Book Review
Greece Biography of a Modern Nation
by
Roderick Eaton
University of Chicago Press. 2019
Roderick Eaton is one of the finest writers of Greek history. Since the publication of this book, he has published, “The Greeks a Global History” which recounts all of Greek history going back to the classical era. This book goes back to the era preceding the War of independence.
This book is great history and is better than similar books (also good) by Christopher Woodhouse and Richard Clogg. A good deal of the book recounts Greek nationalism and the ideas preceding the uprising of 1821. The contrast between the views of Adamantios Korais and Rigos Pherais are compared.
The book does a great job in recounting the evolution of Greek politics. From the era of the Republicanism vs the Monarchy and the National schism to the Greek Civil War where the Communists filled the vacuum of the fall of Venizelism.
The author brilliantly recounts the national schism during the First World War. He properly describes the dispute between Venizelos and the King as a dispute between the nation vs the state. A very important distinction.
Also, much information is provided regarding dictator Metaxas and the later regime of the Colonels. The book makes clear these were not mass movements but regimes imposed on Greeks from the top.
Alas, these were not nationalist movements. The history in this book is not partisan but exonerates figures such as Venizelos and the great Col Nikolaos Plastiras.
Other historians have tended to misinterpret the legitimacy of Greece’s campaign in Asia Minor. But this book gets it right and even points out how close Greece came to defeating the Turks. At one point Mustafa Kemal almost threw in the towel!
Perhaps the best book available that focuses on the two hundred year history of modern Greece.
One reply on “Modern Greece”
The British ‘flipped’ in supporting the Greek campaign into Asia Minor, or the Greeks would have won. The British struck a deal with Kemal Ataturk and pulled the rug out from under the Greeks at the moment they were on the cusp of victory. A lesson to all of us on Anglo Saxon treachery-their word is not to be trusted. Not then and not today.