During the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830) urban life and economic prosperity was, in the south of the country, crippled by the prolonged and destructive struggle. The final Ottoman era had in any case been very negative for the development of Greek life, due to corruption amongst imperial and local officials and the failings of the Ottoman economy to adapt to and take advantage of commercial and industrial modernization (in no small part due to its undermining by Western bankers and entrepreneurs for their own financial advantage). On the other hand there had developed an indigenous response amongst Balkan middle - and upper-class society to the waves of economic and cultural change emanating from Western Europe from the late eighteenth century, and the additional Napoleonic stimulus to political emancipation and nationalism. As a formally multicultural empire, the later Ottoman Empire offered scope for ethnic and religious communities to develop networks of trade and production, and unintentionally to encourage such groups to affirm and strengthen their identity. In such changing international circumstances this served as a potential springboard for aspirations to achieve a greater degree of self-government or even for some, independence. (For good modern historical backgrounds see McNeil 1978, Clogg 1992, Koliopoulos and Veremi 2004.)
But the successful Greek Revolution of the 1820s created a small state (Color Plate 22.1), comprising Southern and Central Greece. The incorporation of Northern Greece and Crete, together with the Ionian and Dodecanese Islands, had to await the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus the creation of the modern Greek territorial state was not just a matter of a few revolutionary years of struggle, but a long drawn-out process of irregular large increments. Moreover in order to comprehend the history of the young independent Greek kingdom, even up to the present day, we need to set the new state into its preceding era of final Ottoman control.
The weakened central administration had progressively allowed local indigenous elites (ayan) as well as imperial officials to assume wide-ranging powers in town and country outside of the capital Istanbul. Greater contact with Western merchants provided many opportunities for enrichment, while the dependence of large sectors of the peasant farming and urban artisan communities on regional elite families encouraged clientelism (informal dependence of the poor on rich patrons). The achievement of independence from Ottoman rule was thus seen in divergent ways by the people of Southern Greece. Established elites envisaged their political and economic bases to be threatened by any development of“democratic” reforms, believing the lower classes to be incapable of participating in public affairs. In contrast, the Greek intelligentsia and especially those living as expatriates in Western Europe were more inclined to plan for the creation of a modern, educated citizenry and a stronger state bureaucracy, in which traditional patrons would be subordinated. There was also a third constituency to be included, not numerically large, but whose power was nonetheless real: this was the widespread phenomenon of armed bands (armatoloi), whose origin lay in the weakness of the official Ottoman army and provincial militia, allowing local bosses to make use of such irregulars to police their spheres of influence. They also had arisen as bandits where neither state nor local bosses were able to assert total control. During the Revolution these bands had often earned credit in the cause of Independence, but their existence now clashed with the intended creation of a civil society policed by the state. There was yet a fourth element to upset the steady flourishing of the young state, and that was the imposition by the Great Powers of an alien concept, kingship, and its first incumbent, a Bavarian prince, on the nascent nation-state.
These historical pressures burdened Greece with a constant threat of political disorder, diverting energies from pressing action to promote the economy and welfare of the rural and urban population. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century population was depressed and land use limited, whilst health, education, and living conditions for the bulk of the population remained poor. The condition of the rural peasantry only began to improve at the end of the nineteenth century, before which their life remained remote from the limited points of commercial development centering on the key ports of the kingdom and their immediate hinterlands. Industrialization was also highly localized and small-scale into the early twentieth century, allowing a minute working class to arise around Athens and in small pockets in other larger urban centers. The lack of technological innovation had long plagued craft and industry in later Ottoman times and it continued throughout the early decades of the new Greek state. Efforts to revive cotton manufacture in Livadheia town in Boeotia during the 1830s, for example, failed, only succeeding during the 1860s, by which time the city acquired a virtual monopoly of processed cotton production for the kingdom (Sigalos 2004). During the latter nineteenth century Greece saw a slow expansion in the scale and spread of local industrial processing of its agricultural cash crops such as cotton, silk, tobacco, and currants. However a population boom outstripped wealth accumulation, whilst highly unstable markets for these cash crops could impact severely on peasant fortunes, with the result that this era and the first half of the twentieth century saw massive emigration into distant parts of the world, notably North America and Australia, to seek a faster and securer path to enrichment.
At the start of the twentieth century living conditions improved, communications became more efficient, and over the following decades the kingdom expanded to incorporate large landscapes in the North and on Crete. Meanwhile the Greek economy as a whole began to interact more vigorously with that of the wider commercial world. Population gradually moved toward levels only achieved in many regions previously during the climax of Classical Greek civilization, 2500 years earlier. Yet Greece remained a land with limited resources in raw materials to promote heavy industry or international exchange, and a traditional small-scale agriculture little suited to compete with global commercial-estate farm produce. Moreover during the largest part of the twentieth century Greek politics suffered from violent see-saws from left to right, a dictator, a Civil War hard on the heels of a devastating Nazi occupation, and a military junta. Nonetheless renewed modernization and growth in every aspect except political stability marks the postwar era, whilst entry into the EEC in 1981 seemed to promise well for a very different twenty-first century to the uneven development of its predecessor. As I write however (2011) the consequences of an incomplete modernization process in the workings of the state and in the relationship between private and public economics have brought the country into a debilitating crisis. One must hope that Greece will emerge from this with a more lasting and robust form of civil society.
World History
