. Over the next decade, Greek engineers who continued to subscribe to ideas of rationalisation embarked on a quest for other ideologies to underpin their specific identity. Between 1931 and 1936, Nikolaos Kitsikis (1887–1978, re-elected unanimously as president of the Technical Chamber over a long period, professor at the NTUA and a deputy of the United Democratic Left after the Second World War) spoke passionately of the necessity of creating a ‘technical state’ run by engineers and other scientists. The suspension of parliament in 1936 by Ioannis Metaxas brought an end to the brief technocratic ‘revolt’ of Greek engineers, who were to produce a Greek version of reactionary modernism during the 1936–40 period, subordinating the technocratic ideal to the official ideology of the dictatorship (an ideological construct involving the idea of a linear continuity between ancient Greece, Byzantium and Christian Orthodoxy, and the modern Greek nation-state).Footnote ⁴⁵ Thanks to the author's research – which we can associate with another recent study on the reception given to the ‘technocratic ideal’ by other sections of Greek society – the intellectual and political landscape during the inter-war period appears richer than that previously depicted by existing research, which focused on the great clashes between monarchists and Venizelists (after the Greek politician Eleftherios Kyriákou Venizelos, 1864–1936), or between the communists and the bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁴⁶

Antoniou's book is the first major work devoted to Greek engineers over the 1832–1940 period and calls for further study. For example, although the main activities in which Greek engineers were involved have been identified by the author, a systematic assessment of their actions within each field requires further work. Similarly, although it is now well established that the Greek engineering community never lost touch with what was happening in advanced Western countries, the actual manner in which they imported foreign experience into the areas of training, practice, professional organisation or ideology, and assimilated, reinterpreted and adapted these in the Greek context also requires further work. And, as we wait for such research to be carried out, we can only praise Antoniou's book which, apart from its solid depiction of the Greek engineering world, also has the merit of helping to deconstruct a number of stereotypes concerning Greece during the inter-war period.

A plea for more comparisons and ‘cross-national’ histories

In concluding this review essay, we should like to present several more personal reflections that lie at the juncture of the books reviewed here and our own current research preoccupations. We have seen how several Greek historians and historical sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s began comparing – either explicitly or as a sort of backdrop – the trajectory of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece with that of the developed West and outlined a whole range of absences and distortions concerning the Greek case. But we have also seen how more recent studies – sometimes carried out by the same researchers, but later in their careers – questioned these differences by contributing new (and more reliable) empirical data and by highlighting certain biases that made some of the findings based on the initial comparisons just a little tenuous.

Despite the problems with these early works that attempted to compare modern Greece with the developed West, we still feel that comparison remains an essential tool for gaining a better understanding of Greek history.Footnote ⁴⁷ The three works discussed here, which remain essentially Helleno-centric, may help us to push the comparison process further and to broaden the scope of comparison. First, we are not obliged to compare Greece with Western countries only.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nor do comparisons have to be confined to the national macro-level or to overarching social and economic structures. ‘Contrasting’ (as opposed to ‘unifying’) comparisons – that is, those comparisons that seek and explain differences – need not be the sole objective of comparative analysis.Footnote ⁴⁹ Lastly, it is possible for the units of comparison to be of a very diverse nature and straddle several spatial and temporal ‘scales’.Footnote ⁵⁰ With regard to the topics of the three books discussed here, we could imagine, for example, comparative studies of the labour movement in different cities (Greek and non-Greek); of the professionalisation of the engineering communities in Greece and elsewhere; or an analysis of temporally circumscribed phenomena such as a civil war and its aftermath.Footnote ⁵¹ Including meso- and micro- levels in comparative historical analysis offers the opportunity to obtain more context-sensitive analyses as well as taking into account the perspectives of those who actually experienced and took part in the particular phenomena under comparison. In particular, we note that the realm of ideas, meanings and behaviour can actually constitute the object of comparative analysis: take a study of ‘honour crimes’ and their development in various urban contexts, for example.

The three works analysed here also encourage us to envisage for Greece in the twentieth century what one might call a cross-national kind of history that would sit alongside or work in tandem with a comparative approach stricto sensu.Footnote ⁵² Such an approach would put the emphasis on the links of interdependence and the interactions existing between Greek and non-Greek entities to be studied together within larger entities that transcend national borders.Footnote ⁵³ For example, through which channels did the different versions of the technocratic ideal, which was clearly a transnational reality in the inter-war period, arrive and take root in Greece? What sort of relations did the Greek ‘modernisers’ who figure in the works by Fountanopoulos, Avdela and Antoniou have with the ‘modernisers’ of other nations?

Not least, we should note that by circumscribing the Greek case in a tight network of comparisons and placing it in a larger space in which different kinds of circulations (of men, ideas, objects, institutions) are at work, we may hope that in addition to improving our understanding of the history of modern Greece, Greek historiography will actually be able to conduct a more effective dialogue with other national historiographies around transnational topics.Footnote ⁵⁴