The period of their 3500-year-long recorded history that Greeks still routinely call the Tourkokratia remains one of the least documented and least understood. Some scholars have tackled it through the institutional history of the Orthodox Church, others through the piecemeal stories of particular communities, through the evolution of the Greek language, through close reading of the works of the ‘Greek Enlightenment’, or (increasingly in recent years) from the perspective afforded by Ottoman sources. Petros Pizanias, a social historian writing in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, sets out to explain the Making of the Modern Greeks through a rigorously theoretical bottom-up approach.
‘The inside history of the Greek peasant and pastoralist populations remains to be written’, the author concedes in his epilogue (p. 476). But no one can say that he hasn't tried. And where these ultimate actors remain, unavoidably, consigned ‘to the status of silent, if not invisible, history’, P. has done his best with the nearest proxies he can find: wills, contracts and other legal documents, prosopographical data culled from an ongoing collaborative project, written evidence drawn from often obscure publications from earlier periods, as well as more familiar sources associated with the ‘Greek Enlightenment’. All this is accompanied by a great deal of methodological admonition addressed to the ‘dear reader’, but directed more broadly against what the author repeatedly terms the ‘irrationalism’ of Greek historians, mostly unnamed, from the nineteenth century to today.
The attempt to create a truly ‘bottom-up’ history of the Greeks during this period is admirable, even if the aim is probably unachievable. So too is P.'s determination to account for the creation of a Greek nation-state in the 1820s through a systematic examination of the conflicting local agendas and differentiated social classes that made up the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian population of the Ottoman empire during the preceding four centuries. At the very least, such an approach might be expected to engage in a meaningful way with a significant body of scholarship pioneered by C.Th. Dimaras and continued by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and others, which focuses on the highly educated individuals who made up the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ (Myrogiannis Reference Myrogiannis2012; Kitromilides Reference Kitromilides2013).
Disappointingly, on this and many other issues, P. eschews dialogue with those whose opinions or approach differ from his own. His accounts of the major figures of the Enlightenment are avowedly biographical, and not based on any close reading of what they wrote. He cites chilling evidence of how several of them were browbeaten by the authorities of the Orthodox Church. But is this sufficient basis to conclude that enlightenment and the spread of education were in constant conflict with the Orthodox hierarchy throughout the eighteenth century? The opposite has been strenuously argued by Kitromilides (Reference Kitromilides2019: 9, 12, 21, 29, 44), in nuanced studies published over many years. In the absence of reasoned argument or debate, the reader is simply forced to choose between starkly divergent selections and interpretations of the available evidence.
For all his insistence on methodological purity, P. is not without biases of his own. His animus against the Orthodox Church (accused of running a ‘dual theocracy’, in tandem with the Ottoman state) and the Phanariots as a class is pervasive – and in a revealing aside is grounded in the intemperately stated opinion of the author of the anonymous manifesto Hellenic Nomarchy, published in 1806 (p. 180). Have we not moved on since then? And P.'s insistence, in the book's peroration, that the ‘conception, action, goals and legitimacy’ of the Greek Revolution ‘were completely secular’ (p. 467) flies in the face of everything that we know (or think we know) about the loyalties and motivation of the great majority of those Greeks who took part in it.
Perhaps the biggest question facing the historian of this period is: how, when, and why did a significant number of Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire begin to think of themselves no longer as ‘Romans’ (Ρωμαίοι or Ρωμιοί) but to revive, instead, the ancient name of ‘Hellenes’? With the change of name came a sense of identity that, as P. persuasively argues, ‘differentiated’ them from the social and political structures of the empire to which they were subject. But the few instances he can adduce of ordinary Greeks defining themselves as ‘Hellenes’ before about 1780 add up to much less than a movement (pp. 188–90). Before that date, adoption of the term ‘Hellene’ seems negligible in scale when set alongside the emergence and partial emancipation of Greek traders, entrepreneurs, landowners, tax-farmers, shipowners and (in Roumeli) militias, which together make up by far the most important theme of this book.
All these groups were able to carve out spaces for themselves within (and potentially against) the Ottoman system without needing, for the most part, to invoke the Hellenic past until very late in the day. As P. himself observes, the shipowners of Spetses started giving their ships ancient names in the 1780s – but not before (p. 443). What Alexis Politis (Reference Politis, Ricks and Magdalino1998: 8) has termed ‘the Hellenizing of the Romioi’ is a phenomenon of the last decade of the eighteenth century. Not least on the evidence provided by P., this development followed long after the social changes that are so meticulously documented here. That leaves the question unresolved: why, when the time came, did Greek emancipation take the particular form that it did in the 1820s?
