In Europe, a nation’s birth was typically conceived as a rebirth.
Clocks were restarted at ‘Year One’, and yet people had to be ‘reawakened’.1 Either way, the moment of birth/ rebirth was meant to signify the disavowal of the pre-existing order.
Such was the case with the nation’s ‘moment’ in 1918. The new nation-states that were constituted in the wake of the First World War were carved out of empires that had long been regarded as anachronisms, in part because of the persistence of feudal power structures, but also on account of being multi-ethnic. None of the post-Ottoman or post-Habsburg regimes saw any value in developing discourses of continuity between empire and nation. Even the Austrians, Hungarians and Turks, ‘ruling’ peoples under the old regime, were prepared to ‘forget’ empire for it relieved them of the ‘burdens’ of multi-ethnicity, which was perceived at the time as a weakness.Until relatively recently, mainstream historians of the twentieth century also treated the land-based ‘traditional’ empires in a similarly dismissive manner. As captives of teleological conceptions of historical change that anticipated a modern world order constituted of nation-states, historians tended to work with the assumption that old regimes (political, social) were merely recalcitrant agents that were destined for historical irrelevance.2 Those high-dynastic feudal regimes, the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans, were too tradition-bound, obsolete and inept to have contributed in a creative sense to the making of the modern world. Modernisation was thought to have occurred despite and against these old regime empires. To be sure, since the mid-1990s there has been a noticeable shift in approach. Such empires were, after all, ‘hardy beasts’ that dominated the world for the last three thousand years,3 hence their role in the making of the succeeding modern world was much more complex than previously thought.
Charles Tilly foreshadowed a fruitful future in the study of empire and nations because the decline of the former and the rise of the latter were mutually involved processes: ‘because all nations resist subordination where they can, because empires actually create nationalities, and/or because as imperial disintegration begins outside powers promote separatism on the part of imperial subjects’.4There are signs that post-Ottoman historiographies are moving in this direction too.5 Traditionally, the national historiographies of the region (Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, Serbia) had depicted the Ottomans as the evil half of a Manichaean struggle, and as a result each nation adhered to narratives of Ottoman rule that were quite similar. Thus in each case, the moment of national emancipation has been read, as Maria Todorova puts it, as ‘the negation of this past’.6 Much was made of the Ottomans as Asiatic and Muslim interlopers, aliens whose presence and influence was cruel and detrimental to any prospect of progress. For that reason, historians within Balkan nations did not see any need to read Ottoman history closely and assess its legacies objectively. No creative connections were noticed, but the effect has left distortions in the region’s national historiographies. As Todorova has pointed out, ‘the danger lies not so much in overemphasising “the impact of the West”, and overlooking the continuities and the indigenous institutions, but rather in separating artificially “indigenous” from “Ottoman” institutions and influences’.7
More recent scholarship has begun the process of overcoming these deeply problematic historiographical legacies, as indicated by greater interest in transnational processes and comparative study within the region.8 The modest aim of this chapter is to outline some of the various ways in which Greek identities emerged from a global age of empires with special reference to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discussing how such identities were shaped from within and between empires rather than just against them.
Such an approach can account for someone like the poet Constantine Cavafy (1863—1933), the world’s best-known Greek poet of the modern era, who lived nearly the whole of his life in cosmopolitan Alexandria. He lived outside of the Greek state and thereby felt a need to describe himself as ‘Hellenic’ rather than an unconditional ‘Hellene’.9 E.M. Forster explained that his Greekness was not ‘territorial’ but had to do with legacy that was altogether divorced from the nation; one associated rather with the tradition of Alexander the Great, which saw Greeks living among other peoples: ‘The civilization he respected was a bastardy in which the Greek strain prevailed, and into which, age after age, outsiders would push, to modify and be modified’.10 His sense of Greekness may have been idiosyncratic, but it may also have represented a much broader Greek world that was not beholden to a nation-state framework.