Abstract
The historiography of the relationship between British and Greek liberalism and imperialism during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century is surprisingly underdeveloped given the works on both these subjects separately. On the one hand, there is the very fine and timely edited volume Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late 19 th Century until 1960s, which provides very valuable insights into Syria (especially), the Lebanon, and, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, but excludes Greece, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, and Cyprus.1 Then there is Robert Holland and Diana Markides’s The British and the Hellenes, which takes an anachronistic approach to exploring British relations with “Greek” elites of various “Greek” islands and which places the relationship within the context of a struggle between British strategy, on the one hand, and Greek ethnonationalism and irredentism, on the other, without seriously questioning either.2 The authors attempt to explain these two themes without reference to the broader historical, theoretical, and comparative contexts, that is, within the vast literature on the ideas and policies of British imperialism and British imperial strategy, and the rise of ethnic-nationalism in the former Ottoman Empire and the role of European ideas and elites. Moreover, they do not question, but on the contrary they justify, Greek irredentism—or as will be argued later in this chapter, imperial expansion.
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Christoph Schumann (ed.), Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late 19 th Century until the 1960s (Brill: Leiden, 2008).
Robert Holland and Diana Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850–1960 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2006).
Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922 (Allen Lane: London, 1973).
Maria Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review, LIII, 2, 1994, 453–82, 454–5.
Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making ofModern Greece (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1982);
Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass (Cambridge, 1987);
Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005).
Linda Osband, Famous Travellers to the Holy Land (Prion: London, 1989).
Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Battle for the Holy City (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2001), 1–44.
J. Kakridis, “The Ancient Greeks and the Greeks of the War of Independence,” BS, IV, 2, 1963, 251–64;
V. Roudometof, “From Rum Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment, Secularisation, and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society, 1453–1821,” Journal of Modern Greek Society, XVI, 1, 1998, 11–48.
See Emmanuel Sarides, “Byron and Greek History,” History Journal Workshop, XV, 1983, 126–30;
Yiannis Papadakis, Echoes From the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (I. B. Tauris: London, 2005), 62–4.
Lucia Patrizio Gunning, The British Consular Service in the Aegean and the Collection of Antiquities for the British Museum (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009); Andrekos Varnava review of Gunning, The British Consular Service; Journal of Levantine Studies, I, 2011, 208–11.
Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (Studies in Imperialism, Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2009), 80–1, 120, 129–32.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso: London, 1983), 6.
Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonisation, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford University Press: California, 1996), 16, 28.
Ibid., 49, 90–112; Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 40; V. Calotychos, “(Pre)occupied Spaces: Hyphens, Apostrophes, and Over-sites in the Literary Imagining of Cyprus,” in Mehmet Yashin (ed.), Step-Mothertongue From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey (Middlesex University Press: London, 2000), 51.
Hamilton Fish Armstrong, “The Unredeemed Isles of Greece,” Foreign Affairs, IV, October 1925, 154–57;
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “Greek Irredentism in Asia Minor and Cyprus,” Middle Eastern Studies, XXVI, 1, 1977, 3–17;
Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1979, 2nd ed. 1986), 70–132; Holland and Markides, The British and the Hellenes.
See the unashamedly pro-Greek chronicle on the small Cypriot contingent by Petros Papapolyviou, Φαειν´ oν Σημε´ιoν ´Aτυχoυς Πoλ´εμoυ: H Σημμετoχ´η της K ´ υπρoυ στoν Eλληνoτoυρκικ´ Π´oλεμo τoυ 1897 (The Bright Spot in a Luckless War: The Participation of Cyprus in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897) (Cyprus Research Centre: Nicosia, 2001).
Pandeleimon Hionidis, “Greek Responses to Cobden,” in Anthony Howe & Simon Morgan (eds.), Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2006), 161–73.
S. Victor Papacosma, The Military in Greek Politics: The 1909 Coup D’Etat (The Kent University Press: Ohio, 1977).
Mark Mazower, “The Messiah and the Bourgeoisie: Venizelos and Politics in Greece, 1909–1912,” The Historical journal, XXXV, 4, 1992, 885–904; For Cyprus see, Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 177.
Mazower, “The Messiah and the Bourgeoisie”; Zorka Parvanova, “Political Programmes of the National Liberation Movements in European Turkey Following the Coup of the Young Turks (1908–1909),” Etudes Balkaniques, XXX, 1, 1994, 51–78;
Vangelis Kechriotis, “Greek-Orthodox, Ottoman Greeks or Just Greeks? Theories of Co-existence in the Aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution,” Etudes Balkaniques, XLI, 1, 2005, 51–72;
Michael Llewwellyn Smith, “Venizelos’ Diplomacy, 1910–23: From Balkan Alliance to Greek-Turkish Settlement,” in Paschalis Kitromilides (ed.), Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trial of Statesmanship (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2006), 140.
See John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (T. Fisher Unwin: London, 1906);
Donald Read, Cobden and Bright: A Victorian Political Partnership (Edward Arnold: London, 1967);
James Laverne Sturgis, John Bright and the Empire (Athlone P.: London, 1969).
Andrekos Varnava, “Punch and the British Occupation of Cyprus in 1878,” Byzantine andModern Greek Studies, XXIX, 2, 2005, 167–86;
Andrekos Varnava, “Recreating Rural Britain and Maintaining Britishness in the Mediterranean: The Troodos Hill Station in Early British Cyprus,” The Cyprus Review, XVII, 2, 2005, 47–79.
W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 1879 (Leicester University Press: Leicester, 1971).
A. G. Hopkins, “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882,” Journal of African History, XXVII, 2, 1986, 363–391, 388.
See Peter T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1994).
See Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1978).
Don M. Cregier, Bounder from Wales: Lloyd George’s Career Before the First World War (University of Missouri Press: Columbia & London, 1976).
Robert Holland, “Nationalism, Ethnicity and the Concert of Europe: The Case of the High Commissionership of Prince George of Greece in Crete, 1898–1906,” The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, XVII, 2, 1999, 253–76; Michael Llewwellyn Smith, “Venizelos’ Diplomacy, 1910–23,” 134–90.
Edward C. Thaden, Russia and the Balkan Alliance of 1912 (Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, 1965).
Geoffrey Miller, The Millstone: British Naval Policy in the Mediterranean, 1900–14, the Commitment to France and British Intervention in the War (The University of Hull Press: Hull, 1999), 317–9.
Ernst Christian Helmreich, The Diplomacy of the Balkan Wars, 1912–1913 (Oxford University Press: London, 1938);
Helen Gardikas-Katsiadakis, Greece and the Balkan Imbroglio: Greek Foreign Policy, 1911–1913 (Syllogos Pros Diadosin Ophelimōn Vivliōn: Athens, 1995).
Richard Bosworth, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy Before the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 306–7.
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© 2012 Matthew P. Fitzpatrick
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Varnava, A. (2012). British and Greek Liberalism and Imperialism in the Long Nineteenth Century. In: Fitzpatrick, M.P. (eds) Liberal Imperialism in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137019974_10
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